Pixiq

With Apple's radical drop in the price of Aperture, Apple has not only propelled their game-changing photographic tool into the number-one grossing application on the App Store, they've also yet again told Adobe that they can kiss off.

Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece, based on my many years of working in the technology industry. I've got no insider information about Apple's stated or internal goals with Aperture's price drop.

That disclaimer aside, it's pretty clear that Apple didn't drop the price of Aperture because they're hurting financially. (In one of the more amusing forum posts about the price drop someone claimed it's because Apple has too many copies of Aperture—Uh huh.I'm sure somewhere Apple has a warehouse full of download copies they're dying to move. That virtual product takes up a lot of shelf space.)

In the early days of the Mac's life unit sales were determined by how many pieces of software were sold by Adobe or Microsoft. Adobe's powerful design apps were the primary tool of the creative and as a result, people would buy Macs for the sole purpose of working with Photoshop or Illustrator.

That wasn't really a problem though because relatively aggressive upgrade pricing for Photoshop and the new features added each revision made the upgrades a no-brainer. As the Mac got more powerful so too did Photoshop and each rev would pick up the speed with which Photoshop tasks could be performed. (One memorable keynote I attended showed off the speed of Photoshop running on the Mac vs. the same Actions on a Windows box as a demonstration of the power of the Apple solution.)

Over the years though, Adobe put so many features into Photoshop that the program became top-heavy and even Adobe big-wigs admit that the program is bloated. In 2007 Adobe's John Nack opined that Adobe needed to make some large, sweeping changes to the program.  Instead, Adobe added more features, pushed out a few more version of Creative Suite and required users to pay significant fees to upgrade, offering relatively little in return. For the Mac user the upgrade path was particularly painful with Adobe dragging their feet on Intel support and 64-bit support. Apple really doesn't like it when a company makes it harder to use their products—and the fact that the Windows version of CS4 ran in 64-bit while Mac users languished in 32-bit didn't endear Adobe with any Mac customer or with Apple.

When Apple released Aperture, many industry insiders were taken by surprise. We'd expected Apple to release a Photoshop killer but what we got was a whole new thing—one program to combine all the facets of photographic management? Why had no one thought of this before? Just a few days before Aperture launched I was teaching a successful workflow seminar that taught the five-or-six applications you had to master to perform the same activities.

A funny thing happened over time—it turned out that Aperture was Apple's Photoshop killer. Once Aperture was installed on my Mac my use of Photoshop dropped around 95%, and I wasn't alone.

Adobe raced to catch up with Apple, announcing a beta of Lightroom after Aperture was out the door. They too were caught off guard and spun an in-development application into the Aperture competitor. Their secret weapon was the Photoshop branding and the availability of a Windows version. I think it's safe to say that Lightroom is the software to own for the Windows-based photographer. But that's also like saying that a flotation device is the accessory for the passenger of an airplane in the ocean. If you're in that position you're already doing something wrong.

When Aperture dropped to $199 we saw a huge uptick in the number of photographers using the program. There is a good deal of price sensitivity among many photographers and the drop in price was welcome. Adobe, for some reason, decided to keep Lightroom 3 at the same $299 of their previous version.

The drop in price of Aperture 3 to $79 comes at an auspicious time in the Mac's history. Apple sales are up, iOS device sales break every record in the technology world, and Apple's infrastructure of interoperability between programs in iLife, iWork and the iOS is a real winner. See how difficult it is to get photos from Lightroom onto your iPhone—or even send them in email—and you'll see what I mean.

Meanwhile Adobe is promoting the use of Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop as a conjoined pair. At full-retail that's a $700 combination. What Apple is offering with the new Mac App Store is a combination of Aperture ($79) and Pixelmator 2.0 (one of my all time favorites, 80% of Photoshop at $29.99) as a one-two punch that comes out to be less than $110.

Apple essentially is telling Adobe that the days of charging customers for successive iterations of feature-heavy software is over. The full—and permanent—this isn't a sale price as some forums have postulated—version of Aperture is currently $220 less than Lightroom. That it also happens of offer book making, better slideshow creation, GPS support, face recognition and a host of other tools not available for Lightroom users is gravy.

Even those of us who swear by Aperture often point at a few Lightroom tools with envy—the consensus is that lens-correction and noise-reduction are stronger on Lightroom. (Personally I'm not a fan of lens correction, but I do like noise-reduction.) The problem Lightroom has is that these features are likely not worth $220 more to the photographer, especially when Aperture has so many additional features, and when it's significantly easier for Aperture to add lens correction in the future than for Lightroom to add a custom book making tool.

The shopping experience of the App Store is hard to beat as well. It took me more than 20 minutes (not including download times, which vary based on location and 'net provider) to purchase, Install and get Lightroom authorized on my Mac. It also ook the use of an Adobe account (which I didn't have) plus filling in shipping and billing info.

The whole process with Aperture takes a mouse click and the Apple ID I have already for music, iOS apps and my MobileMe account.

Apple has realized that we now live in a world where many customers will jump at something based on price point—a look at the non-used apps I've paid for for my iPhone because they were "only a dollar" is testament to that. An $80 price point to someone who just bought a brand new SLR is a no-brainer and once a customer sees what Aperture can do, it's game over for Lightroom for that user.

Finally, Apple's aggressive pricing for Aperture has moved it to the top grossing app list because there's a huge demand for photographic tools and clearly the Apple solution has traction on the Apple-run store. For customers new to the Mac platform, the pricing and positioning of the app are not only great deals, but they're an indication that Apple's understood the need to delivery highly focused solutions to problems at a price the customer can afford.

It's really likely that there's an upper-management-level feud between Apple and Adobe, largely over the issue of Flash on the iOS devices so there's a chance that Apple's move is simply their way of showing Adobe that they've got the muscle to do what they want, and has nothing to do with the life of the photographer. In that case, this is a hell of a display of muscle. In either case, it signals, I think, the beginning of the end for high-priced niche-focused software. And that's just good for everyone.