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Apple acquires Pixelmator

pixelmator.com

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#12
Very interesting move. Adobe must be trembling.

Lots of people have already left Premiere and AE for Resolve. If Apple offers Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives it will remove the need to pay for the Adobe subscription for a lot of Mac users (that will probably be the case for me).

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#13
post #4

Would be cool to see this slotted in as a more advanced photo editing product akin to Aperture back in the day. Apple still makes iMovie separately from Final Cut for video, so there's definitely a path there I think to doing something similar for photography.

At the same time, they don't really have anything like this in their portfolio in terms of Keynote/Pages/Numbers.

They have some photo touch up ability in the Photo App, and maybe in preview. But nothing as first class as what Pixelmator is.

There's a possibility for a new Paint app.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#14
post #12

Very interesting move. Adobe must be trembling. Lots of people have already left Premiere and AE for Resolve. If Apple offers Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives it will remove the need to pay for the Adobe subscription for a lot of Mac users (that will probably be the case for me).

> Adobe must be trembling.

Adobe is probably popping open a champagne for every cross-platform Creative Cloud competitor that gets mothballed with Apple's capital. If Microsoft acquired Affinity next, the Adobe offices would look like a disco ball for a week.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#15
post #7

apple's pro apps have been in a weird space for a while. aperture dying was a bummer, and final cut and logic feel simultaneously actively developed and abandoned to me, there's just not much buzz around them. it would be very neat if apple started to build the necessary portfolio of software to provide a viable, ideally not-subscription-based competitor to adobe's suite of products. they certainly have had the chops…

Aperture could have been amazing, but it was slow, buggy and suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to - just as Lightroom appeared.

FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.

I went all in on Logic, however, and that has proved a great buy, no subscription model, fantastic extras and works super well. If they can rebuild a enthusiast-targeted set of apps again, but stick with it, the future looks bright.

I cannot imagine Apple ever competing with Capture One or most of the other circle of RAW image processors, which have some rather niche features, but they might be able to take on Lightroom.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#16
Great news. Hopefully this will drive enough improvements to finally get me off adobe. Photomator is nearly good enough to replace Lightroom and Pixelmator is much nicer than photoshop for casual users.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#17
Astonishingly to me at the time, the app never had a History function (as in Photoshop, list of history you could click through). I had been waiting 3+ years for it to materialize, in order to purchase it. Have since moved on to vector editors and don't see a need to go back.

*Actually now that I think about it, I don't seem to miss the lack of History in vector editors (and just use undo).

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#18

I love Pixelmator Pro, especially because of no subscription fee. If you own Pro for more than 4 months you're spending less money than you would on Photoshop!

They had switched their Photomator spinoff to subscription pricing in 2022: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/wrieaa/pixelmator_ph...

It's within the realm of possibility that a relaunched version of Pixelmator Pro could have subscription pricing as Apple has been playing with that with Logic Pro on iPad: https://support.apple.com/guide/logicpro-ipad/start-a-logic-...

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#19
post #6

Makes sense. I'm a pretty casual user of Pixelmator Pro but it really does feel like a first party Apple app.

It does, and this makes me nervous that they’ll screw it up. I’m a user of Apple Logic Pro and they’ve done a decent job of keeping it going for what, fifteen plus years? But I can’t offhand think of any other popular acquisition that they’ve improved upon and the kept improving off the top of my head (I’m sure there’s more that I’m not thinking of, maybe CUPS) without just sorta forgetting. At least there’s still Acorn.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#20
post #12

Very interesting move. Adobe must be trembling. Lots of people have already left Premiere and AE for Resolve. If Apple offers Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives it will remove the need to pay for the Adobe subscription for a lot of Mac users (that will probably be the case for me).

yet building an adobe alternative could be daunting. Even for Apple. Adobe products have been polished for decades. IMHO Taking on Adobe is as hard as a another company taking on Apple by building apple like products.
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