Slashdot Mirror
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.