After writing about my travails in upgrading to Snow Leopard Server, I read this article on MacRumors written by the former product designer for Shake, a high end compositing software purchased by Apple only to be EOL’ed a few years later.
This is of course in regards to the hubbub surrounding Final Cut Pro X. Now one could say that possibly, his statements were written from an “axe to grind” angle. I don’t see it that way. He speaks the truth because it isn’t much different from what I wrote about Apple not being a reliable partner in their enterprise efforts. Just as I felt that the writing was on the wall regarding Apple’s move away from the enterprise market, Apple’s traditional creative/pro market should have reason to be concerned.
Much of Apple’s recent moves are heading towards that larger consumer/prosumer market which has far different needs than the high end pro video editing market. Apple’s success in the general consumer market is driving these moves because that is where the money is not only now, but for the foreseeable future. Sure, in the past, the pro and high end market was essential because those customers were purchasing Apple’s higher margin products and making up ground for the lack of volume on the lower end. In the past few years though, as Apple has successfully viral marketed its way into the consumer market, they’ve been able to upsell those customers along the way (iPod shuffle -> iPod nano -> iPod touch and/or iPhone -> iMac and/or MacBook). It’s what has been referred to as the halo effect and that shows no sign of abating. The iOS platform is exactly why I’ve continued to be a long term shareholder because that market has legs to grow.
However, I’m also not an Appleloonian fanatic where I see that everything Apple does is good. It’s the contrarian side of me which always looks for potential pitfalls that could have an impact in the
future and thus, affect my long term goals with regards to the stock. Just like how Apple has moved away from the enterprise market for the past few years and are shifting the way they are developing and marketing Lion Server, Final Cut Pro X is signaling their priorities towards pushing what was
once previously highend software to a broader customer base (its like when Apple implemented Server Preferences in OS X Server, they wanted to make it one click easy to get the most basic of services running as the shift in focus was towards the small business market and not the higher end enterprise). From what Apple has shown of Lion Server so far (and is as much as I can allude to for now without violating my NDA), that trend is going to continue. This is also similar to how Apple is moving to digital distribution with the App Store. Apple often times offers clues of their focus areas in advance so based on this software distribution shift, it is just a matter of time before most of Apple’s laptops and desktops no longer ships with a built-in optical drive. This of course will allow
the company to continue on its path to making their computing products lighter and thinner.
Yes, Apple will alienate a part of this higher end market but you know what, they’ve been doing it for years. I still remember the rebranding of Rhapsody to the first Mac OS X Server. I still remember Apple system engineers who wanted it to be pushed in IT. And some of us did; only to get burned when Apple rolled out the REAL Mac OS X Server (10.0). The Rhapsody based product was incompatible in terms of its software API and worst of all, the migration path was merely a migration of user accounts. I recall some long time NeXT and OpenStep developers feeling like they were used as a stopgap just to evangelize the product. When the real Mac OS X (with the Aqua UI was unveiled), Apple did most of its
courting to the large developers (who were the ones who balked at Apple’s original plans with Rhapsody) and pretty much ignored the ones who had been pushing and supporting the original strategy while also writing software for it. In otherwords, this is no different from what Brinkmann wrote that “as a professional, you shouldn’t want to be reliant on software from a company like Apple because they’re not reliant on you.” Apple has this tendency to include and tout features only to drop them later. If you need more evidence of that, take a look at the evolution of their web services (from iTools to .mac to MobileMe, and now iCloud) where certain features have been dropped with each iteration. If you depended on those things which didn’t make the cut, well, Apple will only try to say how the new way is better while you as the customer are pretty much SOL.
This is why I previously wrote that wearing my enterprise IT and consultant hat (post Apple enterprise), I couldn’t recommend Xserve’s and Mac OS X Server because Apple has proven to be an unreliable partner in that area, often times shipping half-baked solutions within the operating system. A perfect example of this exists right in Snow Leopard Server with NAT services. There is no GUI to configure portmapping. The suggested/official way to do it is to edit an XML text file…. Now I know this is a server product and admins should not be afraid of opening up a terminal shell and using the command line interface (this is what many of us were looking for when Apple first bought NeXT; the
marriage of UNIX with the Mac’s legendary UI and ease of use where you’d get the best of both worlds). But considering that Apple is also trying to appeal to the less sophisticated demographic who can’t afford their own IT specialist and/or to continually have to contract with one in order to perform the more technical details, it is sort of confounding why Apple did not place a higher priority to address these glaring deficiencies (note: I’ve requested this since Tiger Server and gave up putting in this request during the Snow Leopard Server seed). It isn’t difficult either because Apple finally got the services configuration in the firewall right. That logic and UI could be easily utilized for the
portmapping UI.
