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Adobe Drops Mac Support For Premiere
Theaetetus writes "In a story on MacCentral, it's revealed that Adobe Systems is dropping support for the Mac in the new version of video editing app Premiere: 'If Apple's already doing an application, it makes the market for a third-party developer that much smaller,' said David Trescot, senior director of Adobe's digital video products group. In response to the news, Apple issued a statement welcoming Premiere customers to make the switch to the Mac and Final Cut Pro."
Post #1! This has become a very popular thing for developers to do nowadays...lost your will to innovate? Blame it on the other guy. What I don't understand is how this happens when it seems clear to me that people have learned to compete with Microsoft, arguably the most anti-competitive entity in the business, so why is it that they cannot compete with Apple, a company with significantly fewer software titles and an overwhelming demand for the portage of many common applications from the Win32 side of things? Just my two cents.
This seems like a tactic by Adobe to intimidate Apple. Apple know that their macs are paperweights without the likes of Photoshop and Acrobat, so they are saying to Apple "Don't make good applications". Duh.
collins, brian
I had the pleasure of sitting in on a "Q and A" session with an adobe rep, while I was at RIT. The rep (perhaps not the position of the entire company) basically didn't like the mac platform. He complained about how it was more to support, and changed more frequently than the windows counterpart. This of course costs them more in development and support. Granted this was not long after the OS 9 -> OS X transition, so of course adobe is going to bitch that the platform changes too much because they just dumped the whole API adobe products were based off of. Carbon helped fill this gap but it's by no stretch a the cure-all.
I wonder if this is the general feel of Adobe developers however.
- tristan
I'm not too sure about this... Final Cut Pro has a pretty large userbase in the Mac world. I guess when you are used to being the only bully on the block, and have thus come to enjoy forcing people to pay your extremely high prices (since there isn't anywhere else to go)
This comment doesn't really apply, since 1. Adobe hasn't had a monopoly or near-monopoly on the Mac platform for quite some time (Final Cut in it's various flavors has been around a while), and 2. Final Cut Pro is actually more expensive than Adobe Premier.
This is Adobe's way of punishing Apple for trouncing on their business. It also shows that Adobe will try to reclaim that lost Macintosh business on the Windows side of computing, by forcing those Mac users to purchase a Wintel PC to continue using Premiere. This stratedy has a two edged attack: 1. Adobe still keeps its business and 2. Adobe attempts to hinder Apple's hardware sales by forcing Mac users to the Dark Side into being assimilated as BORG DRONES.
wouldnt it also force users to purchase an additional copy of premier (pc version) in order to keep using it?
then people would have to decide between changing platforms or changing programs. and to someone who is well acquainted with premier on a mac, neither choice looks very rosy i think.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Who cares? Adobe, like Microsoft, is slowly being made a moot point on the Macintosh platform. Adobe- like Microsoft, has always had the "you should be grateful to be doing business with us" kind of attitude. As the story poster says- Apple says "sure, come on over Adobe users!"
I worked at a company that did plugin development for Premier and After Effects- and not a day went by without Adobe getting pissed off about something. They'd accuse the their 3rd-party plugin development community of giving out prereleases. They'd "change their mind" about giving the company developer licenses. They were constantly getting upset about the slightest things developers or marketing people said at tradeshows. Each little temper-tantrum from Adobe would take hours of people's time to "fix"(fix being "kiss adobe ass until they're happy".)
The funny thing is that when you act like that, everyone else puts up with it, but slowly works to make you irrelevant. This former employer is doing great business with Apple- their plugin is included with every copy of Final Cut Pro, and while I was still there, I never heard a bad word about relations with Apple.
Please help metamoderate.
- Premiere was left to languish before Final Cut 1
-Once Final Cut shipped adobe was very slow to respond
-Premiere is a crappy product compared to Final Cut
-Adobe has shifted its mentally to the PC even though 30% of their revenues come from apple's "5%" of the market
-Premiere is a crappy product compared to Final Cut
-Adobe was very late getting an OSX version out
-Adobe says they can't compete with Apple but now is competing in the PC market that has FREE products and products that also get better reviews?
-Premiere is a crappy product compared to Final Cut
-Adobe has yet to take advantage of the second proc in macs for After Effects even though they have been standard for years
-Premiere is a crappy product compared to Final Cut
-Premiere is a crappy product compared to Final Cut
-Premiere is a crappy product compared to Final Cut
Adobe is probably doing something very stupid. While products released should be profitable, even if they are break even, if you have an assortment or portfolio of other popular packages for that platform, you end up hurting yourself.
imo, Adobe has 3 signature products--Photoshop, Acrobat, and Premiere. They just dropped one for Mac.
