Perhaps acquiring Pixelmator is about competing with Creative Cloud
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
1. Apple is increasingly a company who's primary growth area is through services revenue and Adobe is one of the most successful services-revenue companies around.
2. Adobe's bread and butter is essentially native desktop apps, one of Apple's areas of expertise.
3. Adobe is vulnerable today with a specific market segment, who resents the high cost, quality issues, and subscription-only model of Creative Cloud.
One thing I agree with is these wouldn't be professional tools the same way Adobe's tools are, they split the market between the high-end, which would continue to use Adobe products, and the low-end which would use these competitors. The low end would be content creators and smaller businesses.
The biggest flaw here is around #3, not sure how Apple can capture that services revenue without creating a suite that has the same flaws with consumers that Creative Cloud has? I think they could emphasize quality, and probably come in at half the cost of CC or less, maybe $25 a month. Maybe that's enough?
The reason it's not working is the incentives internal to Apple aren't great, they aren't (significant) revenue generators, so they're seen as disposable, and by choosing the wrong priorities (platform over creators), they end up losing to competitors where it's a primary revenue generator, because those other apps are fighting tooth-and-nail to stay ahead.
One way of solving all this is to try and make it a revenue generator, and I don't think a revenue generator at Apple's scale is possible without making it a subscription. Also just note that services has been Apple's most reliable recent growth area https://sixcolors.com/post/2024/05/2024-q1-apple-results-90-...
Curious if you have any counter information here? There's definitely a ton of room for me to be wrong on this.
From my vantage point (Brooklyn-based creative music-maker regularly recording & performing), it’s a growing market and both Ableton _and_ Logic are doing pretty well. Ableton has some obvious strengths—its scene-based workflow & M4L in particular—but it’s also got a very opinionated UI & is a bit less intuitive/fluid for editing (at least from my perspective as a Logic user!). I know many people who use Logic to make creative music that involves both live recording and electronic instruments, and a lot of those people have switched away from Pro Tools because of its hideous UI, the subscription pricing, & the annoyance of iLok. I even know several professional, touring musicians who perform with MainStage & swear by it.
In other words, I think that Logic has found a pretty broad audience of creative musicians who straddle the songwriting & electronic music worlds (which is more & more people every day).
What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.
Definitely hoping that Gruber is wrong here & Logic stays the fantastic loss-leader it’s been for the last decade or so.
> What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.
This is purely just from reading opinions of folks online, they seem to think Live has advantages for being more tailored for electronic music, and Logic is more dated, and some of the more entry-level features (e.g., ML session players) rub people the wrong way.
Also awesome to hear the love for Cycling 74! Max is perhaps my personal favorite piece of software ever, and that same group I follow I mainly see actually complaining about it in Live! I maintain a couple of Max for Live plugins:
there’s a lot of genres out there and Logic is still considered one of the best for general DAWs out there.
Yes, Max is amazing. Thanks for sharing your instruments! Sidewinder looks particularly cool.
I also got into building in there for a while (& still do sometimes), though not specifically M4L: https://github.com/flats/max-instruments. Even wrote a couple of externals back in the day.
What I _really_ want is some sort of a hybrid between a DAW and something like Csound—fully graphical but also fully scriptable/automatable. Live w/ M4L is _kinda_ close, but we’re not quite there yet…
Which is the best place to be to do both - which is what a huge number of musicians need - not just (or ever) recording 16 channel drums and 10 musicians in some big studio like with Pro Tools, nor doing just EDM and working off just a laptop (as with Ableton).
High end studios will use Pro Tools for legacy reasons. EDM and electronica musicians will usually opt for Ableton (and many for FL too, hugely popular as well).
But the 10s of millions of people recording and producing music however, will either be fully electronic and opt for something like Live, or will be (even more common) in the place you descrive Logic and Cubase being stuck in (Studio Pro and Reaper too).
That's "stuck place" between the two case is a much bigger market. The Pro Tools market is tiny in comparison. Which is perhaps also why the go from bankcruptcy to bankcruptcy.
In the past, I've even used GarageBand for the iPad to mock up initial musical prototypes and then imported them into logic pro on my Mac and that's been pretty fantastic.
Anecdotally, most of my friends are split pretty evenly between either Ableton, FL studio, or Logic Pro.
> In the past, I've even used GarageBand for the iPad to mock up initial musical prototypes and then imported them into logic pro on my Mac and that's been pretty fantastic.
I didn't mean to imply that syncing between platforms isn't without merit. You didn't really address the counterarguments that I listed in my post, e.g., that complex media projects require micromanaging files. E.g., syncing a Logic song between platforms doesn't really work if you many GBs of recorded takes, and using many GB third-party sample libraries.
