The strangest thing for me reading this is that, well, I loved Aperture. I used it loyally from v1 until long after it was EOL'd. I spent thousands of hours in it, and it really fit my ideal workflow.
There was a lot of functionality/crap in there that I did not use, a lot of functionality was hidden away behind context menus and a lot of promised features around integration with plugins and 3rd party never really materialized, but in terms of core function it was a total workhorse.
Apple ultimately went to great lengths to purge it from existence, even for those of us with paid licenses who'd been told (or at least safely presumed) that we'd be able to install it on new machines via the app store, even if it wasn't available for purchase. In reality, they removed the binary from the cache. At one point, I went through a ridiculously elaborate process of obtaining a certain kind of physical license from eBay and spent hours emailing random Apple employees - likely some of the folks mentioned in this story - getting them to make exceptions and pull favours to make it possible for me to install it one last time before Catalina pulled the rug out for good.
Same here. I never found a system that fit the way I wanted to work as well as Aperture did, so I quit bothering to drag around my DSLR. Then I quit bothering to offload pics from my phone. Then I quit bothering to take them in the first place.
Which is all a shame because I loved photography for a couple decades, and now I have small kids and I’m sure I’ll regret it, but it’s just such a pain in the ass to do these days if I don’t want my entire life tethered to services and data in the fuckin cloud.
I was a huge Aperture fan myself, and have since moved to DxO. They put out a new version every year that has an upgrade fee, but there's no issue staying put for as long as you like. And it's 100% filesystem-based, so it's much easier to work into whatever backup workflow you like; cloud or otherwise.
I actually like it so much, that I even use it since I switched to Linux recently. I have a Windows VM with one app installed that I boot up every month or so to process photos.
Just learning about DxO for the first time. I purchased another app called Luminar that I tried once and wasn't totally blown away by. What I'm looking for is a sane workflow and lightning quick navigation, hopefully with some basic edits and tight photoshop integration.
One of my favourite things about Aperture+PS was being able to spawn an edit process that, when you save the file in PS, created a duplicate version with the changes back in Aperture. The more I think about it, this was the secret sauce. Is this replicated in DxO?
Oh, I have no idea about that, sorry. Don't use Photoshop myself. I just need to do some cropping, lighting/color/contrast adjustments and noise reduction, then I move on to the next family photo. :D
I literally was that photographer before DSLRs got affordable. I love film and still own some extremely expensive film kit, but it is still a hassle. And when it’s not my job and real life kicks in, the fact remains that there used to be a digital workflow that “just works” for me, and Apple killed it.
Photos.app was a joke and Adobe was in the process of flushing their entire suite down the cloud, and shipping horrific bloatware for everything else. I probably should look into Lightroom but at the time it was just not an appealing option.
And the self-pity interpretation is off, but whatever. I guess we all like to be mad at the people we post at.
If Aperture is that valuable, have you considered just keeping an old Mac around dedicated to Aperture?
(You don’t even have to go that far yet, since you can still get Aperture working in Catalina, and Mojave and High Sierra are still viable options. But, for the future.)
I certainly could still run it, but it’s just not worth it to me anymore. Over time I gradually stopped caring because it wasn’t a rewarding way to spend my time anymore. This thread just jogged some really old memories.
Don't bother with Lightroom. It's also been shackled to the cloud at this point. I think if you dig enough you can still find a perpetual license version, but it's years old at this point and doesn't work with newer cameras.
I had a similar affair with Picasa, but at least it's allowed to be downloadable. I've never found anything even close to Picasa on responsiveness when browsing photos.
Stories like this is why I rarely bother with proprietary software anymore.
Different product, different business, different time. When AppleWorks and FileMaker were spun off, they were likely significant chunks of revenue in their own right. By the time Aperture was taken out back, it wouldn’t even have been a rounding error in Apple’s accounts. Far quicker, easier, and cheaper to kill it.
