The State of Final Cut
February 20, 2010
I’m sure by now you’ve read most of the responses to the fact that Apple fired 40 employees of it’s Final Cut team. “Apple is killing the Pro Apps”, “All Steve Jobs cares about is the iPad”, “I guess Apple is just a gadget company now… they’ll probably stop making computers all together.” I’m here to tell you that everyone is reading this completely the wrong way.
Apple is NOT, I repeat NOT killing Final Cut Studio. Final Cut Studio dominates the film industry (a large industry for that matter), and as a result of it’s Mac-only nature, it leads to a ton of Mac purchases… the expensive Macs. Apple has enough money to keep Final Cut Studio running without issue… there’s no chance they will kill it.
Now that that’s out of the way, what does this mean? Three words: trimming the fat. Steve Jobs has said time and time again in keynotes that it’s not how many people are working on a product that makes it good, but the quality of people. Simply put, 40 people weren’t doing a good job. It’s not cost cutting… Apple doesn’t need to do that. It’s quality control.
The timing is worth noting as well. As I stated before, I received word that Apple plans on releasing a new Final Cut Studio by year’s end… a dramatic break from their usual 2-3 year cycle. Perhaps these people were doing a poor job meeting their deadlines, and Apple decided to take an axe to their slow productivity? Perhaps the new Final Cut Studio has just been completed, and now that it’s finished, Apple can get rid of the people that did a poor job during the process? Or perhaps, and this is what I consider the most likely, these people have nothing to do with the Final Cut Studio programming team and held other jobs simply not needed anymore. Remember that Apple’s AppleCare team is located in Austin, where the report says some of the people were fired.
Simply put, I don’t know which of these scenarios is correct. But frankly, it doesn’t matter, because I can definitively say that Final Cut Studio is alive and well, and Apple has no intentions of leaving this market.
My Take: Final Cut Studio is going 64-bit, therefore is switching from Carbon to Cocoa, and the 40 people let go were Carbon programmers.
well that makes me feel better…….hope it’s true!
No layoff is good news.
In his time, Shake was dominating VFX world. Open spaces full of digital compositors = hundreds of potential MacPros to sell, according to your arguments. But Apple killed Shake. Why could it be different concerning Final Cut ?
final cut is dying a slow death…….and premiere pro is getting better all the time..if they (apple) don’t get on the ball…it’s over!…and apparantly they don’t care……ipod…ipad….iphone…..is all they care about…they forgot what kept them going for a long time…PRO APPS……well that’s over..
remenber when we read this…our hopes were so high…..all bullshit….
Final Cut Studio 3
…… the time you’ve so patiently waited for has finally arrived. Final Cut Studio 3 will finally show its face at WWDC 2009, as we reported earlier. I’ll reiterate what I posted previously…
There will be RED and XDCAM support. There will be a major UI overhaul in Color. There will be a new Motion/Shake.
On top of all that, there will be major speed enhancements. When I say major, I mean major, major, major. Apparently Final Cut Studio 3 running in Snow Leopard is unlike anything you’ve ever seen when it comes to professional video editing. Expect graph after graph at the keynote comparing the speed differences from FCS2 to FCS3.
Due to the speed updates, Final Cut Studio 3 will require Snow Leopard to run. As a result of this, it will be available whenever Snow Leopard is.
This means there are two possibilities. The first is that Apple will take pre-orders for FCS3, and ship it when Snow Leopard comes out (August-October). The other possibility is that Apple could ship Final Cut Studio 3 immediately after the keynote, with the catch being it will only install on computers with Snow Leopard installed.
Also expect to see Logic Studio 2. We are unaware of any new features for the box set, we just heard that it will arrive.
Pricing is expected to be the same for both FC
You know why? Because I believe Apple didn’t meet their schedule, and bumped it a year… that’s what we should probably expect for 2010.
A few cases of wishful thinking here.
