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Apple acquires Pixelmator

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Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#51

Post by AlanYx »

vr46 wrote: post #15
bangaroo wrote: 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…

One of the senior Aperture team members went off to use the underlying OS RAW infrastructure in product called Gentleman Coders Nitro. It's a decent but little known Lightroom alternative with no subscription, albeit without all the recent Lightroom AI-infused features. It does have AI masking though.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#52

Post by holman »

vr46 wrote: post #15
bangaroo wrote: 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…

> FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.

I'm more of a casual when it comes to Final Cut Pro rather than a daily driver, but it does seem like the last year or two they've started to get back into the fight again. Some of the 360 VR/AI/multi-iOS camera changes seem to go more hand-in-hand with "Apple gives a shit about content creation again", buttressed by Apple Vision Pro and spatial photography.

As someone who's still eagerly awaiting like... any reasonable prosumer device to shoot for Apple Vision Pro, I think all of this industry is going to really ramp up in the next few short years very quickly. Gonna be interesting.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#53

Post by robenkleene »

Pure speculation: This is about visionOS. Photo editing is the least friction "pro" task to bring to a spatial computing platform.

The other options I considered:

⁃ Renewed interesting in pro use cases in general. I don't see enough incentive for this. Apple's historical interest in this was winning over creatives, but particularly creatives interested in photography are already won.

⁃ Apple wanted the tech for something on iOS. I don't think there's enough "special sauce" tech Pixelmator has to justify this. Pixelmator's tech is only valuable as a full package.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#54

Post by drcongo »

startupLankan wrote: post #20
pier25 wrote: 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.

You can't polish a turd, Beavis.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#56

Post by kermatt »

toinbis wrote: post #9

Well done team Lithuania! Remember hearing Pixelmator founders giving a speech ~12 years ago. They were very vocal and repeated this many times: "Our marketing strategy is to just focus on the product". Not sure I agree with that statement, but they sure seem to followed it thoroughly. Congrats on the acquisition!

> "Our marketing strategy is to just focus on the product".

I wish more companies had this perspective, in contrast to the "Barely MVP and mostly marketing spend" to get the most signups / MAU in hopes of an acquisition.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#57

Post by robenkleene »

robenkleene wrote: post #53

Pure speculation: This is about visionOS. Photo editing is the least friction "pro" task to bring to a spatial computing platform. The other options I considered: ⁃ Renewed interesting in pro use cases in general. I don't see enough incentive for this. Apple's historical interest in this was winning over creatives, but particularly creatives interested in photography are already won. ⁃ Apple wanted the tech for somet…

I think Pixelmator probably already runs on visionOS (I don't have one personally) but I doubt they spend enough engineering resources to make it amazing because the ROI isn't worth it for a third party company. But of course Apple can make Pixelmator amazing on visionOS without even noticing the cost.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#58

Post by comboy »

bangaroo wrote: 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…

Logic is stellar. Why would you feel like its being abandoned? Professional tools don't change UX every 2 years.

Re: Apple acquires Pixelmator

#59

Post by asimpletune »

Combining Pixelmator and Procreate via airdrop is such a nice workflow. I'm happy for the team and I'm holding out hope this will be good for Mac users in the long run. A Blackmagic acquisition would also be interesting. It's too bad there isn't a vector drawing app that's at the same level of Mac integration as Pixelmator. I've used Inkscape and it was amazing but unfortunately very slow.
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