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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."
My employer produces some for-profit software which runs on Linux. We specify that it runs on RH 9 or somesuch as a basic ass-covering move. We test on that and release it. It does happen to work just on the majority of linuxes we try, but it greatly reduces the load on our tech support people if we get a call saying "it doesn't work on crappy-distro-0.9" and we can tell them it's their own damn problem. And really I'd expect any decent Linux admin to be able to install any missing libraries or version problems if our binaries don't happen to Just Work out of the box. But it usually works anyway and there's no trouble.
Start Running Better Polls
When I first read this, I thought it was a joke. After checking the System Requirements page, I'm absolutely amazed.
Has Apple done prepackaged software for GNU/Linux before? Why Shake? (I'm guessing the type of customer who wants Shake demanded it, but on the other hand, when has Apple used that as a reason to produce it, rather than "encourage" users to switch to Mac)? Wouldn't those same customers want a Windows version?
Well done Apple... I think... any chance of an official version of Quicktime or iTunes while you're at it?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It's not fully clear just how the price structure has changed. Nobody is going to buy just ONE Shake workstation, usually it's backed by at least a small render farm with Shake client renderers. A few years back, I went to an Apple seminar about Shake, they said the $3000 package came with licenses for one workstation and 5 client machines for rendering. It looked like any smart configuration would be one big Mac workstation and 5 commodity Linux render stations. I just checked the Apple website and now they're offering a 5 user volume license (including Linux workstations) for $129 per system. So I am guessing that they dropped the price on the main package and unbundled the extra licenses for the 5 render machines so those are sold separately. Of course the volume licenses are for full workstation usage, but I suspect most people will use them for small render farms. But I'm only speculating here.
But still, there's a huge incentive to switch away from Linux to Mac render farms, Shake supports distributed rendering through QMaster, which AFAIK only runs on Mac, and is totally free. I've seen hacks to use QMaster to manage Linux Maya render farms, but I believe that's because the Maya renderer specifically wrote hooks to QMaster even on their Linux clients. And you still need license management on large Maya render farms. Nobody gives out free render farm licenses.. except Apple's QMaster.
There is no possible way to justify software costing 3 Grand.
I'm staring down a possible (though not likely...we'll lease) $170,000 bill for a full suite of Cadence Allego apps.
Oh if only it was only "3 Grand."
I'm not sure how "old" you are referring to. Apple seems to follow a pattern of lowering the price of the pro apps once hardware fast enough to run it becomes cheap enough that it is common place. They certainly did that with the Final Cut suite. By reducing the cost as the potential market gets bigger, they may even increase profits, before you even consider what payoff results from increased marketshare.
That said, it also seems to be Apple's modus operandi to put powerful software into as many hands as possible. As far as I can tell, Apple bought Logic for the express purpose of gutting it and repackaging it as Garage Band. I mean, you got to give them props for that: taking an (expensive) production quality piece of software, giving it a nice UI, and then giving it away practiacally for free. Now if they would just buy protools.
I think Aperture is a fluke, though. They rushed to get it out the door to put pressure on Adobe when the software should not have passed QA. While nice when it works, the software has serious flaws. I think the price reduction is due primarily to the fact that the software isn't worth what they were charging. People who bought the software before the price drop were given a partial refund. I am quite sure that is NOT how apple planned that to go. You certainly aren't going to see many Shake customers getting $2500 checks from Apple.
Read this post (also here). I quote: "Apple will no longer be selling maintenance for Shake and no further software updates are planned".
Apple will not be making the base product more stable, they're dropping it completely, in favour of some future product (apparently due around 2008). While the price drop will doubtless expand the market into the low end in the short term, the high-end users started their move away from Shake the moment Apple bought it (at least, those that wanted to keep running Linux and not Mac OS). Perhaps I didn't stress enough how important support is to high-end customers. Now the end of the road is clear, nobody is going to want to invest significantly in the Shake platform - including major plugin vendors.
I don't doubt Shake's technology will live on, but whatever Apple is working on will be a new product, and will not be released for Linux. Since something like 90% of Shake licences were Linux (which isn't even getting the price drop), most users will not see this as a good thing.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?