I’m not sure how much of the following is conspiracy versus coincidence but you can take a look and decide for yourself.
What a difference a decade makes for Apple. During the late nineties the computer company (that’s all they built back then) nearly went broke. But then came the iMac which changed the company’s fortunes, followed by the iPod, which changed the world.
For most of its thirty years in business Apple has held underdog status, a David in the context of a Microsoft Goliath. The Apple brand brought connotations of a fringe-dwelling cult and its followers were personal computer outcasts with just a two or three-percent market share. But you need to strain hard to remember those days now given what Apple has become: today it’s a globally dominant force in half a dozen markets.
If anything it would have been the incessant marketing and manipulative PR antics of Apple that might have diluted my interest in the iPad. But knowing this brand as I do and relying on the company’s equipment for years as I have, I was able to put aside my inclination towards cynicism long enough to have a proper look at the iPad. It’s also wise to pay attention when a company like Apple says it’s going to create an entirely new computer platform completely afresh.
The iPad sounds like it caters more for the photography audience than photographers themselves but I’ll speculate that it will be quite useful to us nonetheless. We know that it’s not going to be a primary computer any time soon, and it’s a consumer oriented device for sure, but priced at well under a grand I think it’s easy enough to justify, especially when you consider a few of these possibilities.
It took a long time to get here, but the new Aperture release looks like it’s been worth waiting for. A bunch of new features like selective (non-destructive) dodging and burning, 64-bit architecture with the additional memory capacity that it brings with it, together with the introduction of adjustment presets and something resembling Photoshop’s curves functionality are all things I’ll use daily.
But it’s not all rosy. You see, Aperture 3.0 seems to have brought with it a few teething problems that are a good reminder to us all that the early adoption of new technology and business critical systems don’t mix.
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