An Apple Aperture in a Photoshop World
Apple Computer introduced today a new professional photo product called Aperture. Priced at $499, its $100 less than Photoshop CS2. The price point is facinating, both of Aperture and of Photoshop. And Im certain that, while most reviews will certainly indicate that Aperture doesn’t have the feature set of Photoshop, it will certainly make full use of the graphics toolbox underlying the MacOS X operating system.
The price point is facinating for two reasons. The first is that Adobe has conciously decided to ignore the significance of the $499 price point. Not only is $499 a psychological price point (its under $500!), but its also magical in that $500 is likely the point at which some corporate purchases have to be signed off by a manager. Adobe doesnt need to worry about that, right? Photoshop is the absolute king of professional photo-imaging tools, and Adobe’s Creative Suite provides incredible value with InDesign and Acrobat in the mix. What is a $100, when you have the presence of Photoshop in the market?
Now there’s Apple’s decision about pricing. At $499, they got the psychological price point and the budgetary price point. But hold the phone: this is an Apple product, which means, unlike the cross-platform requirements of Photoshop, can take every possible advantage of every feature of the operating system. While Mac graphics artists worldwide have had a fairly monogamous relationship with Adobe Photoshop, here comes a product that can incorporate everything that is latest and greatest for the Mac, such as Quartz Extreme effects, Spotlight search and more.
I predict it will be revealed in short order how well Aperture works with other Apple applications, like Final Cut Pro and Motion. That’s nothing new in itself, since Adobe and Macromedia have long pioneered sharing effects, plugins, file formats and the like between products. But if the vendor also owns the hardware and operating system. It gets even more interesting. My contacts at Microsoft have long talked about how the Microsoft Office development team has directed the MS Windows team to make changes to accommodate specific Office features. If Apple isnt already doing this, it would be sorely tempted to do so.