[burrokeet]

Apple has the resources to own a big piece of the pro media market too - Mac Pros, Final Cut Pro, Color, Shake, Final Cut Server, Logic, XSan, OS X Server, etc. - they keep systematically destroying these for some reason.

I think Apple's corporate culture and ego, however, doesn't lend itself at all to this market - this market requires communication and feedback between developers and end-users, and roadmaps of upgrades and bug fixes and features, all things that Apple doesn't do for the most part.

All in all it is a shame in any event - I had a friend who runs a video editing department with 20 editors, and they literally just completed a very large Final Cut Server install a few weeks before FCPX (not Final Cut Server compatible) and the very sudden EOL of Final Cut Server. Of course it will work fine for a while, until hardware/OS render it obsolete/incompatible, but what about bug fixes, support, etc?

[michaelbuckbee]

Apple's margins and revenue are much better for consumer technologies (iOS) than for their pro lines (which certainly explains at least some of their reasoning behind all but outright abandoning the Pro market).

Source: http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/26/apple-has-moved-on/

[burrokeet]

I understand that, but they can still do Pro as well w/o hurting their bottom line - plus IMHO there are LOTS of implicit and indirect benefits to Apple overall by having the Pro community still being Apple evangelists.

On the other side of it, if they are not really going to do Pro, then just don't do it all and stop mucking around and pretending - sell off the line to someone who can handle it properly - what they did by EOLing Shake was terrible terrible terrible

[jinushaun]

I don't know... Photoshop didn't sell Macs, but iPods and iPhones did. The time and energy is takes for them to produce pro software versus the return on investment is probably too low. It's such a small market, relative to general consumers.