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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."
There is no possible way to justify software costing 3 Grand. Even at 500 dollars, I will just go and download it on mininova.
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.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
Why is Apple wasting development resources on the tiny number of people who bought their flaky Intel Macs?
Apple's market-share continues to slide lower and lower each quarter. Wasting time fiddling around with software for a niche segment of the tiny Mac market it silly.
Another Trollaxor.com exclusive!
All Mac users, until recently, were destined for Hell. If you owned or used a Macintosh, you were getting a one-way ticket to Sheol free of charge. But thanks to Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and Mac Messiah, the Mac community maintained their grace. The dark part of the story, however, is that Jobs himself is the one who put Mac users' souls in danger to begin for the sole purpose of market share. It was Steve's gamble that made Apple what it is today, but things weren't always so sunny. And it all began during Apple's Dark Ages.
A Deal with the Devil
December 20, 1996 was a date fateful not only for Apple but also for the souls of 25 million Mac users. At this point, Apple's next-generation operating system, Copland, had fizzled and Apple purchased NeXT for its OS. Mac users and the rest of the industry waited with eager ears for news. By August of that year, it was clear: Jobs had taken back his company and was simplifying everything, focusing on the G3 and pushing Mac OS 8 through while work on a new OS derived from OPENSTEP began. Jobs slashed many projects at Apple. But, as Apple's market share had fallen to 3.3%, Jobs began new projects in the shadows. And as 1997 drew to a close, he put one of them into motion.
After weeks of meticulous planning, Jobs called an emergency board meeting. As the board members arrived, Jobs drew a magic circle and muttered in Old Latin. In a ritual that CFO Fred Anderson described as scarier than losing a billion dollars in one quarter, Jobs had summoned the Devil. Many of the board fell ill and had to leave while Jobs and Satan haggled over the future of the company, but by the end of the meeting Steve presented a three-year plan to save Apple. After thanking Satan, he flew home in his private jet. Jobs would later have to replace most of the board, now demented or ill from their encounter with the prince of darkness, with his cronies from NeXT.
First Sprouts of the Demon Seed
The first and most obvious sign of something devilish was at MacWorld Boston later that Summer. Steve Jobs announced the departure of Gil Amelio, a new board of directors, and a $500 million deal with Microsoft that featured future Microsoft Office updates. It wasn't hard to believe the Devil was behind this deal. And many in attendance at the Boston MacWorld that year said they could make out distinctly goatish features in Bill Gates's face during his address to the audience. Little did the world know how close to the truth they were.
Several months later, Apple debuted the iMac. And it was a hit. The iMac revolutionized industrial design, got Apple's feet back in the consumer market, and most importantly garnered massive media attention. Indeed, the iMac became a thing to remember about 1998. Within another year the iBook and the Blue White Power Mac G3 debuted, which were also hits with their stylish looks. Satan and Jobs's plan was coming along nicely so soon and they looked ahead to newer, faster systems and in late '99 the seemingly impossible happened: Motorola had completed and released a new PowerPC core without the help of IBM.
Granted, the PowerPC G4 was just a revision of the G3, but it was groundbreaking at the time and gave Mac users a huge speed-boost and something to brag about to their Pentium II-using coworkers. But then Motorola stalled, even with the Devil working behind the scenes, and the G4 was stuck at 500 MHz for 18 months in what Mac users called The 500 MHz Fiasco. This in turned caused Apple's board to see a weakening in Satan's side of the bargain with Apple and they began to mull litigation against Satan for breach of contract.
Devil Inside
As the 500 MHz Fiasco loomed, Apple was hard at work renegotiating with Satan. Since Satan's efforts had flagged, Apple pushed
Great. First we had people who thought they could edit (FCP/iMovie), then people who thought they could design motion graphics (Motion), now we'll have people who think they know how to composite.
Am I the only one that thinks this is a bad idea?
Slashdot: where repeating an article in a post is "+5 Insightful"
And to stay on topic, it's good to see more and more of apple's prices come out of the stratosphere. Now how about dropping that 20" cinema HD display to match dell's $400 on a similar screen.