| Wednesday, October 19, 2005 |
13:19 - Gadzooks
http://applexnet.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1633
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No, they don't do anything halfway, do they?
Of immediate interest to me is Aperture, a new $500 iPhoto-on-steroids package that looks to be squarely in the Final Cut Pro class. Professionals only, please. And preferably people with 30-inch monitors. Two of them.
I've also never seen so lavish a product page for anything out of Apple. Heavy Flash usage, lots of video tours, and some really excellent professional testimonial videos that get the message across very well indeed. I guess H.264 is already paying off.
New Power Macs—quads. They've been predicting quads since the early days of the G4, remember that? Finally they're here. Dual-core G5s, dual-CPU, for $3300.
(But CapLion notes that you can put together a Mac now for $18,000. It's one hell of a machine, though, at that price.)
Updated PowerBooks, too, though their biggest selling point seems to be brighter, higher-resolution screens.
All in all, a day for the photography and video pros, it seems. Which stands to reason, considering where it took place: at PhotoPlus Expo in New York.
I wonder how Adobe feels about this? Apple's finally starting to really chisel at their market. Premiere is (reportedly) leaving the Mac platform, as Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express have the high-middle and low-middle ends of video production sewn up. Now I wonder if Photoshop's days are numbered...
I hope not, because if Aperture exposes (heh) nothing else, it's that Photoshop has evolved to the point where manipulating photos is barely even a concern to it anymore—and a program like Aperture that really does tackle pro photographers' needs head-on will probably suck away a whole market that mistakenly thought it had all it needed. I mean, hell, you can't even order photo prints or create one-touch Web galleries from Photoshop. You can't even import photos from your camera! What is this? But it's become something that's indispensable for Web designers, graphic artists, and SomethingAwful geeks, for just about every feature it has that has nothing to do with photography. Aperture ignores that market and aims squarely at those people that Photoshop once served, but that it does no longer.
Someone at Apple has seen a prime opening and the company pounced. It just re-cemented the Mac as the platform of choice for pro photographers. Nice move.
UPDATE: So this is what Core Image was all about. Methinks this has been planned for some time... maybe even ever since iPhoto was first conceived.
Also, it strikes me that no matter how nice Apple plays with the Wintel world, whether it's using Intel processors or buffing iTunes for Windows or making the iPod USB-only, the Mac is never going to be endangered as long as stuff like Aperture and FCP and Shake are only available for the Mac. Besides, I'll bet they make a pretty penny on those 30-inch monitors, and this software makes great strides toward driving sales of those things...
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Brian Tiemann
