Slashdot Mirror
Apple Unveils New Pro Products
porcupine8 writes "As many had speculated, today Apple unveiled upgrades to their PowerBook and Power Mac lines (although no PowerBook G5). They also introduced a new professional photography application known as Aperture, rounding out their software lineup for creative professionals. Can't wait to find out what they announce next week!"
Finally Apple has upped the resolution on their powerbooks to something more reasonable (at least, reasonable to me - other people have different requirements). Whoops, no, I tell a lie, its only on their 15" and 17" models. The 12" i^HpowerBook is still at 1024x768. If this had been equally increased, I'd be very happy. As it is, the form factor is perfect but the resolution just too limiting for it to be my standard road machine.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
These are some of the most expandible workstations Apple has ever released. 16GB of RAM and a TB of storage makes a killer multimedia editing workstation all around. If you are weary of the Intel switchover, the time to buy is now. The workstations should hold you over well into the second and third revisions of Apple Intel hardware at least.
I hope next week they finally add something to itunes to monitor changes to a directory. thats all I really need at this point
It's a totally different product. Photoshop doesn't have anywhere near the workflow that Aperature provides. Non destructive RAW processing, applying exposure processing to multiple files, and desktop organization is a godsend for professional photographers.
My one take away issue is the fact that a lot of audio card makers are having trouble getting high quality audio out of their PCIe cards. as mentioned here. Everybody else will start cranking out the 8 port SATA 2 cards soon (I don't think they have settled on that standard yet, have they?), looking around i've seen x1 firewire cards, but x4 multiport fw800s cards are sure to be in the works also.
Aperture isn't competing with Photoshop, it's competing with things like this:
PhaseOne's Capture One
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Hmm, sort of true. The 9800 is an ATI, not nVidia, but you're right about the base videocards not meeting the recommended spec. I'd be willing to bet the requirements having the most affect on Aperture are memory and CPU speed (in that order), though who knows.
Aperture's feature set is different from Photoshop's, yes, but where they overlap is significant from a photographer's point of view. I'd say that 95% of what I do to photos is now covered by Aperture. I'll still need PS, but as of today it's been relegated to secondary importance, and will be much more easily replaced if something simpler/cheaper/better comes along. For people like graphic designers and digital artists, Aperture may only be a nice accompaniment to PS, but for photographers, this is huge. It's actually quite perfect.
A product in the same price-class as Photoshop CS, but not the same feature-class... I wonder how that'll fair in the market...
:-) but it won't replace Photoshop for professionals.
I'd say, badly (and you probably meant "fare", not "fair"). Cut the price to under $100 and things may change.
God knows, Photoshop needs competition, but this isn't it (at least yet). Aperture is in the Photoshop Elements class for photo editing purposes, but it also seems to have useful database/organisation features.
It may turn out to be a decent tool for "serious amateurs"
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Photoshop was created a long time ago, when no professional photographers were using digital cameras. It's feature set / interface is actually very cumbersome for people shooting large number of pictures on a professional basis.
With Aperture, Apple has spent a long time analyzing photographer's workflow, and design the app on top of it. It has just what is needed for pros, a clean workflow that includes:
- easy import of raw images
- easy way to see / search metadata
- non destructive editing
- project management
- easy backup of negatives (raw files)
- differentiation between masters (raw) and versions (treated images)
- easy export and soft color spoofing
- easy backup on masters and collections
I can't wait o get my hands on this one...
p.s.: Aperture is to iPhoto somewhat like Solaris is to windows 95...
Also now avalable: ECC memory.
No self-respecting workstation went without it (same with the graphics cards), and finally, Apple has true workstations available, not just high end desktops priced like workstations.
Looks to me like Apple showing what can be done with Core Image.
isn't that going to be, uh, slower?
Depends, and less likely than you think. A lot more Mac software seems to be multi processor aware than Windows software. H.264 is dog-slow to encode but the Apple H.264 encoder used by the Quicktime encoder is MP-aware, with this, the speed will nearly double.
The new Powerbooks offer no real advantage to their predecessors, besides a wider screen. I suspect many people will hold off their purchases on these laptops until Powerbooks ship with Intel processors (and a faster system bus). The PowerMac G5 dual core model has some great potential though. I'd get one if I could afford it. I also think Aperture has the makings of a solid pro app.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
I'd say the difference between sluggish and snappy started when the
2.5 duals came out. You could sense a different that the 2.0s were
reasonably quick but the 2.5s' actually had snap.
And with each new version of OS X, the interface speed increased.
That is until Tiger where you can sense the window resizing/opening
was faster than that of Panther but other things were slower and the
beach ball returned for a lot of people.
I talk to many people with 2.5 duals who say that Panther under 2.5
dual was the fastest Mac OS X machine they experienced.
And if you had a better video card (i.e. ATI X800 versus ATI Radeons
below the 9600 XT) you would experience better performance. And a
faster drive also added "snap".
When 10.43 comes out, I'm hoping some of the speed has been restored.