Remember, everything Apple does, it does to advance the interests of Apple. The company. Not the products, not the departments, not the employees, and definitely not the customers. The same is true of any large org.
The knockout success of iPhone grew the business by magnitudes almost overnight. iPhone Apple, frankly, is too big to be wasting its time now on niche products with limited potential for growth, even if those products are very successful within their own niche. If a product doesn’t fit with the current business strategy and portfolio, it’s out.
It’s one of the basics to running a successful business: don’t be distracted. And definitely don’t be sentimental. Poor Aperture just got left in the iPhone’s dust.
This is very true, but it's also important to realize that the hyper focussed Apple culture comes as an adaptive response to their near-death experience, before Jobs came back. A company that makes a billion dollars in revenue a day can afford to diversify; a company that is on death's door cannot.
I think the situation currently is an overcorrection to a vaguely remembered pre-Jobs past.
> It’s one of the basics to running a successful business: don’t be distracted.
What does that mean in the context of a huge corporation? From my perspective, $1K in profit is still $1K, even if you're making $100K elsewhere.
Tim Cook certainly has limited time and needs to prioritize, but he also doesn’t need to touch every part of the company. Independently-profitable projects can be spun out into their own teams as needed.
The issue is opportunity cost. If those folks could help increase sales or profitability on one of your mainline products by even a fraction of a percent, you’ll be better off by redeploying them.
I’m just not convinced of the value of focus in this context.
When Steve Jobs came to Apple, he made the Mac line “focused” by cutting it down to four models. That had clear benefits: less hardware for the OS to support, better economies of scale in manufacturing, and less wasted retail shelf space.
How does killing Aperture benefit Apple’s other products in that way?
As we've already covered, I'm an Aperture fan and I, too, wish it hadn't been #canceled. However, when I put on my executive hat and consider the arguments made in this thread, from a corporate perspective it was 100% the right thing to do.
(We don't have to like it, or work at or buy from corporations.)
$100k in profit is not $100k in profit to a company that makes $1B a day: it is a massive operational risk. Not only is the revenue a rounding error, but every product on the docket represents a meaningful sacrifice of agility and exposure to unknowable risk.
One of my smartest mentors once told me (and then reminded me a dozen times) that a company can only have three priorities at any given time. If an initiative does not make the top three cut, it is tabled for the future. Your executive team - and indeed, the entire org - should have those priorities front and center as they make decisions and spend their time. "Does what I'm about to do advance one of the top three priorities?" is a clarifying question.
Every person in an org can have three personal priorities, no more. Every person should be able to confidently tell you what those priorities are. Those priorities should all meaningfully tie back to the company priorities.
My mentor was, some 20 years ago, the in-house corporate counsel for a large telco. Amongst his responsibilities was M&A and foreign expansion. You'd think these would be priorities, but you'd think wrong. His initiatives were consistently tabled, politely but assertively. It was the best thing for the company.
On the flipside, companies and leaders than cannot embrace laser focus on top priorities tend to be slowly dying, even if they don't realize it yet.
In the end, $1B a day is $1B a day to lose, if they don't focus on their top priorities. Frankly, I think it's some combination of branding and charity that they haven't just stopped making computers.
Most geeks know the value of everything and the cost of nowt. Especially those costs measured in risk, be it risk of a code exploit in some mature stable part of the OS that almost nobody uses, or the risk of ceding a trillion-dollar primary market to competitors while preoccupied chasing secondary tails.
Having blown my first startup by sloppy unfocused mismanagement, I can attest to this lesson the hard way.
(And yeah, the only reason Macs still exist is because Apple has to protect the whole productivity ecosystem that puts Apps in its iOS Store. ’Cos the moment it cedes that foundation to a competitor, the whole company is lost.)
I haven't read the whole article, but if the business in itself was successful, sounds like a waste to just kill it off. If Apple didn't want to focus on the business, might have been worthwhile to see if a spin-off was possible.
This was always going to wrong from the minute I read “we had a collection of demos ... and a hard deadline to launch a year later at a Photo exhibition”.
