Apple Dumps Most of Aperture Dev. Team

SuperMog2002 writes "An article over at Think Secret is reporting that Apple has fired much of the Aperture development team. The Shake and Motion team was assigned to work on Aperture's image processing pipeline for version 1.1. Apple has also dropped the price of Aperture from $499 to $299, and is offering those who purchased the program at $499 a $200 Apple store coupon." From the article: "Perhaps the greatest hope for Aperture's future is that the application's problems are said to be so extensive that any version 2.0 would require major portions of code to be entirely rewritten. With that in mind, the bell may not yet be tolling for Aperture; an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards."

Comments

Standards?

[suv4x4]

an entirely new engineering team could salvage the software and bring it up to Apple's usual standards.

For a reference, the "Apple's usual standards for software" are "the best application in the Universe" (tm), that's tought to achieve.

They might as well fire all of their Windows ports division as well, QuickTime/iTunes on Windows is a piece of cr*p.

"Dumps" not entirely accurate

[ThousandStars]

The Ars Technica Mac Achaia already has a discussion about the Aperture issue here, and the consensus seems to be that this is more likely a reorganization than a sign of Aperture becoming abandon-ware.

Before posting conspiracy theories and such, you may want to read what others have to say.

Re:"Dumps" not entirely accurate

[znu]

Mac rumors sites have made mistakes like this before. There was one famous case where they confidently predicted the iMac was being canceled, because some sources at the company which had the manufacturing contract reported that the contract wasn't being renewed. Of course, it turned out that was because Apple had signed a new production contract with someone else.

I suspect the discussion over at Ars is right, and this is really just a reorganization. A lot of the technologies Aperture uses (including RAW image processing) are actually operating system features, so it might make sense to fold the people working on that stuff into the OS development team. The article rather overstates Aperture's problems. I find it to be a very useful program. The RAW processing was never all that bad (at least for my camera), and got better with the 1.1 release. I seriously doubt the program would require major rewrites to 'fix', since there really isn't all that much wrong with it.

The article also sort of tries to spin Apple's price cut as evidence that maybe the app is in trouble, but I'd say it actually shows the opposite. If Apple didn't care anymore, they wouldn't have bothered. To me, the price cut says they're trying to pick up as many users as they can, in preparation for the battle with Adobe that we'll see when Lightroom is completed.

Aperture 1.1

[daveschroeder]

I don't think anyone's saying that Aperture 1.0 had some bugs and problems (as a 1.0 release of a MAJOR product), and the recently released major update, Aperture 1.1, addresses many of these (not to mention making the application Universal for PowerPC and Intel).

Apple may feel that Aperture's architecture needs to be completely retooled, but it's not going to kill one of its pro software products that has been out for mere months, especially one that was desired as much as Aperture. Apple just needs to figure out internally which teams are going to be responsible for ongoing development and/or retooling.

Yes, Aperture has had mixed reviews, but many people already love it and are basing their entire workflows on it. It's not like it's the incapable piece of utter shit Think Secret makes it out to be. (Gotta love Think Secret's sensationalism lately...must be bitter about becoming progressively more and more wrong about almost all of their pre-event predictions.)

Sign that Aperture isn't dead yet...

[bananaendian]

Just an observation: Apple's website's frontpage ad for the new 17" MacBookPro has Aperture on it's screen. If Aperture was so crap and dead as some are suggesting Apple woundn't use it in their advertising for their latest flagship product.