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Apple Releases Shake 4.1, Drops Price To $499
chasingporsches writes "Today, Apple released the long-awaited Universal Binary version of Shake, their high-end compositing application. Its new version is 4.1 and is available from their online store or as a crossgrade from version 4.0 for $49. The price of Shake has been dropped significantly, from $2999 to $499. (Educational version is $249.) The minimum system requirements imply that this could run on any new Mac, including the iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Pro, and MacBook, as well as older PowerPC-based Macs."
It looks as though Apple is really going for the jugular in terms of wanting market share. The "old" Apple would have kept the price high and raked in the profits, the "new" Apple price hardware and software keenly (still with a slight premium if you don't want the h/w extras that come with a Mac), but still far cheaper than they used to be.
:-)
So Aperture got a price reduction, Shake has just dropped through the floor, and the machines are competitively priced... I was quoting "old" and "new" above because the guard hasn't really changed, but it seems the rules of engagement have been given a bit of a shake-up. I like the "new" Apple better, bodes well for things to come
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
You aren't exactly the target market for Apple to sell shake to. This isn't a home user software package - it's a high end pro package. And with that high end pro price tag comes high end pro service. A production shop that actually needs this kind of software to do real work will gladly pay a couple grand for a software package for the support that comes along with it. Plus, when you're using hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computers to do your editing, shake doesn't look so expensive anymore.
Let's look again at your "no possible way to justify" bullshit statement. If I develop a game, say Sims 2, I might sell a couple of million copies. At 50 bucks a copy, that's a healthy profit. If I develop, say, a motion compositing program used by animators and effects people, there might only be a couple of thousand people who even have any desire to use such functionality. I need to charge a lot more money to even recoup the costs of writing the software, let alone making a profit.
Economics of scale is a bitch.
There is no possible way to justify software costing 3 Grand.
Sure there is, it's called "the market."
If people are willing to pay that price, it's justified.
Even at 500 dollars, I will just go and download it on mininova.
You're not their target market. I don't really think they care if you download it, since all it's likely to do is influence your buying decisions in the future (you or someone like you). However, a production studio of any size and legitimacy would not risk their entire business just to save $500 or $3000 on software.
Expensive software is exactly why people pirate stuff anyway. Why dont people learn this?
Why should they have to "learn this" when they are making money selling it at the prices they choose?
Just because you can't afford it or won't pay it doesn't mean no one's buying it.
Typical Slashdot user myopia. "If I'm not doing it, no one is!"
If you sell your stuff cheaper, people will actually BUY it.
Yeah, why not give it away for free and make your profits up in volume?!
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Yeah, because it's not like you can connect a 30" monitor to a macbook or anything...
Expensive software, at least the kind that people use to make money with, is expensive for the most part because the seller is trying to capture some fraction of the revenue you will make from using it. If you are downloading it from mininova you most likely aren't trying to make a buck off it. In that case, a smart vendor probably looks the other way at that kind of piracy because it increases the user base at no real cost.
It's not a 1337 thing, it's a business thing. When powerful software gets into the hands of the untrained, the trend seems to be that it lowers the value of the services of people who do know what they are doing.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that people will get a chance to use Shake (and software like it). But look at the trend in the design world. As the barrier to entry is lowered, so is the quality of work as well as the value of that work (over the entire industry).
I can't tell you how many times I've heard agencies say "We don't need to use a post house, we have Final Cut Pro now." Only they can't attract the tallent or experience that a post house has. Taken one step further, there was a client of an agency we work with who decided to get FCP and some cameras and drop the agency all together. Only now their commercials are stuck with a 4-year-old campaign (that's starting to look dated), their tallent looks like he's aged about 15 years because of poor lighting, and the editing and graphics are lacking.
I'm not saying the price drop in Shake is entirely bad, just that it will bring in more people who think they know what they're doing, when really they have no idea. And suddenly the professionals who have been using it for quite some time look like they're gouging their clients because some kid in his mom's basement can get the same tools.
Oh, and to anyone who says "Hey, your business model should be changing to fit the market." That's not the issue, it's that the market thinks our services should be cheaper because Timmy, the VP's nephew can do the same thing because he has a computer with FCP/Shake/Photoshop/whatever. They for some reason don't realize that experience and training go a long way.
Slashdot: where repeating an article in a post is "+5 Insightful"
We also had a lot of people who were quite capable of editing, designing motion graphics and compositing, who couldn't afford to produce a film before Apple brought the capabilities of million-dollar systems down into an under-$3K package. Get over yourself, you snob.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...and to think, you were marked as "friend."
See my post above. If people know what they are doing, great! We need more tallent out there. The issue comes in when people think that a tool makes the artist; when people think "hey, I can get Shake now. That's all I need!" and never follow up with either getting training, or getting beyond the basics and labeling themselves as composite artists/designers/editors.
Let's move the example a little closer to home. Take web design. It is very cheap to design and host web sites now. How many times have you seen sites and thought "who the hell designed/coded this?" Chances are, it's someone who has got the tools, never learned to use them, never read a book on design or coding, labeled themselves as a web developer/designer, and charged far less than any professional or even semi-professional designer/coder would have. Hey, I like to tinker with web design/programming too. I just don't announce myself to the world as a web developer/designer.
Slashdot: where repeating an article in a post is "+5 Insightful"
Even at 500 dollars, I will just go and download it on mininova.
Why would you do that? You clearly don't know what Shake is, or who uses it, or why it costs what it does. What use would you have for it?
No they didn't. And, really truly it doesn't matter. The price drop here is to try to attract users of other software, like Autodesk Discreet Flame or the Avid DS-Nitris. The former runs about $80,000 for a full workstation and the latter is $125,000.
Apple here is unbundling render farm licenses and providing potential users with a look-see that is designed to sell Macintosh computers. The Mac version works better with Apple's Motion, so you can see that this is being marketed at the hobbyist and the very small studio with lots of time to render (on one machine, rather than a farm).
The high end motion picture and feature people who are working at film resolution totally don't care about a relatively minor price drop like this. They're willing to pay what they're willing to pay to get their job done. Is it cheaper than film processing? Yes? OK, let's invest. They don't care if it's cheaper now, they care that their visual effects artist knows the application. And they'll be buying whatever their VFX artist knows (and recommends).
So you can see this in two ways:
Apple is selling hardware by reducing the Mac-only cost.
Apple is trying to seed more people who know the application into the stream of up-and-coming VFX artists
Either way looks good for Apple.
Disclosure: I use Avid's DS-Nitris for compositing for a national television network in the United States.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Expensive software is exactly why people pirate stuff anyway. Why dont people learn this? If you sell your stuff cheaper, people will actually BUY it.
That is complete nonsense. People will pirate if they can do so easily. It is as simple as that. As you make piracy more complicated, sales rise. That is why there is a thriving successful industry offering software copy protection even though the security is easily defeated by a small number of more technically capable users. The latter are irrelevant.
An example. I once worked on commercial software that was bundled with a college textbook. It was well regarded software used in the industry. We were nice and didn't use copy protection. The academic version was US$15 with the coupon shrinkwrapped to the textbook. At numerous campus bookstores the software sales volume was 10% of the book despite being required for classwork. The next quarter we had an upgraded version and used one of the lowest cost software based security products available. The sales volume increased to 90% that of the book despite there being no shortage of crack programs. Sorry, but low price doesn't work, copy protection software does.