That isn’t a real deadline, it’s a management ambition. And a badly set ambition, based on some demos and the belief they could scream good code into existence.
Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.
To make parents work weekends without their children for an entire 6-month period just to try and hit a management fantasy is a symptom of a toxic culture.
(And is also counter-productive. The slow and buggy v1 that resulted wasn’t good enough to capture the market — but it was enough to finally wake up Adobe, who dramatically accelerated efforts on Lightroom, which launched first on Mac and went on to dominate the market)
I was working on the Lightroom engineering team at the time and Adobe was heading towards killing the project in favor of a Bridge + Photoshop solution.
When Apple announced Aperture, it instantly galvanized the executive support in favor of Lightroom and Shantanu made the call for us to announce Lightroom and ship a public beta in 6 weeks.
Thankfully we ran the engineering team with an iterative and low technical debt threshold. We had been shipping iterations to a private beta group.
The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.
> The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.
Do you have any idea what happened? Aperture 1 was slow but it got better and since it was expensive to switch I never tried Lightroom until Apple cancelled Aperture. I was surprised to find that it was so much slower and eventually ended up getting a refund because even the Adobe support person eventually admitted that it wasn’t fair to suggest buying a new Mac just to be able to use the application.
It's amazing how much better free Google Photos is over $20 per month iCloud Photos (especially on macOS). The number of bugs and lack of features is appalling.
Even Lightroom arguably hasn't achieved the technical abilities of Aperture...it's slow.
Plus now there's a fork of Lightroom "classic" and a weird cloud-only version, and also Adobe's subscription pricing. There are a few other apps that have added digital asset management, but overall, there's really nothing that has taken its place.
Affinity might have something in the works, no official news that I can find but it’s been rumored for years and seems like an obvious product for them.
Luminar 4 has a DAM and upcoming solutions for migrating your existing <insert product> libraries. I haven’t tried it yet but the reviews look really good.
>Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.
Is this the corporate version of PTSD? I'm sure the Maps debacle really had an affect on the overall decision process to the "release software prematurely, or delay it until it is working" question.
> Apple is getting better at this - see how it now pulls announced features from releases if they aren’t ready - but it’s still a terrible approach.
It's still mostly "we ship yearly, and everything has to be ready by September". That's how we got four or five iOS 13 updates within a month of release fixing glaring bugs and underdeveloped functionality.
As a former manager I always read these management failures and wonder how on earth these people ended up in their positions. To be fair, I hated being a manager but I enjoyed having a happy, confident and competent team. So maybe the job just attracts people who love drama.
At a lot of places, there is a single technical track, and when you get to a certain level of experience, the only place to go is into management. Also, there is a general disinterest in treating people management as a separate, first-class discipline, and most places devote no resources to training and support, particularly for front-line managers.
People left rudderless but with strong and inflexible demands on their teams will often revert to a control freaky micromanagement style, out of pure risk abatement. Bad managers are products of bad cultures; there are (thankfully) very few actual psychopaths in the world.
In many cases, a great engineering team can practically manage themselves. I've been on teams that had managers who were so bad they were useless at best, but so much engineering experience that we could ship a good product anyway.
I assume these managers got promoted after I left. It's hard to measure manager effectiveness, and with projects lasting multiple years, a couple of wins can make it look like you're an ace manager even though the team basically just ignored you.
As a former manager (who sounds like a good one), are you able to shine any light on why management cultures appear so reluctant to eject malignant managers?
Any bad employee will damage the business and those around them. But where a typical bottom-rung grunt has a very small scope of influence and is relatively easy to fire, even a mid-level manager has more than enough power to ruin entire departments; and once they’re c-suite the game is all but done.
why management cultures appear so reluctant to eject malignant managers?
