Apple relents, begins selling "old" Final Cut Studio again
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I think Apple's corporate culture and ego, however, doesn't lend itself at all to this market - this market requires communication and feedback between developers and end-users, and roadmaps of upgrades and bug fixes and features, all things that Apple doesn't do for the most part.
All in all it is a shame in any event - I had a friend who runs a video editing department with 20 editors, and they literally just completed a very large Final Cut Server install a few weeks before FCPX (not Final Cut Server compatible) and the very sudden EOL of Final Cut Server. Of course it will work fine for a while, until hardware/OS render it obsolete/incompatible, but what about bug fixes, support, etc?
Source: http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/26/apple-has-moved-on/
On the other side of it, if they are not really going to do Pro, then just don't do it all and stop mucking around and pretending - sell off the line to someone who can handle it properly - what they did by EOLing Shake was terrible terrible terrible
It's easier to bring back the product in the most limited distribution possible, rather than risk a lawsuit.
[1] For example, Norway's national broadcaster NRK has 200+ FCP seats just for their video library: http://broadcastengineering.com/mag/nrk-keeps-watchful-0709/
The FCP situation is more reminiscent of what happened with Vista - where MS had to extend the life of WXP until they offered something better.
Although, it'll be interesting to see how well Lion is doing in terms of market share at Apples next event.
I guess if there is any hidden message it might be that they are wanting to keep the pro's onside - which might be good news for the direction of FCP and Logic.
(also to note that there is nothing actually wrong with FCPX - I'm using it everyday working on some marketing materials right now. I can see that Pros are missing some features which is fair enough but it's an extremely usable application and I'm finding it very friction free to work in)
Just because it works for your use cases, does not mean there is "nothing actually wrong with [it]". Drawing that kind of conclusion is either ignorant of or disingenuous to the realities of software.
Editing video in FCP X feels a lot like manipulating photos in Aperture: it's great for quick adjustments, but doesn't allow the kind of meticulous control you'd get with Photoshop. Unfortunately Apple doesn't have that kind of control-oriented video product anymore, so those looking to move up from FCP X will have to go with either Avid or Adobe.
But, the problem isn't that it isn't the video equivalent of photoshop — that's After Effects or (maybe) Motion. The problem is that FCP X is missing basic "Apeture" functionality like any kind of real audio editing, or the ability to export to another program.
FCP X is nothing but iMovie Pro. It's completely, utterly unusable by professional editors. Even the key commands are not the same, and film/music editors live by key commands (see all the FCP/Media Composer keyboards on the market).
'Update: An Apple spokesperson told The Loop that the company has "a limited quantity of Final Cut Studio still available through Apple telesales to customers who need them for ongoing projects."'
Don't Apple know how they can make more copies ... if they don't someone else will do it for them.
Based on the other posts, maybe you misread € for $?
I wonder that anyone would make such a short sighted demand. Apple should properly release the source code of Final Cut Pro 7 to the public under a Free Software license. That would prevent this type of thing from happening again.
I wish there were a centralized way to crowdsource-fund open source projects...
Fat lot of good it did to trust a "name brand" in this case.
http://jeff.ecchi.ca/blog/2011/07/15/the-glorious-history-of...
Not working on it, doesn't mean they don't exist.
It is the same place the os that Competes, and office suite that Competes and whatever else that Competes are. Nonexistant.
People are going to forget that Apple ever made any mistakes under Steve although they were obviously testing boundaries aggressively and often retracting decisions. Poor guy!
More often than not reversals are probably not a sign of Cook's poor performance. But sometimes they could be. There are times when it pays to be stubborn. How am I supposed to judge whether Tim Cook is exactly the right amount of stubborn?
I think the only (more or less) good way of evaluating Cook is to look at Apple's financial performace and even that is hard. Limitless growth is likely not possible, so when Apple's growth inevitably slows or stops, is that a sign of Cook's poor performance or would that have happened anyway?
I think I should right now write down some criteria by which to judge Cook or else I'm in danger of endlessly shifting goalposts.
Truly, we need a second universive with a healthy Jobs to compare.
This quote made by day, thanks.
I just finished listening to John Siracusa on Hypercritical who was making the point that it won't be long until people start saying "there's no way this would have happened on Steve Jobs's watch".
It's easy to see the sarcasm when Steve's only been gone from Apple for a week, but give it a year and people will start forgetting that Apple lead by Steve would go back on decisions when they released they'd made the wrong call.
Another example of this that John gave is when they prematurely removed Firewire from the 13" Macbook. While Steve was CEO they realized that the market wasn't ready for that so they put it back in. And everyone was happy.
In 6 months, if Apple concedes they were wrong on something, will the market think Tim Cook is weak and Apple is doomed?
Sarcasm aside, that's probably true (ignoring your hypothetical person doing poor inference).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting
A much better example is iMovie, because the exact same events unfolded as with FCP:
* Apple has iMovie HD 6, a product with its roots in iMac DV but well understood and liked by its users.
* Apple releases iMovie '08, a complete rewrite of iMovie lacking many of HD6's features and completely panned by critics, HD6 is not available anymore
* Apple makes HD6 available as a free download to all iMovie '08 owners
Yes, the new one costs 299. Way to make a buck...
Wait, yes it is, FCPX is basically a different product and production house (the kind of people who will buy a 5-figure piece of single-user software if they need it) have asked for FCP7 to be available again for their production due to features missing from FCPX and the inanity of switching mid-project.
FYI, Avid Media Composer (one of FCP7's competitor) is 3 times the price of FCP7.