Lots of people have already left Premiere and AE for Resolve. If Apple offers Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives it will remove the need to pay for the Adobe subscription for a lot of Mac users (that will probably be the case for me).
I'm not a fan of Adobe at all but I used to do a lot of work in Photoshop. The top features for nearly 30 years have not been the destructive editing portion of the app but the composition tools.
By composition tools I mean the layer, channel, and layer effects tools. Layer effects/adjustments and masks make for easy compositing and live readjustment. It's the live nature of these features which is helpful because you're having to constantly refine the look of things based on a client's feedback. Photoshop manages to handle all sorts of layering while still providing color correct output.
It's not glamorous but it's important and most supposed Photoshop competitors over the decades fail at it. Some tools do many of the same things but I don't know of apps that can do everything Photoshop does it that space.
It's fine to snipe at Photoshop users that only have very basic needs for which Photoshop is overkill. I don't do anything graphic design anymore so Pixelmator and Affinity Photo have my needs covered. I purchased both and they've been well worth the money. But if you want to actually go after professional Photoshop users, not just incidental users, you really need 100% of Photoshop's functionality. Otherwise you'll miss a must-have feature that some designer requires for their workflow.
As much as I've enjoyed Pixelmator it's not even 50% of Photoshop's capabilities. It's not even on par with the decades old Photoshop 6.
I agree. The feature that keeps me using Illustrator vs all the other vector graphics apps is group isolation. Nobody has implemented this properly and it's a deal breaker since my vector workflow relies on groups instead of using layers.
OTOH it could very well be that Apple intends to invest into Pixelmator and make it a pro app.
Every time they try to bump me up to a higher plan I tell them that I don't need it any more and it's too expensive and they give me stupid deals. I think currently I'm paying $25 a month but they refunded me the first month where I accidentally lapsed back onto the "real" pricing, and gave me the next four months for free. So basically $175 for the year. I'll probably cancel it next time it comes up though, I basically only use it for complicated PDF stuff, and I'm sure I can find something else to do that.
You just tell them that you don't find it valuable and if you've been a customer for long enough they will bend over backwards to keep you. I used to buy several copies of CS3 and CS4 back when they came on DVD and I'm still using the same account, and moved to subscriptions with three seats as soon as they came in. So my LTV is probably fairly compared to a normal "consumer" account where they've only ever subscribed. Obviously compared to an enterprise account it's nothing, but if you're buying enterprise licensing I imagine you're getting it for less than $30 per seat per month.
yet building an adobe alternative could be daunting. Even for Apple. Adobe products have been polished for decades. IMHO Taking on Adobe is as hard as a another company taking on Apple by building apple like products.
Calling Adobe apps polished is a hot take. Adobe products are houses that have been added onto until the learning curve on their apps is similar to that of taking up playing a pipe organ.
Weird, because the overlap between After Effects and Resolve is insignificantly small. Anyone using AE for post-processing only has been in the wrong app for years already.
Some people may not be familiar with the fact that BlackMagic Design incorporated its motion graphics and VFX package, Fusion, into Resolve a few years ago. It's an incredibly powerful compositing package, though its node-based architecture may present a nontrivial learning curve for people accustomed to the pre-comping workflow of AE.
Do you have a source for folks doing motion graphics with Resolve? Always curious to hear more data points on this. The impression I have from reading online is I'd be shocked if they had over 1% of the market, but it's purely anecdotal.
Sorry no data points, just what I've seen first hand.
Everyone around me has moved on from Premiere and Final Cut to Resolve.
AE is objectively a more powerful solution for motion graphics than Fusion. But OTOH it's super convenient to have it all in a single app and for many projects (probably most video projects) you don't need more than Fusion.
If you don't mind sharing I'd love to hear which industry you're in. What I typically hear is advertising is Premiere, Hollywood is Avid, and Resolve is taking over prosumer/smaller shops (although still AE for any remotely sophisticated motion graphics/2D work). And Nuke for VFX compositing. I've actually never heard of Fussion itself being being popular for anything actually, it seems like it's not sophisticated enough to compete with Nuke, and not a great fit for the motion graphics/2D stuff that AE excels at.
Personally I'm mostly in web dev but I work with design shops, agencies, etc. I also do audio production, photography, and some video. But you're right that I'm in contact with small creative shops (less than 50 people).
> What I typically hear is advertising is Premiere, Hollywood is Avid
Yes, for editing, but AFAIK Resolve is quickly becoming the king for grading.
> it seems like it's not sophisticated enough to compete with Nuke, and not a great fit for the motion graphics/2D stuff that AE excels at
It's true but OTOH many projects don't need all that sophistication and you can't beat the convenience of doing it all inside a single project/app (editing, grading, vfx, motion, sound).
Adobe is probably popping open a champagne for every cross-platform Creative Cloud competitor that gets mothballed with Apple's capital. If Microsoft acquired Affinity next, the Adobe offices would look like a disco ball for a week.
"graphics people" aren't the core people using Adobe's products though. As evidenced by the terrible designs people keep cranking out using photoshop. And by the huge market for terrible-design-by-numbers Canva.com
I guess it depends where you work. In CAD and 3D animation work, Windows machines outnumber the Macs I see 10:1. In smaller shops this ratio probably flips around but Adobe (and others) have a large and captive contingent of Windows users to profit off.
We all live in our own bubbles. I never saw a tech person using MacOS, it's always Windows or Linux - I assume that's not your experience either (and I only know a few people using MacOS privately). That probably mostly depends on the country one resides in.
Well, the view laid out here also corresponds to actual statistical reality: About 29% of developers reported using Macs (of any kind) as of a few years ago, it's not even close to "most", as some HN visitors would have you believe. The bubble is very real.
Statistically speaking there was no "most developers use this", but the closest OS offering was Windows at 45%.
Given Apple's poor performance on the OS side the past few years I'm not sure the hardware has managed to keep users on their side anyway; they even lost DHH very publicly not that long ago... So the numbers might be even worse now.
Edit:
In the latest StackOverflow survey 31.8% of developers report using MacOS (for personal and professional use), 57.9%/47.6% for Windows (personal/professional use). So both MacOS and Windows are eating into Linux's share at the moment, with Windows offering them to instead run Linux inside of Windows.
I've been forced to use Windows in the creative graphics world. Back long ago in the dark ages, I did layout/graphics for a 'zine that was all done on Windows NT with Adobe software delivered to press on a Syquest disk.
More recently (2017ish), I was on Windows 7 for another stint at graphics.
Maybe I've just had the misfortune that others have been able to avoid??
Really? I worked in Hollywood for many years and all the color grading and photo editing was done on PCs with Sony professional color grading monitors, which weren't supported right on Macs.
Pixelmator could never compete with Adobe. Their expertise is on Mac and until now they didn't have the resources to make a big product like Photoshop or Illustrator (at some point they shared the idea of making a vector graphics product but it was abandoned).
Another point is macOS has a significant market share in the creative industries. Personally I know zero designers/illustrators using Windows. My hunch is Mac users represent probably 50% or more of Adobe users.
Lots of people have already left Premiere and AE for Resolve. If Apple offers Photoshop and Illustrator alternatives it will remove the need to pay for the Adobe subscription for a lot of Mac users (that will probably be the case for me).