A typical engineer will gladly stab another in the back for something so trivial as what nearly-identical-anyway programming language or framework or IDE to use. Meanwhile managers, like lawyers, accountants, doctors, teachers and every other profession, prioritise solidarity within the profession. We can debate whether that’s good or bad but there’s no doubt why they prosper while engineers are the first to be outsourced or exploited.
Very true. I have noticed this too at my company. Other departments promote people more, hire faster, waste money on offsite fun meetings whereas engineering rarely promotes people and generally makes each other’s lives miserable. In the Gervais principle hierarchy I definitely feel we are the losers.
Don’t know if you ever worked as a lawyer but “solidarity” isn’t a core value.
Solidarity to the profession. They may squabble amongst themselves but they’ll never compromise the general prestige of lawyering. Nor tell the client that what they do is easy and anyone can learn it, even if that’s true.
I can’t comment on that. I have no problem firing anyone, including myself, if that was beneficial to the team. I want to enjoy work as it’s such a big part of life. And if I can’t create the circumstances that enable me and the people around me to enjoy their job, I’m out. Thats why for the last 4 years, I ran one man company, working from home.
I wasn't old enough to be paying attention when Aperture first released, but because I've only ever heard great things about the program, I kept expecting this story to end with some miraculous turnaround for the engineering team.
That didn't happen. And while the author doesn't say that Aperture 1.0 was bad, he doesn't appear to have thought too highly of it either. Separately, it's hard to imagine such a rushed and mismanaged process producing a stellar end-product (although, I'm sure stranger things have happened).
What was Aperture like at release? Were later versions a substantial improvement?
We were proud of it given the circumstances. I'll edit the quote below to make that more clear.
"So, we shipped the product and introduced it at the show as planned. Despite a long list of warts and terrible performance, I thought it turned out well given the schedule and the circumstances. I continued to use it as my primary photo app, even though I’m not a hard-core professional. Others on the team were too bitter, such that they refused to use the final product."
For my use, it was fine at release, it got better through time. The unpacking of library and transition to iPhoto compatible library was rocky.
Definitely a tool where you wanted the x.x.2 before you’d update a major or minor version, because, well, it probably held 150,000 photos at a time where almost nothing else you did on your personal computer had that amount of data or irreplaceable value per file.
--- Aperture science ---
Many prolific shooters considered this the best photojournalism / travel / wedding / EDL bulk photo library and photo triage tool outside of the camera bag, bar none. Still is if you have kept a Mac tuned for it.
The key benefits for me, not found most other places at the time, were:
- auto photo sorting (“stacks” of burst photos you could expand and choose the best from then collapse again, like burst works on iphone now), along with press compliant metadata and tagging, GPS, TZ adjust, etc.
- ultra fast photo triage (rapid star ratings and ability to see photos above n stars for fast pruning of a 3000 photo shoot to the best 30 shots), and
- a (just okay) RAW engine with non-destructive photo editing, as well as masters and ‘versions’ per photo including automatic RAW+JPEG pairing for digital cameras
All this on a love-it-or-hate-it “managed” library, where you could go look at the originals in folders, but never needed to if you let go of folders and thought in metadata sets. (It could also oversee folders external to the library.)
I switched to it from Lightroom, occasionally tried to switch back, always felt like molasses compared to the ‘just right’ benefits of Aperture if you shot a lot of photos to get a small set of publishable shots, but also wanted to keep every shot forever.
--- Photos 2.0 ---
There’s been a dark few years here where the Photos library that was capable of Aperture sized content didn’t offer any of those key benefits in the Photos app, but at least remained accessible across all your devices. While Photos continued to do the RAW+JPEG pairing, it lost most other things.
Latest Photos finally puts back in some of the level of photo editing that was in the original Aperture.
That said, seems though when implemented through Photos on iCloud, there’s a soft performance limit in the 130K to 160K range that things start to act wonky, one photo out of 100K won’t sync, etc.
Be interesting to see what would happen if Apple threw some QA at the high volume uses cases again.
Is this kind of working environment normal at Apple? This isn't the first story I've heard about mandatory long hours and screaming in the office. Can anyone else chime in?
