> AFAIK Aperture never had such a hardcore following and didn't offer such a unique product. The photography market is clearly dominated by Adobe anyway.

At the time, sure - but none of my friends and contacts who do part-time and professional photography have anything good to say about Adobe Lightroom - the move to Lightroom CC left a bad taste in everyone's mouth, as have the many Cloud-related SNAFUs (apparently a couple of years ago Adobe screwed-up Lightroom's non-destructive edit files and caused a load of people to lose all their Lightroom work - and times when people are unable to authenticate with Adobe so they can't even open the program). Apple would be on to a sure-winner by re-launching Aperture, especially if they give it the visual indexing features present in Apple's existing photo-management products.

> Apple would be on to a sure-winner by re-launching Aperture

In my limited experience, products whose main differentiating factor is being "not the other guy" usually generate a ton of hype, but end up flopping.

Wasn’t that the basis of Apple’s “Get a Mac” campaign though?

Right - you have to have a better product, but Lightroom isn’t Photoshop (i.e. it isn’t impossible to compete with) and Aperture’s codebase already exists. Apple could divert the profits from a single day’s worth of iPhone sales into an endowment for Aperture to keep a halo-effect on their Mac hardware.

I have switched to Capture One, which is overly expensive and has less-intelligent defaults, but I can also buy a perpetual license.

I agree - at $200 Logic is a great value.

After considering Ableton's high prices and competition from Bitwig, I haven't been enthusiastic about paying for a Live Suite upgrade.

Bitwig 400$, expensive, but closer to the goal and it seems that it provides more content.

Bitwig is amazing, specially now with The Grid.

But it's still the underdog. If it becomes more popular I'm sure the price will go up at some point.

I wouldn't really compare the two. They target much different markets.

True, and neither is Ableton Live, but look at all the new features in Logic blatantly copied from Live.

It's definitely a good way to branch out on their current user base and probably makes a lot more sense for people starting out to buy Logic than base Ableton. Ableton Suite just doesn't seem like a great value vs Logic unless you absolutely need something in Ableton.

The value of Live is in the workflow which is very different from Logic or any other classic DAWs. It's much more creative and streamlined. The Suite version includes Max which opens up the creative possibilities way beyond anything Logic can do.

Of course this is only attractive to a smaller part of the DAW market. People working in recording, mixing and mastering will not find any value in those things.

Also people working in media composing have tended to prefer Cubase or Logic because the arrangement view in Live was pretty bad up to version 10.

I know how Live works, I've owned it for way too long now. I'm talking in relation to features Logic has lifted from Live, if you are just starting out and don't really know what's going on, it's a very hard ask to spend double on base Ableton (3x? for Suite) vs Logic especially when Logic comes with more stuff.

OTOH you need to have a mac and there are cheaper Live versions to get you started.

Also if you buy a midi controller in many cases you get a free version of Live which is plenty for people getting started.

Yeah, I'm thinking of the person who either fell for the Mac propaganda or already had one. There still is a sizable advantage to knowing that things will probably work out the box on a Mac laptop vs random PC laptop but the price gap is unreal. Live Intro is definitely enough for most people to get a feel for things.