[alwa]

Final Cut Pro X has been available for purchase (at the same price, IIRC) for well over a decade now. Pro feathers were ruffled at the time they leapt from FCP7 to FCPX: the $299 price point was something like 1/4 of the going rate for its predecessors, was Apple planning to abandon its pros for the consumer market? Well. Here we are almost 15 years later, and if you paid the one-time price back then, you're still getting free updates today (at least on desktop). And you can still buy in with 299 2025 dollars, rather than 299 2011 dollars.

At the time, the common wisdom was that they'd go the same route as Adobe: you'd have to buy Final Cut X+1 in a couple years for another $299, and Final Cut X+2 a couple years after that... to their credit, that's not the way it's gone.

So that way, I imagine, all the film folks have a little more money to chuck at their high-powered Mac hardware budgets in the next refresh cycle instead... An evergreen Final Cut Pro license costs almost as much as 1TB of SSD from those guys!

[weinzierl]

That is true, but it is also true that FinalCut lost big time against DaVinci for all semi-professional users which are exactly FinalCut's main target group.

I'd argue that it is very likely that Final Cut X+1 was Apple's plan. It just did not pan out and they were busy with other things. Now they made the first step correcting that (or cutting the losses, depending how you want to see it).

[bredren]

I had thought a main problem for professional video editors w FC had to do with video editor UX philosophy. Something difficult to pivot away from.

I’m hand waving there because I’m not a pro but my neighbor is and I don’t recall the details.

But I’m curious how you see FC also lost in semi pro to Davinci specifically.

[josephg]

Davinci Resolve is free. At least, for the non studio version. (There’s a few studio only features, but almost everything is available in the free version of resolve). And a lot of people want to learn resolve anyway for color grading. Why not just edit in resolve too? Resolve studio is also quite cheap, given you buy it once and own it forever. Including updates.

I spent last week helping out at a short filmmaking course. The DP running it has used Final Cut for his entire career. But not a single student chose to edit their film using Final Cut. The class was split between resolve and premier pro. (Premier was chosen by a lot of people because it’s what they use at school, and they have a free licence to premier from their school while they’re studying.)

[weinzierl]

This, plus:

- The studio version of DaVinci is still affordable should you need it.

- DaVinci has many good tutorials

[embedding-shape]

+ purchasing any BMD camera and you usually get a "free" license of DaVinci :) That's how I got my license many moons ago.

Now BMD have "prosumer" cameras available too that doesn't cost half a liver, which the second-hand market seems flush with too, so you can grab really good hardware for "cheap", and get excellent software with it too as the license is movable across hosts :)

[bredren]

I'm surprised to hear the software moves with the hardware! This and the other comments help explain the spread.

[dbspin]

The 'cut' page in DaVinci specifically exists to replicate the FC editing UX.

It's an optional way of editing separate from the 'edit' tab.

[dostick]

Oh that’s where Cut comes from. I could never get used to edit in Cut screen.

[dbspin]

Agreed, I hate it.

[derefr]

> At the time, the common wisdom was that they'd go the same route as Adobe: you'd have to buy Final Cut X+1 in a couple years for another $299, and Final Cut X+2 a couple years after that... to their credit, that's not the way it's gone.

And that's despite Apple having zero interest in doing things that don't ultimately make them money.

I have a theory for how sales of these one-time-purchase yet indefinitely-updated apps happens to work out positively on Apple's balance sheet, while it doesn't for most other large players right now.

And that's that, due to Apple's vertical integration (they make the hardware, they make the OS that runs on the hardware, they make the apps that run on the OS) — and due to these apps only targeting their own OSes+hardware, with no consideration of portability to other platforms — a lot (like 90+%) of the "enablement" work for these apps ends up time-budgeted as OS work, rather than apps work.

Or, I guess, to be more charitable, you could say that Apple's engineers develop first-party apps not just to sell them, but at least in part to drive the development of the OS as a developer platform. You could even describe the OS frameworks as the product, and the apps themselves as the byproduct. (In that lens, the only reason FCP would cost anything at all is to avoid accusations of anti-competitive behavior.)

[akd]

The core of Apple's success has always been to capture the cultural leaders. Artists, musicians, journalists, etc. have used Apple at much higher percentages than the general public.

Now that the iPhone made Apple much more of mainstream company, it's harder to do -- what does it mean to focus on cultural leaders when 90% of American teens have an iPhone? But in the 15 years since Steve Jobs' death they have still been doing a decent job of it.

The company

[dwaite]

One beancounter way that I think has been used to justify the strategy - FCX and the like are currently also sold as paid upgrades at time of machine purchase. This is another way to bump up the average price of the computers outside BTO.

It also frames the cost of the software differently, as part of a much larger purchase and as enabling other uses for the new machine. I suspect this is a fairly large sales channel for the software.

That makes me wonder how this new suite strategy (as well as other subscription efforts like AppleCare One) play into the purchase experience going forward.