Furthermore, in some ways, this sends a negative signal regarding the potential of dropping other Mac products, no matter the PR spin on this. People will look elsewhere possibly sooner. Some will migrate to a wholly different platform (your 2nd point), x86 and MS OSs. However, Mac users tend to be a little more brand centric, so they will likely look to some other product sooner. If the company has shown one product may/will fail, what about the others? (If people perceive a bank to be unstable, even if it isn't, the bank may become unstable from such a fear.) Adobe Photoshop and similar products are stil quite popular and profitable for Adobe on OS X. Abandoning one of them sends a bad signal.
I wouldn't be surprised if downloads for the GIMP increased over the next few months for OS X users. The only problem with GIMP besides it being sometimes tempermental is, afaik, that it does not support commercial color syncing technology (like Pantone, stuff for digital commercial printing, since that tech tends to be heavily patented--please correct me if I'm wrong, since I'd like an alternative). That tech is something photoshop has, and is something most professionals find critical in their work.
Here is why Adobe didn't port Premiere to Macs
This comment here explains the business situation fine:(link)
Interesting, except for the fact that the author(and you) don't use correct terminology. Premiere started as a Macintosh app, and always has been- it's never been "ported" to the Macintosh. Rather, it was "ported" to the PC.
Please help metamoderate.
Welcome to life, Adobe. Innovate or die.
I'm certainly not saying that FCP is the be all, end all for video production (it isn't), but at least give it a chance, Adobe. Final Cut Express is lookin mighty fine right now...
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
So instead of fighting for glory with Apple, they will now put all their eggs in one basket in the competition against AVID? Makes no business sense to me...
According to the article, Apple is dropping the API that Premiere was writtent in. In other words, Apple told them to get lost first.
-]Phreak Out[-
Photoshop 4 may be usable, but I find 7's brushes to be EXTREMELY useful for texturing. Additionaly the layout changes between 5.5 and 6.0 made a huge usability improvement. Let's also not forget the immensly useful Image Ready, which makes slicing up layouts for the web very easy, although ultimately they still must be edited by hand, it gets rid of much of the grunt work. Adobe has done a great job of innovating Photoshop, currently there are no real competitors.
Photos.
Final Cut Pro costs more than a copy of Premiere, but it has more high-end features you see on really expensive Avid setups that run you well over two grand.
/half/ of what Adobe charges for Premiere, while having the same badass UI of FCP and most of the same feature set.
If you want to mention that Premiere costs less than Final Cut Pro, please do mention that Final Cut Express costs about
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
*baffled look*
/. is about some angry competitor swearing off the mac. What exactly is causing this? Personally, I'd have to go with the incredible ease of use that Safari/FCP/etc 'suffer' from, but there has to be something else.
After years and years of Windows/Solaris usage, I finally went out and bought a mac. The OS was stable and unixlike to the point where I couldn't rationalize -not- buying one.
Now, every 8th story on
Could enough people actually be buying macs now that companies are purposefully trying to pull out of the market to cease the flow of new mac purchasers?
Christ knows I won't be buying another PC until my dev box dies. Yay Apple.
Are you MORE than your SPINAL COLUMN?
if they were going up against something free (iTunes, iPhoto) from Apple, then i can see it hard to justify a consumer level app..... maybe. There will always be things that Apple's iApps can not and will not do in the name of simplicity. You can't tell me anyone is giving up a legit copy of Photoshop for iPhoto. Kind of off topic, but my point is that FCP and FCE are not free by any means. FCE is a lot cheaper than Premiere, but FCP is still the most money. FCE is targetted at people wanting a step up from iMovie, not people working on big films. If anything it's like Photoshop elements, which is still very much not the application that iPhoto is.
Perhaps this is their reasoning but I think they have waited too long. If Adobe had pursued this strategy right away when FinalCut was introduced it would have worked as you suggest but now it will be a near run thing. Apple is a niche player and has it's eye on dominating the video editting/production niche. FinalCut Pro is one of the "killer" (or "tractor") apps in their strategy. Once the Mac platform has a critical mass of users and a critical mass of applications many of which are Mac only even competing apps like Premier can't leave without doing themselves more harm than good. Instead of Adobe keeping their business their users (some reluctantly) switch to FinalCut Pro because the *other* apps they need and the other people they need to work with are all on the mac.
