14 DAY TRIAL // There’s a lot of things Apple has been doing right from day one, and one of those is kill off products before they start to smell. Like the Xserve or the polycarbonate MacBook, which was actually one of Apple’s best-selling Macs when it got discontinued. Now, the same thing is happening to Aperture.
Where is Aperture going?
Apple announced a couple of days ago that Aperture would no longer be maintained with software updates, as the Mac maker will focus on the Photos app in OS X Yosemite.
“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. When Photos for OS X ships next year, users will be able to migrate their existing Aperture libraries to Photos for OS X,” the company said.
Of course, that doesn’t mean Yosemite will be bundled with a Photoshop-like image editor. Far from it. Think of Photos as a combination of key features from Aperture and iPhoto, but without the oomph of pro-level editing. Sort of like a built-in Pixelmator, but slightly less evolved.
So why is Apple doing this and where is Aperture headed? First of all, the rating count on the US Mac App Store says it all. The software isn’t exactly selling. Because of that, Apple has left it unattended for quite a while.
Here’s an impression (known as a “review” on Apple’s iTunes Store) from one of the users, and one that’s shared by many photographers alike.
“This is a good app for the casual photographer. With that said, I am a professional photographer and am changing over to Adobe Lightroom. Quite honestly Apple has REALLY dropped the ball having basically left this program for dead, by not updating it in a timely manner. All professional photographers that I have observed are not using Aperture, they are using Lightroom because Adobe is actually updating their software, and Lightroom integrates better with photoshop.”
Case in point, Adobe quickly jumped in to help with the transition. Apple and Adobe are working closely together to move customers’ projects from Aperture over to Lightroom, and Corel itself has jumped in to save the day as well with its AfterShot Pro 2.
Kill it before it really dies off
In typical manner, Apple is discontinuing the product before it catches mold. Leaving it unattended for the sake of making a few more thousand dollars is not the way to go for a big company like Apple, which feeds on positive media and feedback.
At the cost of upsetting a handful of users, the Cupertino giant is putting Aperture out of its misery, while admitting it can’t do everything perfectly. Instead, the company recommends that casual users settle with what OS X has to offer (or will have to offer, in a few months from now), or go out and buy something from those whose entire business is making photo editing software. A decent approach by any standard.
Third-party apps
Thanks to the immense popularity of smartphones and the millions of apps accessible on them, photography has become a hobby that even the non-talented have embraced. Solutions like Instagram turn even the dumbest shots into works of abstract art, and the success of these apps has been replicated on the desktop too.
Developers like The Pixelmator Team have gone the extra mile and created a super-intuitive photo editor that does a lot of the things you can do on your smartphone, as well as a lot of the things you can do in Aperture and Photoshop. Bundling just the necessary editing tools (and using marketing that rivals even that of Apple’s), Pixelmator has twice as many downloads and costs less than half of the price of Aperture.
With so many choices laying around, some costing next to nothing, it’s easy to see why Apple preferred to abandon Aperture altogether. If anything, it’s doing everyone a public service.