But yeah, it does seem that to equal the old single user Mac OS
cooperative multitasking interface speed, you would need a nine
gigahertz quad cpu, quad core cpu.
Just a thought.
From the looks of it, Aperture is far more thought-out than Elements is. (Which, I guess, could also mean that half of the features are useless for those of us who are not professional photographers - it's a very niche product, and it's almost by definition not a direct Photoshop competitor.)
Automatic backup to a secondary drive, good metadata handling - which goes hand in hand with things like the "Smart Web Gallery" feature to automatically rebuild the pages where new photos come in that fit a special criteria, automatic stacking of batches of images (taken within x minutes of each other). However, I think that the biggest thing here is that Apple gets to use Core Image to do some fun stuff - you can make several versions of the same image by adding effects and doing things like cloning and patching, which all just adds up to an incremental 'recipe' of the changes and a lot of saved hard drive space (which I guess would add up if you were to make a lot of toy alternate RAW images).
Obviously I haven't tried it, and I'm not a professional photographer, but from having watched the tours, there seems to be an awful lot of "extra miles" that Apple have taken in a lot of the features, which I think will be what sets it apart from Elements more than the stereotypical "artists buy Apple" factor.
You are, in fact, correct. There is no boost in speed. 1.67ghz yesterday, 1.67ghz today.
As someone who's quite likely to buy the 17" model, I can say that the increase in resolution was more important to me than the 0.2ghz increase in speed some people had anticipated. And the price decrease was certainly welcome.
Aperture looks fantastic, but I think they'd sell a lot more copies at $299 than $499. Ouch! I think it's comparable in complexity and sophistication to Motion, which also sells for $299, so I'm really disappointed by the price. Also, it lacks layers, although it does support non-destructive editing, so it can't serve as a substitute for Photoshop, although I'm quite sure that I'll prefer it to Photoshop for the things it can do. Since I work for an educational institution, I can and most likely will buy it at the $249 educational price, but as a hobby photographer I couldn't just ify $499, while I was able to justify $299 for Motion just fine.
D
Apple has yet to grab "the middle class" market. Thats the price range from $1000-1500.00, what most consumers in that area expect to pay for a new Laptop. I'm very disappointed that Apple is still charging $2000-2400 for G4 powerbooks that are now a generation behind their desktops and priced more than a comparable Wintel notebook. At this price point looks like we'll be buying some more Mac Mini's and lugging the monitors arround, fun stuff.
is similar to Googles Picassa but on steroids.
I think maybe Apple's own iPhoto might be a better comparison. It blows both right out of the water, though.
It doesnt look like it will compete with Photoshop though at this stage. It is more of a basic organization and editing program.
I am not a professional photographer, but I think it's more than competitive with Photoshop for that market already. Dispite the name, Photoshop isn't especially tailored for photographer's workflows. Aperture is, and I can definitely see people who don't need Photoshop's other editing capabilities making the switch. Just as they did with their last new pro product, Motion, they've created something that doesn't quite resemble anything else out there.
It looks pretty slick but has some fairly hefty system requirements.
I find the reason why to be really interesting. Instead of making duplicate copies for your edited photos (as you would with most tools), Aperture just stores the CoreImage filter settings for each version, and re-applies them to the original when you view them. It just saves "the diffs". But instead of having to actively re-render the filters each time you want to make a change, as you would with Photoshop, you can just adjust the filter's settings in realtime (or close enough to realtime). In other words, CoreImage is the shit, and it requires some decent hardware to run at a respectable rate.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
While it may not replace Photoshop in terms of some specific features and purpose, the very things you've listed in your excellent analysis are the things that will make this a Photoshop "injurer". Right now, PS serves two crowds: digital artists and digital photographers. Adobe is going to find themselves losing market share if they don't pick up the pace on PS real quick, thanks to Aperture. Since Canon released Digital Photo Pro, I've been using PS less and less, though DPP falls short in many areas. Aperture sounds like the best combination of Picasa, DPP (or Phase One C1), and Photoshop's digital photography features.
If the two programs continue as they are now, there will always be a place for both Aperture and PS, but PS won't be the king of all digital imagery, only digital art. It will lose the photography world to Apple.
The new dual core will perform better, given the larger caches, on-chip cache-to-cache bus, and faster memory. If it was an Athlon 64, it could have performed worse, because you'd be going from dual independent memory controllers to a shared memory controller, but the G5's have a shared memory bus anyway, even when there are two seperate physical processors.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
This is totally non-sense. I shoot in the order of 20k photos a year, on average I use photoshop several hours a day (see http://silvernegative.com/ and I have looked at the Apple materials on Aperture.
I can assure you that Photoshop is not equivalent to Aperture. I would instead, say that Adobe Bridge is (which is a part of Adobe Photoshop CS2).
Many of the features present in Aperture are available in Photoshop's bridge (easy import of RAW, non-destructive editing, RAW processing). One of the great benefits of Aperture entering the market is healthy competion.