Sadly for Adobe FinalCut Pro has already proven itself and is widely regarded as a superior, even revolutionary product. Also Apples play to dominate the video/film production market doesn't rest on FinalCut alone but also on a fundamental technology (QuickTime) and a parallel strategy of "tractor apps" at the very high end (Shake), the very low end (iMovie) and in related fields (DVD Studio Pro, Logic) and on Apple hardware designed specifically for this market (why do you think they offer a "server" with an option for a high(ish) end video card and a FireWire port on the front?). Apple's hand has just gotten stronger with the introduction of the G5 and the introduction of the Pixlet codec. (not to mention the implications of Apple developing a codec at the specific request of Steve's other company which just happens to be a major Hollywood player and the developers of RenderMan (Coming to a Mac near you soon?))
Adobe may do OK despite all the advantages Apple has at this point since increasingly FinalCut Pro is not competing with Premiere at the low end of the spectrum but with Avid at the high end, but that begs the question of why someone getting in to the low end would buy a middle-to-low end product like Premiere when for the same price he can get a middle-to-high end product like FinalCut Pro on the platform with all the users and software (in this niche).
Isn't Microsoft pushing video editing on it's OS too? Gawd, given the choice of trusting Apple or Microsoft, it's a no-brainer to NOT trust Microsoft.
With Apple finally putting alot of effort in making a good OS( I'm talking OS, not GUI ) and having to get pushy to make sure apps are available to support it. It stands to reason that some longtime Apple developers won't like getting pressure from Apple. For some reason, they have no idea what to expect from Microsoft. It's like the history books keep getting burned each year as more and more companies "partner" with Microsoft and then end up in court and out of business soon after. IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
It won't just be Premiere. In this case Apple's "Final Cut" software was obviously the cause, but expect more software companies to flee Apple after the relase of 10.3 with its built-in XFree86 that makes running all that cool free software in Apple.com's "Downloads" section a breeze.
Adobe has already made it quite clear that Windows is their new preferred platform, so I think that it's safe to assume that we will see more of this down the road. Adobe is, for the most part, a proprietary software company, and with Apple cozying up to the Open Source world, Adobe's profit margins in the Apple world will shrink as popular free tools like Gimp encroach on Adobe's market share. Microsoft yanked IE support for Apple, punishing Apple for providing a little competition. It will continue.
Apple is doing what the Linux world has failed at- bringing Open-Source software to desktop users. In a few years Apple users might not need much proprietary software at all- making up for the higher cost of Mac hardware. Apple is taking a big risk by pissing off a lot of software companies, but the rewards should make up for it if Apple comes through it.
Jesus, at the first sign of the competition taking their market away, they turn and run with their tales between their legs. I guess Adobe isn't comfortable unless they have a monopoly and can take years between new version releases of their software. Welcome to America, Adobe. It's called capitalism. This is a bad thing for both Final Cut Pro and Premiere. Less competition is almost never good for the market, and it certainly isn't a good thing in this case.
Apple bought Final Cut pro from the company who's name I can' remember right now-- the makers of Flash.
They bought it because Premiere was buggy and lagging on the mac and driving users over to Windows. Apple was loosing a lot of customers because Premiere sucked so hard.
So, apple spent all this money and at least 3 years of development time before the first version of Final cut Pro came out developing a top flight Video editing app on the mac.
And it has worked-- it has become the premiere video editing app anywhere... mac or windows.
So, of course Adobe is going to drop Premiere for the Mac-- they didn't have to compete before because there was no competition (And so the mac version sucked) and now they can't compete because it would take a very large investment in their mac product and they already moved most of their customers away from the Mac.
Now you'll start seeing some real competition-- premiere and all those other products who abandoned the mac (there are a variety, with only Media 100 remaining AFAIK) on the windows side and Apple with Final Cut Pro on the Mac side.
Final Cut Pro is currently winning the battle-- and every FCP sale to a previous windows user is another dozen switchers to the Mac Platform.
It only makes sense.. windows cannot architectually handle realtime video or audio, and the reason people moved to windows in the first place was they got to sell lots of add on hardware and make more money that way. Since Macs can handle it built in (Even in the pure digital domain for both audio and video now on the G5) Apple can undercut the competition at $999 for a copy! (And FCP express works great for the independants and pro-am types.)
Like Microsoft a few weeks ago, Adobe just admitted defeat.
Now lets count the days until they cancel the whole premiere product line, or move it toward the lower end of the market.
In the end, thoough, Adobe brought this on themselves by taking the Mac market for granted and not bothering to invest there.... their betrayal has come back to haunt them.
And I totally applaud Apple for putting the time and money into creating the top dog video app for their platform.
ITs not like there were third parties trying to do the same thing. Adobe was just milking the mac product.
