Yesterday Loopinsight reported that Apple is going to stop developing Aperture and iPhoto. They will be replaced on both the Mac and iOS devices by a new Photos app:
With the introduction of the new Photos app and iCloud Photo Library, enabling you to safely store all of your photos in iCloud and access them from anywhere, there will be no new development of Aperture.
I’ve been a fairly happy iPhoto and Aperture user for years but this announcement doesn’t really worries me much. On the contrary I am quite excited to be able to use the same software on both OS X and iOS, hopefully with a streamlined interface and simplified workflow.
There is not any doubt that Apple has prepped a solid migration path to Photos once it is released at the beginning of next year. In the meantime I’ll continue using Aperture, confident that Apple is going to take care of the rest. That’s the beauty of being an Apple user.
Starting from scratch is a well known way of working for Apple. When an application becomes too confused, or when the code base would make it complicated to introduce certain functionalities, Apple just throw everything away and write the software starting from zero. It certainly takes balls, and an endless confidence that you have the ability to get there in the end.
In a way this way of working was inspired by Steve Jobs. He was not afraid to say that:
…because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life\’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.
In general I agree with the upbeat tone of your comment, but Apple’s history with their graphics products is is not without awful stumbles. Their video products (iMovie and Final Cut Pro) made disastrous turns with many talented videographers continuing to run older versions rather than moving to current, and bizarre, upgrades. Apple has been trying for years to catch up with their past in this space. Hopefully they won’t dumb down their photography suite like they did in the video domain. I’m not quite as hopeful having lived through a number of attempts by Apple to move down the food chain in search of the least-common-denominator in user set skill.
Good point Ted. It seems to me Apple is allocating resources to products that can benefit the majority of users and leave the development of Pro tools to the likes of Adobe etc. In a way Apple has turned its back to exactly the type of faithful users that kept buying Apple in the ’90s.
Having just purchased a training program for Aperture, and migrating around a few hundred photos into iPhoto, I am unhappy about this. Of course, it’s not the first time Apple has made such a move. I will look elsewhere, probably Lightroom.