Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peteforde | Hacker News Reader

The strangest thing for me reading this is that, well, I loved Aperture. I used it loyally from v1 until long after it was EOL'd. I spent thousands of hours in it, and it really fit my ideal workflow.

There was a lot of functionality/crap in there that I did not use, a lot of functionality was hidden away behind context menus and a lot of promised features around integration with plugins and 3rd party never really materialized, but in terms of core function it was a total workhorse.

Apple ultimately went to great lengths to purge it from existence, even for those of us with paid licenses who'd been told (or at least safely presumed) that we'd be able to install it on new machines via the app store, even if it wasn't available for purchase. In reality, they removed the binary from the cache. At one point, I went through a ridiculously elaborate process of obtaining a certain kind of physical license from eBay and spent hours emailing random Apple employees - likely some of the folks mentioned in this story - getting them to make exceptions and pull favours to make it possible for me to install it one last time before Catalina pulled the rug out for good.

Fuckin' Apple.

Same here. I never found a system that fit the way I wanted to work as well as Aperture did, so I quit bothering to drag around my DSLR. Then I quit bothering to offload pics from my phone. Then I quit bothering to take them in the first place.

Which is all a shame because I loved photography for a couple decades, and now I have small kids and I’m sure I’ll regret it, but it’s just such a pain in the ass to do these days if I don’t want my entire life tethered to services and data in the fuckin cloud.

YES. It was an integrated part of an everyday DSLR workflow.

So much so, that I too eventually stopped with DSLR after losing it.

I was a huge Aperture fan myself, and have since moved to DxO. They put out a new version every year that has an upgrade fee, but there's no issue staying put for as long as you like. And it's 100% filesystem-based, so it's much easier to work into whatever backup workflow you like; cloud or otherwise.

I actually like it so much, that I even use it since I switched to Linux recently. I have a Windows VM with one app installed that I boot up every month or so to process photos.

Just learning about DxO for the first time. I purchased another app called Luminar that I tried once and wasn't totally blown away by. What I'm looking for is a sane workflow and lightning quick navigation, hopefully with some basic edits and tight photoshop integration.

One of my favourite things about Aperture+PS was being able to spawn an edit process that, when you save the file in PS, created a duplicate version with the changes back in Aperture. The more I think about it, this was the secret sauce. Is this replicated in DxO?

Oh, I have no idea about that, sorry. Don't use Photoshop myself. I just need to do some cropping, lighting/color/contrast adjustments and noise reduction, then I move on to the next family photo. :D

Fyi there’s a process to get Aperture working on Catalina. Don’t have the link on hand, but if you need it I’d be happy to dig it up.

I would be very grateful.

Here you go! https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive

As an aside, the author's "Technical Deep Dive" is worth a read: https://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-ret...

The technical deep dive was a great read, thanks! I think it would be a good submission.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submit

I did try; got no attention sadly. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22229101

I had a similar affair with Picasa, but at least it's allowed to be downloadable. I've never found anything even close to Picasa on responsiveness when browsing photos.

Stories like this is why I rarely bother with proprietary software anymore.

It totally was so fast!

I remember using it when I got my first digital cameras :-)

Yet they keep FileMaker rolling on. I never understood the decision to drop Aperture.

Different product, different business, different time. When AppleWorks and FileMaker were spun off, they were likely significant chunks of revenue in their own right. By the time Aperture was taken out back, it wouldn’t even have been a rounding error in Apple’s accounts. Far quicker, easier, and cheaper to kill it.

Remember, everything Apple does, it does to advance the interests of Apple. The company. Not the products, not the departments, not the employees, and definitely not the customers. The same is true of any large org.

The knockout success of iPhone grew the business by magnitudes almost overnight. iPhone Apple, frankly, is too big to be wasting its time now on niche products with limited potential for growth, even if those products are very successful within their own niche. If a product doesn’t fit with the current business strategy and portfolio, it’s out.

It’s one of the basics to running a successful business: don’t be distracted. And definitely don’t be sentimental. Poor Aperture just got left in the iPhone’s dust.

This is very true, but it's also important to realize that the hyper focussed Apple culture comes as an adaptive response to their near-death experience, before Jobs came back. A company that makes a billion dollars in revenue a day can afford to diversify; a company that is on death's door cannot.

I think the situation currently is an overcorrection to a vaguely remembered pre-Jobs past.

> It’s one of the basics to running a successful business: don’t be distracted.

What does that mean in the context of a huge corporation? From my perspective, $1K in profit is still $1K, even if you're making $100K elsewhere.

Tim Cook certainly has limited time and needs to prioritize, but he also doesn’t need to touch every part of the company. Independently-profitable projects can be spun out into their own teams as needed.

The issue is opportunity cost. If those folks could help increase sales or profitability on one of your mainline products by even a fraction of a percent, you’ll be better off by redeploying them.

Then hire new people, or outsource. The B product may take a hit, but better than killing it.

Focus; is not about saying yes to the thing you currently do, but a thousand no to many other things.

Having said that I think Apple hasn't prioritise their Software Engineering resources well.

I’m just not convinced of the value of focus in this context.

When Steve Jobs came to Apple, he made the Mac line “focused” by cutting it down to four models. That had clear benefits: less hardware for the OS to support, better economies of scale in manufacturing, and less wasted retail shelf space.

How does killing Aperture benefit Apple’s other products in that way?

As we've already covered, I'm an Aperture fan and I, too, wish it hadn't been #canceled. However, when I put on my executive hat and consider the arguments made in this thread, from a corporate perspective it was 100% the right thing to do.

(We don't have to like it, or work at or buy from corporations.)

$100k in profit is not $100k in profit to a company that makes $1B a day: it is a massive operational risk. Not only is the revenue a rounding error, but every product on the docket represents a meaningful sacrifice of agility and exposure to unknowable risk.

One of my smartest mentors once told me (and then reminded me a dozen times) that a company can only have three priorities at any given time. If an initiative does not make the top three cut, it is tabled for the future. Your executive team - and indeed, the entire org - should have those priorities front and center as they make decisions and spend their time. "Does what I'm about to do advance one of the top three priorities?" is a clarifying question.

Every person in an org can have three personal priorities, no more. Every person should be able to confidently tell you what those priorities are. Those priorities should all meaningfully tie back to the company priorities.

My mentor was, some 20 years ago, the in-house corporate counsel for a large telco. Amongst his responsibilities was M&A and foreign expansion. You'd think these would be priorities, but you'd think wrong. His initiatives were consistently tabled, politely but assertively. It was the best thing for the company.

On the flipside, companies and leaders than cannot embrace laser focus on top priorities tend to be slowly dying, even if they don't realize it yet.

In the end, $1B a day is $1B a day to lose, if they don't focus on their top priorities. Frankly, I think it's some combination of branding and charity that they haven't just stopped making computers.

Upvoted because, dang, that’s on the ball.

Most geeks know the value of everything and the cost of nowt. Especially those costs measured in risk, be it risk of a code exploit in some mature stable part of the OS that almost nobody uses, or the risk of ceding a trillion-dollar primary market to competitors while preoccupied chasing secondary tails.

Having blown my first startup by sloppy unfocused mismanagement, I can attest to this lesson the hard way.

(And yeah, the only reason Macs still exist is because Apple has to protect the whole productivity ecosystem that puts Apps in its iOS Store. ’Cos the moment it cedes that foundation to a competitor, the whole company is lost.)

I haven't read the whole article, but if the business in itself was successful, sounds like a waste to just kill it off. If Apple didn't want to focus on the business, might have been worthwhile to see if a spin-off was possible.

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