thomas fitzgerald.net

There has been this rumor floating around for the past couple of months that Apple is planning to sell off its Pro Apps devision, namely Final Cut studio and Aperture. The rumor was dying down but then Robert Cringly over at PBS posted a fanciful story that Apple was planning to sell its pro apps so it could buy Adobe. Of course the idea that they need to ditch their own Applications to make way for Adobe’s is completely ridiculous. It’s doubtful if Apple could afford to buy Adobe even if it wanted to, and Apple’s competing Apps are, for the most part better than the Adobe Counterparts. Having said that I do think here could be benefits for both consumers and Apple if they did buy Adobe (putting an end to Adobe’s insane overseas pricing would be one benefit). I consider it unlikely but not totally beyond the realms of possibility. What is completely beyond the realms of possibility though is the idea that Apple plans to sell off its pro apps.

This all started when Apple announced that they weren’t going to be exhibiting at NAB this year. This sparked immediate and rampant speculation as to their motives. As I work in the Television post production Industry I have first hand experience of it. After the announcement I was having discussions with some of the people I know who work in the industry and the first chicken little reaction was that they must be planning to ditch Final Cut Pro so they can focus on the iPhone. (The iPhone pretty much gets the blame for everything these days) Of course it’s complete nonsense as they are two completely separate and independent devisions within Apple. Anyway, I’m sure discussions like this were being held by post production professionals across the globe. That in itself would have been enough to start the ball rolling, but then take those same professionals, and have them all congregate in Las Vegas under the one roof for a week and rampant speculation quickly becomes a rumor. All it takes is one person in that situation to make the jump from “I wonder are Apple selling off their pro apps” to “I heard that Apple are selling off their Pro Apps” in a hot convention center with several thousand video nerds and you have an instant scandal.

Such was the furor over this that Apple came out and firmly denied that this was to be the case. Mind you that didn’t stop Robert Cringly publishing his piece and multiple sites picking up his speculation and translating it to potential fact. This isn’t the first time this kind of water cooler chatter got out of hand about Apple either. Thanks to a wonderfully bad piece of attempted journalism by the now dead Think Secret, people had pronounced Aperture end of life and there were “rumors” that Apple was going to kill the project. Anyway, you can rest assured that with Final Cut pro’s 44% market share it’s not going to happen.

So why weren’t they at NAB this year and why has there been no major Final Cut updates considering they usually release a relatively big upgrade at NAB every year? I have a pretty good idea as to what’s going on, and the inspiration came, ironically enough from Adobe. When they made their stark warning at Photoshop World recently that they would need to migrate Photoshop’s code from carbon to cocoa in order to take the application to 64bit I realized that Apple was faced with the same dilemma. Final Cut Pro started out as an OS9 Application and has been building on that legacy code ever since. It’s actually pretty inefficient by todays standards too (for example it barely uses multiple processors), and it was only a matter of time before they would have to do a major re-write. Why now though you ask? Well, there is a growing trend in the high end of the industry towards 2K and 4K post production. This is basically even higher resolution than high definition and is used for cinema post production. Cameras like the Red One are pushing this way of working forward into the mainstream and because of the huge file sizes involved I suspect than in order to work efficiently Apple needs to go 64bit with Final Cut Pro.

The reason the weren’t at NAB was simply that they didn’t have anything to show this year. Their main competitor, Avid, was not there and it costs a lot of money to have a space as large as Apple’s usual booth so why waste the money when you’ve got nothing to show. From what I’ve heard from people at the show they might as well have been there anyway considering the amount of other booths showing Final Cut or using Apple technology.

So the upshot of all this is that there is no great conspiracy in action here. Apple is not selling their Pro Applications. Final Cut is not going away. the sky is not falling and the iPhone is not the root of all evil. Rest assured that if they are re-writing Final Cut the end result will be even better than ever. And still way better than Premiere.

[update: Added link to Apple's denial of the rumors]

[UPDATE: Fixed Broken Links]