“Final Cut Studio dominates the film industry.” It may indeed dominate the indy and low-end market, but I think it may be a bit of a (wishful) stretch to ascribe it’s Kingship of an entire industry.
“…it leads to a ton of Mac purchases… the expensive Macs.” True enough, but let’s be honest about the sliver of Apple’s market that Final Cut really represents. When Apple hopes to sell 5 MILLION iPads this year alone–well, I think that puts things in perspective.
Final Cut is a great product. But Apple can be a flaky company. And I wouldn’t count Avid completely out yet, either. But my money rests on Adobe in the long run.
“Final Cut Studio dominates the film industry”
Maybe on the indie side but Final Cut Pro has yet to make significant inroads into Hollywood.
“…as a result of it’s Mac-only nature, it leads to a ton of Mac purchases… the expensive Macs.”
It doesn’t matter how expensive the computer is, it’s the profit margin that counts. Mac Pros are expensive but not necessarily profitable.
“Apple has enough money to keep Final Cut Studio running without issue”
This is true but Apple is a publicly-traded company which is legally-obligated to maximize profit. Apple have killed many products over the years when they could easily have afforded to keep them running, suggesting that such aspects do not factor into the decision-making process.
But regardless of this, I agree that it is unlikely that the ProApps will be killed off – well, not in the immediate future at least.
kqatamu made the perfect point about Shake…
It really was dominating the VFX world…widely adopted and very much loved.
Thousands of digital compositors = thousands of potential MacPros sales.
KILLED, Over night, end of’s, case closed, NO COMMENT.
Apple has public responsibility to max revenue. it has been carrying FCP since day one in terms of profitability when compared to iphone applications that they are mearly hosting not even writing code for. When you think that iphone apps made more money last quater alone than in the whole history of FCP…the writting is on the wall. Don’t get me wrong I love Apple but pro apps is not where they are making share holders happy.
Nope. It was not “Carbon programmers”. Matter of fact, I don’t know anyone there who only writes Carbon code anymore. It was across the board cuts. At least the board that includes lots of engineers, people in docs, project managers, & QA (not too many managers, I’m afraid). Many good people working on important things. *Very* few were contractors, most were long-time employees who where passionately committed to what they did. There was no warning, and minimal compensation. I’m surprised the folks that were laid off aren’t talking much… I guess they’re all afraid of Apple’s nasty retribution. I know I am.
Many of the others here are probably right in that Apple goes where the money is. ProApps is high effort, with a moderate to low return, compared to some other groups which are quite small, yet generate huge revenues. Hence it did have more than it’s share of people, but in my view it needs them. I would say there probably weren’t enough engineers, and now there’s a lot fewer. I might add that (IMO) some of the current upper mgmt doesn’t really get (or maybe care about?) the pro space and does not have the vision/passion for it to make it really work– too bad. And of course SJ is all about the iPad, the iPhone, the every day user –after all, that’s where the volume is. It’s easy to forget that ultimately Apple is a big corporation in a corporate world — no matter how much of a humanist face is designed into the public persona of the company.
with in two years…final cut will be dead……it’s almost there already…..you all better start getting into adobe cs5…..apple does not care about it any more….ipod…iphone…ipad…..ilife….imovie……thats makes money…..not fcs
Apple will not openly admit their plan to kill off FCS. However, the writing is clearly on the wall… As Apple concentrates its focus on iPhone/iPad, the revenue significance of apps like FCS will surely and unfortunately diminish over time. Case in point, the UI and functionality of various apps in FCS are still hodge-podge. None of the apps has received any of the technical advancement brought forth by 10.6: there is no utilization of Grand Central, no OpenCL GPU codec. Yes, moving an existing app to multi-thread/heterogeneous multi-processing takes time and resource, but there’s been not a blip of progress in that department also suggests the lack of development…
The self-fulfilling prophecy, unfortunately, will be a reality in fate of FCS demise.