Zero chance Apple is getting back into professional tools, this team and their work will be rolled into the photo app edit view at least and that Freeform app they have at most.
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".
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).