It depends on the group. Apple's silos mean that individual directors and VPs have a lot of influence over the working cultures of their teams, and a lot of those leaders ape their management's style, which, when His Nibs was still a going concern, involved lots of screaming and abuse. So it could trickle down.
I was lucky in that during both of my tours, my management was humane, but that's sort of the luck of the draw.
Reading that story made me feel sick. As a young Engineer my dream was to work at Apple, but I'm happy I never did.
I don't understand why people tolerate that kind of treatment. Never in a million years would I work nights or weekends or allow anyone to scream in my face. That's just not life.
There’s a fair number of people who work weekends voluntarily - I’ve even gotten bug reports on odd days when corporate is shut down like Dec. 26th.
My manager and some on my team at Apple generally discouraged me from working on weekends - I’ve worked some on weekends mainly to de-risk accomplishing certain tasks due to me being in an optimal state to tackle some issues & having some spare time. Occasionally I have to fix operations issues on weekends too, but those get resolved generally pretty quickly.
All in all it’s a YMMV situation. Most people in my org keep to normal hours, have same development timelines, and are pretty happy (no yelling/screaming, most operate somewhere in the 10-4 time range give or take, 5 days a week).
Flash-in-the-pan stories like this are fascinating to me. I've never seen this kind of drama at work. No nights, no weekends, no screaming, no passive-aggressive snubs like the gift-bag iPods. I did a double take on the dates when I first saw this on Daring Fireball--who has this much to write about in a year or two?
On the other hand, I've never built a product from scratch so quickly. Google and Facebook didn't exist when I started my current job. Now they're gazillion-dollar companies. I've had projects on my wish list longer than Aperture was a product.
Aside from a hospital or a life-or-death situation, I can't think of any other time where screaming in a workplace would ever be remotely acceptable. Ever.
I have no idea about Apple specifically but I've heard similar tales about other large tech companies. It seems endemic to our industry for some reason (maybe its also endemic to other industries, but I wouldn't know).
I heard once of a team mourning the end of Sopranos, because that one TV show ensured that they didn't have to work on Sundays - because their VP would watch it instead of ordering them to prepare new stuff for Monday morning meeting.
Such a shame that Apple let go of this program... all in the name of their new cloud services. Apple had the big chance to show the world what a joke Google Photos is in comparison... now it's more the other way round in my opinion.
> Many people, including myself, developed long-term health problems. One person, as I mentioned, had a nervous breakdown, others just took forever to get any spark back in their careers. I would look these people in the eyes, and they had this look like someone close to them died.
The same thing happened to me last year, and basically this is the reason I have been shadow-banned from HN.
I stayed for 2.5 months only, but it was still too much, because I thought I got a decent salary. It cost me twice as much since then because I wasn't able to work since 4 months and I have no clear idea how I will crawl out this huge hole despite taking antidepressant, tranquillizer and going to psychotherapy every week.
DON'T PUT A PRICE TAG ON YOUR MENTAL HEALTH, and get out of a terrible job until it's too late! It's not worth it, believe me!
I use it at least once a week and there are a lot of places where it could be improved when it comes to stability or making you feel like it's a safe place to store your pictures.
There was a lot of functionality/crap in there that I did not use, a lot of functionality was hidden away behind context menus and a lot of promised features around integration with plugins and 3rd party never really materialized, but in terms of core function it was a total workhorse.
Apple ultimately went to great lengths to purge it from existence, even for those of us with paid licenses who'd been told (or at least safely presumed) that we'd be able to install it on new machines via the app store, even if it wasn't available for purchase. In reality, they removed the binary from the cache. At one point, I went through a ridiculously elaborate process of obtaining a certain kind of physical license from eBay and spent hours emailing random Apple employees - likely some of the folks mentioned in this story - getting them to make exceptions and pull favours to make it possible for me to install it one last time before Catalina pulled the rug out for good.
Fuckin' Apple.