>> Rather than spend time and energy in a fight over the smaller Apple-based market, they're placing their resources in the much larger Windows arena, where there are greater prospects for growth.
The problem for Adobe is that Mac is actually a major platform for video editing and they are retreating to a smaller market because they don't know how to compete with Apple and Avid.
I come from the world of PC video editing. I intended to do everything on my mac now, because the workflow is better, but the PC world boasts greater speed and until FCP 3, greater software. I mean not just the speed of the software, but the staggering options at every level from beginner to superpro. Some of the advanced intermediate apps, like Vegas Video or Ulead, have about as many options as Premiere. And Premiere has a lot of features that extend from Adobe's still image editors. Basically, it allows you to use your different frame tracks like layers in a photoshop document, and apply these changes over time...a very complex but incredibly awesome feature that I used all the time.
I'm just getting into FCP, and have noticed that things are done quite differently. You can't just switch in a day like you can with the OS. However, what I have noticed is the excessive quality of the output of FCP. Premiere had all sorts of bugs, the root of which seems to be a heavy reliance on source data integrity. Some of my captures never worked right in Premiere and I ended up having to reencode things, which took a long time. And FCP's audio track syncronization is perfect...Premiere's again relies heavily on the output format, I think, because a lot of time different formats would have completely different sync. I do a lot of music video work and this was just ridiculous...I went to a video competion with a fresh "print" of a precisely synced video track and discovered that adobe had somehow offset the whole thing by 200 ms, or about 6 frames. The only difference between that print and the test AVIs I run was the frame resolution -- the print was in lower res to ensure it ran at full speed. It made the whole project look amaturish, when I spent a lot of time making sure it would look great, and needless to say I didn't win.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I find it interesting how the major developers (Adobe, Microsoft, etc.) are quick to drop Mac support when a better product comes along. Now while I understand that "the bottom line" is all that matters in the business world, the respective companies have some degree of control over their bottom line.
And please do drop the market share argument. Any decent economist, that is those who have joined in the anti-Apple conspiracy*, knows that market share does not determine anything and more often than not it is the high-end quality products that have the single-digit market share values. * Yes it is a conspiracy because no other high-end company (e.g. Bang & Olufsen, Rolls Royce, etc.) gets the consistent negative treatment that Apple does. The only reason for this is a multi-tiered scheme on the part of the press, economists, IT professionals, and Microsoft/Intel, organized or not, to wipe Apple of the map while promoting the dominance of a second-rate product line (Wintel/AMDows systems).
Now is Adobe's option to drop Premier for the Mac a bad thing? For those in the professional video market using Macs obviously not since they have opted to purchase a product that costs $300 more. Also, Apple has traditionally been a fairly small player in this market. Unfortunately, the mainstream press will most likely use this as another opportunity to scream about the impending death of Apple that has been coming for nearly two decades. Even if a negative spin is not used, the general public has been successfully brainwashed enough to interpret this as a bad sign.
Apple took an existing product, improved it and the consumers made a choice: FCP over Premier. This has nothing to do with who happens to market and sell Final Cut Pro/Express; it is not as if pro users are getting PowerMacs with FCP pre-installed. In fact, none of Apple's pre-installed apps are pro-level by any stretch of the imagination. Adobe's reasoning, much like Microsoft's decision to drop IE for the Mac, is a cop out. The only difference is that Microsoft has their "drop" of IE for Windows to hide behind--in actuality Microsoft is simply circumventing their illegal binding of IE with the OS by ceasing to make IE a separate product and fully incorporating it into the OS and thus continuing to make the use competing browsers on Wintel systems an unattractive, or at least seemingly unnecessary, option.
Now will Adobe leverage its position to threaten the removal of Photoshop/Illustrator? Probably not. Unlike the professional video market, Macs are nearly a de facto standard in desktop publishing and have been since the beginning of the market. It is bad enough that Adobe is beginning to display Quark-esque traits (e.g. the change in the PS7 plug-in SDK which can potentially lock competing products out of Photoshop plug-in compatibility) and as always their pricing is astronomical for their product. For $200+ less than the cost of entry for Photoshop (an image editing-only app) a graphic artist/technician can get a full set of features with Canvas or CorelDRAW Suite. And, both of those products support enough file formats to not exist in a vacuum. Yet, Photoshop and the Adobe suites still rules the roost while being considerably more expensive. If Adobe pulls the plug on the Mac, someone will move in to take its place. In my experience the only real problem with Canvas is its stability and hopefully the recent merging of Deneba and ACD will provide them the resources to remedy that.