There's a two part problem with Apple's strategy here:
1. They're breaking high-end workflows with these decisions
2. They're not acknowledging how high-end workflows drive lower-end workflows
Here is in my opinion the best piece ever written about how Apple's approach to pro apps changed pre- and post-2010/iPhone, that covers all of these points nicely https://lonelysandwich.com/post/7033868135/fcp-the-new-class but tldr: pre-2010 Apple would have done this by consulting with practitioners on the high-end to build a system they can leverage, post-2010 just builds the new system without consulting anyone and tries to force it on everyone through software releases, this ends up alienating the high-end.
Regarding Logic that's nowhere near the case.
Regarding Final Cut, it's more true (there's a tendency for industry editors to go to Resolve for many editors), but the doom when Final Cut X was introduced never panned out. Final Cut remains a huge player. The complains were more from/about the production studio niche (film, advertising, etc). But Final Cut caters to a much larger user base now - millions of people editing for social media, YouTube, and such.
Re Final Cut, Apple has released user numbers as recent as 2018: "more than 2.5 million seats" https://www.apple.com/ca/newsroom/2018/04/final-cut-pro-x-up... Adobe Creative Cloud is estimated to have 33 million users by comparison https://prodesigntools.com/number-of-creative-cloud-subscrib... (not saying this means any thing for Final Cut vs Premiere, just a useful data point).
Re Final Cut, I would have agreed it was mainly just losing the high-end a few years ago, but the sheer volume of YouTube videos taking about switching from Final Cut (and Premiere) to DaVinci Resolve is hard to ignore. Final Cut seems squeezed by Premiere/Avid on the high-end and Resolve on the low end.
Many of them are real, as Resolve has had some solid big feature updates with frequency and it's also very usable free, so it has drawn people in. Some of those "I'm switching" though are the usual video market influencer promotions and/or need to change things every while.
For Logic this is not the case though. Haven't seen anything suggesting it's losing users, and in the pop space it has tons of high profile users. There are also lots of industry "market reports" that say that the overall market is growing in general.
Apple "locking" was always overplayed, and this is even less true in 2024, where music and video are subscriptions (so you just switch to another service and still have access to all music, at worst you lose your playlists, big deal), most apps regular people use web based/cross platform, and pro graphics, video, music, business, and 3D stuff are all cross platform too. People switch to (and sometimes from) Resolve all the time, for example.
Also Apple owning 10% of the desktop market is hardly going to impact Adobe that much.
The times when Adobe was Apple first are long gone.
Photomator on the iPad is more capable than Photos on the Mac.
Frankly I think this is an acqui-hire. I think Photomator will significantly boost the capabilities of Photos, back to an Aperture-level app. I think some of the features may even end up in the camera.
Pixelmator, I don't know. I think a whole bunch of Pixelmator features do make sense as a tab/workspace in Photos, actually, but either way I don't see Apple keeping it called "Pixelmator"; I would expect to see it called "Images" (to go with Pages and Numbers, and with photo-specific stuff left in Photos).
I think there's a significant market of "not quite professional, but more than a hobby" photographers for which they don't want to pay an Adobe subscription, and CaptureOne is too much software for their needs.
a RAW converter with all the standard tools, integrated with the Photos app, and presets curated and polished by Apple, could do well. Add some AI features like Lightroom, but run locally on device instead of allowing Adobe to train on your photos, and I think they'd have a winner in that space.
I actually ran a project that produced a pretty awesome photo browser that would still be top-notch today, but it was killed.
Photo browsers are really, really difficult to get right, and they don't make money. Most folks expect them to be free.
"Adobe may analyze your content using techniques such as machine learning to develop and improve our products and services." Not explicitly training their models, I was wrong there - but it wouldn't be a stretch for them update terms in the future.
Not as egregious as training their models on your photos, but most certainly should be opt-in, not opt-out.
Nothing in the paragraph above rules this out. "techniques such as machine learning" could easily include AI in the "such as".
surely they could put a button or menu action somewhere in the photos app and call it "new canvas". or in addition to upgrading Photos, integrate pixelmator features to the Notes app, which already allows creating a blank canvas to draw on. this doesn't seem like an especially difficult problem for them
1. FileMaker still exists, and
2. It’s $43/person/month for a reasonable amount of storage. Or you can buy a single license for $594.
I strongly suspect 2 is why I didn’t know 1.
I suspect the bigger reason is the complete absence of advertising.
iPad versions of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro are subscription based and these are latest pro apps Apple released.
But I despise, deeply, from the bottom of my soul, that Adobe Creative Cloud runs a background process on my machine, even when the applications aren't running. That is an affront.