I will not, with what I have seen, replace photoshop with Aperture. Will I be happy using Aperture? Probably yes. Will I pay for it? US$500 is a lot of money for those extra features, and I will probably not buy it. But then again, I don't think that pro-am photographers are the intended market. We are more worried about buying glass than buying software to do our hobby.
Unless Aperture seriously competes with photoshop, it will end as a fringe application similar to Impress (who only Apple drones buy). There is already talk on the f-spot mailing list about Apereture features, so you might see them in a free software application soon.
Right, .... sort of.
As of yesterday, Apple offered two versions of the PowerBook series (at least the 15" and 12" or 17" too IIRC). The cheaper versions were at 1.5Ghz while the more expensive version was at 1.67Ghz.
In other words, they simply dropped the cheaper, only-barely slower versions.
i'm looking for a machine to last me for probably two to three years. it's likely i won't switch to the intel platform until the second generation and i bet a lot of other pros are waiting it out as well. ppc is a known quantity and familiarity and predicability are very important when you rely on your computer and third party apps to make a living. so i'll stick on ppc until i KNOW that all the issues are worked out on intel. a quad 2.5 machine is the perfect machine to tide me over until macintel gen 2.
This has nothing to do with adobe and photoshop.
This has everything to do with companies like Bibble Labs, Phase One, iView Multimedia who all make 'raw workflow' software.
For those of you who are new, or don't care, or don't use RAW workflow it's about the post processing that most enthusiast, semi-pro, and pros doin once the pictures are taken and before they're edited in Photoshop (if needed).
Photoshop has something included that has been showing up in the last few versions, they call it adobe camera raw but it is rasterized out of camera RAW and then you edit it like you would any other image.
What Aperture, and the others let you do is 'pre-process' your image to do lossless corrections to things such as white balance, color cast, cropping, etc. If you make any of these types of changes inside photoshop once you import in the RAW file you are doing it with data loss.
This is a step before photoshop, not a slap in the face and replacement.
This is condiments to the burger. The burger is much more filling than just the condiments, but the condiments aren't all that by itself
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I've been saving up for one final PowerMac generation, I figured that no 1st gen MacIntel will come close to a Quad G5, and besides, I'd probably want to have a good top-end PPC machine around even after the transition starts since it will be a while before native Intel apps get released.
BUT.. this top end Quad G5 configuration has me astonished, especially the +$1650 nVidia Quadro FX 4500. I was thinking of investing in a nice 30in Cinema Display and a QuadG5, for applications like FCP, Maya, Shake, and Motion. But I wonder if it's really worth spending that kind of money on a video card, I mean jeez, that card alone is almost as much as a basic dualcore-2Ghz G5 CPU! Is this card going to really give a performance boost to make it worth that kind of money? It's not like I'm going to do the fancy tricks this card is capable of, like stereographic LCD glasses, dual 30in screens, etc.
The other big question is quad processor support. I recall seeing the "Use X processors" option in the Maya prefs, but it wouldn't accept any number higher than 2 (of course, since there were only 2 processors). I guess I'll have to call Alias (or is it now Autodesk?) to ask them if Maya will support 4 processors in the G5, and if it's worth it to get the FX 4500 video card. I know that Apple will support quad processors in their own apps like FCP, but I wonder if third party apps will be updated to quad when they're already forced to deal with the MacIntel transition.
Another issue is the amount of space for expansion in the new CPUs. There are a few aftermarket kits to toss in up to 4 additional hard drives, in the space up front between the grille and the CPU area. But now it looks like there is much less space available, no room to squeeze in a nice 4 drive RAID. Damn. I was going to stick in 4 300Gb drives and a SATA RAID card, but now it looks like this will be impossible. I guess we will have to wait and see what some clever engineer can figure out how to squeeze into that space. Darn it, I want that option NOW, not later when they figure out how to do it. Oh well, you can't have it all.
Then there's the final issue: heat dissipation. I wonder how much heat these suckers kick out, especially with extra hard drives. My office is already baking from the hot exhaust of my dual-1Ghz MDD with 4 drives, I bet a similar quadG5 config really will kick out the heat and suck up the power. It's 60 degrees outside but I'm still running the air conditioning because without it, my CPU heats my tiny office up to about 90 degrees even under moderately light CPU use.
I think Apple can do better by creating a space for the graphics card's fan. I still don't understand why mobo manufacturers continue to include a slot where in most cases people have video card fans that render that slot useless.
Does anyone have specs on cooling? The previous Power Macintosh 2.7 required liquid cooling. Will the new dual core run cooler and require only fans?
I called the apple store to ask about whether the new video cards have cooling fans or just passive heat-sinks...the answer is that all of the video cards offered have cooling fans. The technical representative that I spoke to was not able to comment on how much noise these new machines make compared to the previous line. He said that they've only known about the new machines for a few hours, and it usually takes a few days for the developer notes to get to the techies that answer the phones.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...