Apple Smells Blood in the Water

In just the last year and a half, Apple launched Final Cut on iPad and Final Cut Camera, updated Final Cut Pro to a new version for the first time in 13 years, and moved to purchase Pixelmator. As Adobe’s public perception continues to struggle, Apple is making moves to take advantage.

Through the 2010s, Apple didn’t do much on the software front. Sure, it had Final Cut Pro X but the move from version 7 required a complete rewrite of the program’s code. The benefit of this was marked improvement in performance. The downside was a gutting of the app’s features. The negative response to Final Cut Pro X was so strong that Apple lost a large chunk of the professional video editing market and it has since never made up that ground. Most moved to Adobe Premiere which over the next decade would solidify itself as a major player in the professional space, both in small teams and feature-length productions.

But public perception of Adobe has dipped in recent years. The switch to a subscription plan has left many editors dissatisfied, especially considering how inflexible Adobe has been with its plans — the lack of an a la carte option leaves creative professionals either the option to only edit photos or pay for a large number of apps they’ll never use if they want to get Premiere Pro. Performance has also been a regular complaint across Adobe’s ecosystem with Lightroom and Premiere Pro the focus of most of the consternation. While Adobe says it prioritizes performance with each feature drop, little has changed in the wider perception of Adobe’s business model.

Adobe’s focus on enterprise clients along with the push into AI has resulted in quarter-over-quarter record profits for the software juggernaut, however. And as I’ve said before, no one can touch Adobe when it comes to fast and wide support of camera RAW profiles. So despite vocal complaints from the creator community, a lack of alternative options and regular feature updates have kept Adobe in pole position.

Apple’s recent strong push back into creative applications comes at an opportune time, then. Photographers want a good Lightroom competitor and video editors still using Premiere are looking elsewhere if they haven’t already switched to DaVinci Resolve.

Poor performance (perceived or otherwise), an annual pain point for Adobe, has been a thing of the past for Apple’s software since the move to in-house silicon. The M-series chips have been a boon for the company and their power combined with in-house software development has resulted in unbeatable performance inside the Mac ecosystem. All that it needs to thrive now is more power and more options.

Now it’s getting both.

Final Cut Pro 11 brings features that compete favorably against DaVinci Resolve and positions it as a powerful and easier-to-use alternative to both Blackmagic’s offering and Premiere Pro. It has a full ecosystem that no other company can touch — it’s the only company that makes capture device hardware, the AI that performs background computation to overcome the limitations of small camera sensors and lenses, the chips that power that AI, and the software used to edit videos on and the computers used to do so. It has in-depth knowledge and full control of the entire pipeline for video.

Once Apple finishes its acquisition of Photomator, it will have the exact same pipeline in place for photos. The company has a Vision for the future of photography and is putting the pieces in place to support it.

When Apple shuttered development of Aperture, there were rumors it did so because it entered into a gentleman’s agreement with Adobe to give Lightroom the space it needed to take over the photography software industry. That worked, and Adobe applications ran great on Apple computers.

Then a few years ago, Adobe started courting Windows aggressively. The company showed up at Microsoft events, touted its performance on Windows, and pushed harder into the PC space. Just this year, Adobe and Microsoft further cozied up to each other with a partnership with Microsoft Advertising. Full tinfoil hat speculation here, but Apple saw this as a betrayal of its agreement the decade prior. Adobe was a regular part of Apple’s WWDC events for years but hasn’t been on stage since 2018. Over the past few years where Adobe has struggled to win in the war of public perception, Apple has ramped up its efforts to return to form.

Perhaps Apple’s leadership thought to itself, if Adobe wasn’t going to put Apple users first, then Apple was going to do it.

Image credits: Elements of header photo licensed via Depositphotos.