Along the way, there has been this lack of attention to detail and various inconsistencies. Those who are a part of the FTFF (Fix the F’fing Finder) crowd will also know what I’m talking about. I’m not at
the anal end of the whole spatial Finder thing but it would have been nice to not see it turning into this schizophrenic app by grafting on a web browsing sort of paradigm. It got even worse with Snow Leopard when Apple decided to appeal to the switcher crowd who were getting confused with the constantly switching views (icon, list, column) and as a result, made the view a global setting (so if you wanted your view preferences to act like how it has worked since the Mac OS 9 and earlier days, you now needed to set it manually for each window/folder). Now Apple is doing it with Expose and Spaces (both simple, efficient, and intuitive in its pre-Lion form) by lumping them all together in a mishmash. This will work fine for some but not necessarily others (but with Apple, it is their way or the highway). Don’t get me wrong, the level of refinement has gone up in each version of the OS but in some areas, the level of intuitiveness has gone down.
As far as Final Cut Pro X is concerned, I can’t really comment on how good or bad the software is because frankly, it isn’t my area of expertise. I do personal video editing as a hobby and nothing more. I’ve used iMovie ’06, the much maligned iMovie ’08 (and its newer versions), Final Cut Express (for more complex editing), and Final Cut Pro. While it took me awhile to grok iMovie ’08, I came to appreciate its ability to bring in and essentially catalog clips (so if I shot footage in say Shibuya one day and Harajuku on another, I could quickly find these events and quickly pull out the segments of footage that I wanted). From what I’ve read, FCP X is sort of like an iMovie Pro at this current
stage and lacking the functionality of more powerful tools which is present in FCP 7. While Apple has released a FAQ to address some of the concerns being raised, I can understand why this segment of the customer base is up in arms; Apple released an initial half-backed product onto the market which cannot import projects made in FCP 7 due to the extensive changes made in FCP X while making the whole FCP 7 /Final Cut Studio package an end of life product. That is a conundrum for companies which have a lot invested in previous works and therefore need to stick with the older version for the time being. The valid concern is they can no longer purchase the product in the event they need to add more
software seats in the future. IMHO, it would have made more sense for Apple to continue to sell these products until the feature set of FCP X catches up. Apple has normally provided transition paths (Carbon, Classic, Rosetta, QuickTime 7 as few examples) with the future intent of removing them in the future but with the release of FCP X, they EOL’ed FCP 7/FCS 3 immediately.
Which leads me to the future of the Mac Pro (this type of system is still my preferred choice; 5 internal drives and 1 PCIe expansion card shows how much I’m making use of its internal expansion capabilities). With the path that Apple is taking, I can eventually see this particular form factor going away in the future especially if a sizable number of video editing professionals decide to transition away from Apple. Thunderbolt (which basically extends PCI Express over a cable, but does have bandwidth limitations) could possibly just hasten this fate because I can easily see Apple promoting this as the preferred way for expansion (one of the key selling points of the Mac Pro). I know there will be those who disagree with this possibility but look at it from Apple’s (or more so, Steve Jobs) point of view, they’d prefer to sell a sealed box. And with this continued unification of Mac OS X and iOS (something else which has the writing on the wall maybe two or three major releases from Lion), it would be easier for Apple if most all of their consumer targeted computers were all-in-ones since they could then concentrate on a form factor which eventually includes multitouch interfacing directly with the systems screen.
While the term “Pro” is highly subjective and not as black and white and some like to make it, the Pro and Consumer quadrants which Jobs first described after paring down the confusing product lines that occurred before he returned to the company (from the NeXT purchase) is probably one of those distinctions which the company wants to bury. The company has its sights set on the larger and more lucrative general consumer market which also includes those more sophisticated prosumers. While they will probably still cater to certain niche markets, that demographic may need to realize that their best interests may not always be served by the decisions made in Cupertino. My personal take has always been to utilize the best possible tools which gets the job done. The day when Apple products no longer meets my needs is when I’ll make that decision to move elsewhere. While I don’t always agree with some of the design decisions made, the alternatives which exist don’t offer anything significantly better to peak my interest.
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