It is unlikely that Apple will create a professional level graphics app. It is ultimately counterproductive and with Adobe, Deneba/ACD, Macromedia, what's left of Corel, GIMP, etc. already in the market, they would have to develop and market one heck of a graphics suite to even be noticed, let alone have a significant rate of adoption. Also, creating a full arc of Apple developed software will only reinforce the long since false proprietary image that Apple still has to shed.
Q4 of 2003 will be an interesting time for all parties concerned.
After Effects still does solid business on the Mac...the compositing tools built into Final Cut 3 don't offer nearly the same level of power & control and such. Final Cut 4 might, but it is primarily an editing app.
Apple does have a more powerful compositing/animation tool -- Shake -- but that is aimed more at the film industry and other Really Big Tasks, whereas After Effects is more useful for TV and DV.
If Apple were to come out with a "Shake Lite" to bridge the gap between FCP and the regular Pro Shake, then we might see Adobe run away again. Cowards!
Stories such as this remind me of the time John Warnock stood before the attendees of a Seybold conference years ago and actually cried because Apple was threatening Adobe's PostScript font tech with its own TrueType. (Well, okay, I can't find any articles that back up my recollection, but perhaps that's what the author of this one meant by "visible dismay.")
In those days, Adobe had a stranglehold on the fonts market. Sure, there were players such as Bitstream and Agfa, but nothing compared to Adobe and the huge fees it was collecting per font. Then came Apple (along with Microsoft) who announced a competing technology that would be included with its operating systems, rather than as an add-on such as Adobe Type Manager, and if not make PostScript irrelevant, at least take a huge bite out of Adobe's margins. History tells us a truce was achieved, but at the time, my sympathy for Adobe was in the minus. Gouging your customers inevitably is bad business.
Now we have this. I personally haven't used Premiere in ages, and I can't say I know how it has evolved in the meantime. But while I was using it, I always had the unnerving feeling I was using a pee cee port that was an afterthought. A stagnant afterthought. (Not quite as bad as MS Word 6.0, but you get the idea.) After using FCP (and FCP Express), the question I have is: Why would I ever want to go back to Premiere?
Again, I'm thinking it's just desserts for Adobe. While I'm certain their reasons for redeveloping Premiere are exclusively retaliatory (just my opinion), Premiere is a fading star in as much the same way that Quark Xpress is. Ironic, in a way, that it's Adobe that's eating Quark's lunch.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
I haven't run into any problems getting the files to be accepted by any press houses. A lot of them take InDesign documents these days even if they don't advertise the fact. The few that don't take the native file wil usualy accept a PDF or EPS.
Next time you upgrade get one of Adobes all inclusive packages (one of those ones that includes PS, Illustrator, Acrobat, ect...) you would practicaly be getting it for free, so if you don't like it it's no big loss.
Adobe lost the Apple market share because Apple produced a better product. That's called competition and competition is good! I just hope Apple doesn't slack off on their FCP software.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
A couple of colleagues have wondered about GIMP and I've helped them to install it. They then sit down, go "doh...!?" for about ten minutes, click half-heartedly a few times and proclaim it an abject failure because it doesn't have precisely the same user interface as PS6.
Just because you can't figure out how to use a piece of software doesn't mean that no-one can.
I kinda agree with you on your last point there - I've seen some great stuff done with the GIMP, so I'm convinced there are people who indeed can learn to use it. I've tried it several times myself, more out of philosophical reasons than anything else, support the free stuff and so on - the problem to me is not that it doesn't have the same interface as PS6 though - I've hardly used that either.
The problem is that the GIMP doesn't have the same interface (even remotely) as any other application I've ever touched. That makes the entry-level very high, since I have to look really hard and try lots of possible alternatives until the application (maybe) does what I want.
Maybe this interface is totally superior (script-fu certainly seems powerful as well), but as long as it is so bloody hard to figure out, it will not be popular.
If you disagree and think it should be obvious, or have some way of looking at it that makes sense (and is possible to explain), then please, please write it down and make it a publically available tutorial. I'm pretty sure there are lots of people like me that would like to use it, but just can't figure it out - in a reasonable time span. I'm sure just about everyone can figure it out. Just not soon enough.
I really mean it - if you have a good way, share it. The docs I've seen make little to no sense to me.
You know, I don't give a great god damn about the P4, personally I think Intel lost it after they introduced the PII... the PIII was stupid and the P4 is a ridiculous re-design.
The work flow of FCP is only better if it's the only thing you use. Personally, I use Photoshop a lot more and I feel right at home in After Effects and Premiere, even more so than in Final Cut.
Like I said, Final Cut gets the job done, and well. But it's certainly a far cry from being "hands-down" best.