Hacker News Reader

Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but this is $129/yr, that's significantly cheaper

It’s cheap enough it’s not enough to fund development of Final Cut but also not enough money to bother spending time on it. Find it odd personally, just offering them free to keep hardware makes more sense than trying to push a tiny subscription revenue number.

It's the problem that the whole industry is facing - the current generation of hardware is sufficient that hardware refreshes will continue to decline, and companies that want to keep milking us for money regularly need to find a new way to do it.

Sufficient for whom? At my job they’re still refreshing workstations regularly. They buy and churn hardware on a regular basis.

Not quite “buying on release week” basis but some % of employees always getting new hardware at max specs in the design org

Makes even engineering jealous sometimes

> the current generation of hardware is sufficient that hardware refreshes will continue to decline

If anything, Apple is refreshing their hardware much faster now compared to the Intel days. There's literally a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air every year. And of course there are 3-4 new iPhones every year.

By declining hardware refreshes, I meant on the consumer side, not the producer side.

I hate subscriptions as much as the next person but how would you pay for continued development of software? Do you say a person can continue to run version X forever but if they want a new version they pay for it?

> Do you say a person can continue to run version X forever but if they want a new version they pay for it?

I'm not particularly interested in sustaining the financial growth of software companies. I did that for years and I'm done.

But, what you suggest is literally what the software industry did for decades before subscriptions became the norm.

$129/year is surely better than $300 once, 15 years ago. Though I'm guessing not offering it for free is to keep it distinct from iMovie and to maintain some semblance of "Pro"-ness (which I'm gathering is up for debate either way.. the last time I did any actual video editing it was on Final Cut Pro 5 so I'm out of the loop)

> It’s cheap enough it’s not enough to fund development of Final Cut but also not enough money to bother spending time on it. Find it odd personally, just offering them free to keep hardware makes more sense than trying to push a tiny subscription revenue number.

Apple doesn't work that way.

Unlike almost all other tech companies that are organized by divisions, Apple uses a functional organizational structure.

So all of the software teams are under one head of software; there's no senior vp of the Final Cut division, for example.

For accounting purposes, all software is lumped together.

Apple made $391 billion in revenue last fiscal year; when you're making that kind of money, you can afford to do things for reasons other than the amount of money you could make.

Whatever revenue Final Cut generates isn't required to fund the Final Cut team.

> you can afford to do things for reasons other than the amount of money you could make.

This is what I'm saying and why I don't see the point in charging at all for these apps. The existence of the subscription price tag on them is evidence against what you're claiming.

> The existence of the subscription price tag on them is evidence against what you're claiming.

I disagree. Apple doesn’t need the money, but they also know consumers don’t value free apps the same way they do for pay apps.

It also plays into people’s desire for something better than what everyone has. Everyone gets Numbers, Pages and Keynote for free, but if you subscribe, you get bonus content and features.

So while Apple doesn’t need this to be a blockbuster product, they’re not going to leave money on the table either.

One might argue it offers significantly less value too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com