There are days I wonder if the entire reason for the locked-down iOS App Store and Mac app sandboxing is purely just to try and figure out some approach to software distribution that never lets Adobe run an invisible background process on their hardware ever again.
I never got a good answer for why this was the case, but I think it’s wildly out of control.
Final Cut is Apple’s direct competition with Adobe, but Apple makes their money largely from hardware, App Store fees, and platform lock-in. Their current pricing isn’t outrageous for a casual or adventurous user to purchase and furthers their lock-in to the Apple ecosystem, meanwhile professionals will purchase Apple’s expensive hardware upgrades, this also advances Apple further into the zeitgeist of professional video and music software and anyone looking to get into the hobby will heavily consider Apple against the alternatives.
Businesses need money to keep updating the software, and won’t get it if all their customers have already bought the product. On the other hand, if something is offline and paid for, it should never go away.
Online is different, because customers need to continuously pay for hosting and compute. If it’s an app that’s almost all client side and the business just makes it online to force users to subscribe…yeah that’s wrong. But obviously something like a VPS is going to be a subscription.
I would be content if Adobe moved to this model, particularly for Lightroom Classic.
There's only so much they can eventually cram into a RAW editor, and they've stopped adding library management features for a while because it's essentially finished in that aspect. I don't need more AI in it, and it'll be years before I have a new camera that I need it to support - it's at that point I'd love to simply cancel the subscription, but still retain access to the current version.
I've had my Adobe subscription long enough now to have paid full price for Lightroom at least 5x over.
Just let me buy a specific version and be done with it, and I'll pay for updates when I need them if the features are interesting enough, or I need the update to support new hardware. Otherwise, there's no need.
What they will do is introduce Apple One Premier+ : includes Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+ […] and all your creator tools including Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator, Photomator, Logic Pro […]
If you’re already paying $40 or whatever for Apple One Premier it’s a very short step to $65 for Premier+
I pay for Apple One Premier. Would I pay for Apple One Prmeier+?
Almost certainly.
Maybe there would be a tier of Apple one that also included this stuff, but I think it would be pretty stupid if that was the only way to get it.
I think there’s a lot of companies that might be willing to get this for some of their creative employees who would absolutely resent having to pay for Apple TV+ and Apple Music to do so.
I also know a lot of people who are hobbyists or enjoying tinkering who resent having to pay Adobe to be able to use Creative Suite, so if the price was right (you get tools that Adobe charge $75 a month for PLUS Apple Music, Apple TV+, yadda yadda) then that's a sell in itself.
I feel like if you're a family and you and the kids have iPhones and iPads and macbooks and you're already paying for the Apple One Premier plan then it's a fairly trivial cost to have another $30 or whatever dollars on top so that your kids have access to some really good software to create things with, because you've already spent an enormous amount of money with Apple, and there's an upsell from Garage Band to Logic, an upsell from iMovie to Final Cut, etc. It kind of fits.
Maybe they have a stand alone subscription for them as well - but you get a better price if it's a bolt on to the Apple One subscription.
This is all pure speculation though. The only thing I know if that they offered it like I was proposing, I'd definitely subscribe.
We already know Apple doesn’t care about the Windows market, they could’ve made all sorts of moves over the last 20 years if they did.
It also seems very unlikely they care about the high-end professional market. The kind of people who are really in with Adobe.
But they have a ton of Prosumer customers they could make happy. I know a number of people personally who would like to use Adobe tools but can’t afford the subscriptions. Being able to buy a smaller Apple product, or maybe pay a few dollars a month, to get a good product that covers their needs would probably make them quite happy.
And anything that makes the Mac more sticky to current customers (or new customers) is a good investment for Apple. Every person they can lure away from Creative Cloud or prevent from ever starting with it is someone who doesn’t have an easy path to move to Windows without changing software.
In the pro world, from my anecdotal perspective, I'd say Windows is still more popular in game dev and 3d stuff which is outside of Adobe's scope.
(Not rhetorical here -- I'm genuinely curious)
Whether a subscription or purchase any piece of software you use on a Mac that you can’t get on Windows is one more sticking point that helps Apple retain their users. And since they make a lot of profit on their hardware that’s a very good thing for them.
If Apple had any self respect at all these would be one time per year at best prompts or something which could be disabled with a subscription. I would no longer recommend Apple as the go to for respecting their customers.
I'd argue Apple has already achieved this, at least in my circle (Photography). I've ran a photography business on the side for going on 5 years now, and I've yet to meet a single (professional) photographer in my market that doesn't use or recommend mac's. Anytime the question of "What computer to get" comes up in Photography forums as well, it's always some variation of "M-series MBP."
Of course, it helps that Lightroom Classic runs like absolute crap on even the beefiest Windows desktop, but Apple is still synonymous with creative professional, and has been for a while.