richard hallas

Aperture did NOT fail. Lightroom did NOT win. Aperture was, and still is, the superior product of the two, by a wide margin.

The fate that befell Aperture was unjust, unfair and avoidable. It simply – unfortunately – fell foul of Apple's iCloud strategy.

Apple wanted the use of photos on its system to become invisibly streamlined, with all photos synchronising automatically between Macs and other devices via iCloud. And as far as that goes, they've got it working well. If all you do is snap photos with your iPhone, Apple's got you covered beautifully.

Unfortunately, it was hard to fit Aperture into this strategy because it's a Pro app that Apple wanted to shoehorn into a consumer solution, and they couldn't see how to do it. People who use Aperture will typically have huge photo libraries that are too big to consider integrating with iCloud – and probably multiple libraries in any case. Such users typically have dedicated hard drives for their photo libraries, so the idea of putting everything on iCloud is laughable.

So, not being able to see a sensible way forward for Aperture that wouldn't conflict with their plans for the new Photos app and make everything rather confusing, and because Aperture was "only" for pros and hobbyists (i.e. a small market), Apple decided to simply kill it and tell people to use Lightroom instead, in spite of the fact that Lightroom is an utterly different product that really doesn't do the same thing at all, and doesn't work in the same way. It wasn't an admission of defeat in Aperture itself; it was an admission that Apple didn't want to bother serving a market as small as the pro and hobbyist photographer market. That's what it boils down to; Aperture as a product was unsurpassed, and had an open-ended future.

The timing, too, was unbelievably awful. Apple made a BIG, BIG noise about how fantastic Aperture was on its new Mac Pro system (the cylindrical dustbin system, that is) when the Mac Pro was launched, and how this was going to be the perfect machine for pro photographers. It based a whole load of impressive advertising on this, and made Aperture look absolutely compelling and drool-worthy on the new Mac Pro.

Then, just as soon as the new machine was out and people had had a chance to buy it and Aperture, Apple killed Aperture. Of course, it then also allowed its new Mac Pro system to totally stagnate as well. And if those factors together don't tell you exactly what Apple thinks of its pro photographer users, the message will never get through to you. It conned them into investing in a software package (an admittedly wonderful software package) that it was just on the points of discontinuing both development and support for, and it conned them into buying a MASSIVELY expensive and comparatively underpowered dead-end system, that it would never significantly upgrade, on which to run that end-of-life software. Pro users could easily have spent a fortune on one of these turkeys. It was absolutely shameful behaviour for Apple to drop Aperture JUST AFTER it had used it as a big incentive to buy its expensive new Mac Pro.

Thank heavens I didn't buy one myself. Had I done so, I'd have been livid. But even given that I didn't, I still think Apple acted shamefully, and most of all I regret the loss of this wonderful piece of software which I so enjoyed using. I invested in it from the start and bought every upgrade, and expected to continue to use it for as long as I was taking photos. I really don't like Lightroom, so I don't use that. Photos isn't up to the job. So I'm back to managing my photos manually in folders again. Thanks a lot, Apple. Terrific work. Well done.

Of course, being Apple, they had to definitively kill the product. Any other company with a half-decent sense of commitment to its users would have either sold Aperture to another company and allowed it to continue development, or simply open-sourced the software so that it could, at the very least, be kept alive and running on modern hardware. But no. Apple holds its pro/hobbyist photographer users in such contempt that it just killed off the project in a way that meant there could be no future for it, and no way ahead for its users. And if that isn't an insult to those users, I don't know what is. Apple treated those people with the utmost contempt. Having just screwed the maximum amount of money it could out of the ones who were prepared to buy an expensive Mac Pro system, it immediately betrayed them utterly and left them with no way forward. It was and is absolutely disgraceful.

Aperture was my favourite Apple software product, and I'm not going to forgive Apple for killing it any time soon.

It's time Apple returned the power (sleep/wake/'side') button back to the top of the phone, where it always was prior to the iPhone 6.

The new placement on the side is a really bad decision in my opinion. Aside from this new screenshot problem, I've always found the side button a nuisance. I'm always pressing it by accident when I'm trying to put the phone away in my pocket, and yet I can't get at it quickly when I want to press it if the phone's already in my shirt pocket (e.g. to silence it quickly). The old position was perfect; the new location's a disaster as far as I'm concerned. If Apple put the button back on the top, where it always used to be, all these problems would be instantly solved.

I wrote the following in a reply to another story yesterday, but I'm going to repeat it here (slightly edited) because it's about exactly this matter of black vs white with the red body.

Personally, in this instance I happen to think that Apple has made the right choice. Some colours work better with black than with white; others work better with white than with black. Generally, the brighter the colour, the better it works with black, and the more subdued the colour, the better it works with white. Some strong colours that fall in the centre of the 'vibrancy range' work pretty well with either black or white. It's all about contrast, really; maximising contrast works better than minimising it.

The red shade used for (PRODUCT)RED products, bright though it is, is just within the 'subdued' half of the scale, but is close enough to the middle to be workable with either black or white. As proof that it works with black too, see the one-off (Mac Pro)RED; see the (iPhone Battery Case)RED with a black-faced iPhone inside it. Nevertheless, overall, it's *just slightly* to the 'works better with white' side of the colour-vibrancy scale.

Look at all the other products Apple has previously released in RED versions; the various RED iPod models. Are their click-wheels black or white? They're white. Is the Apple logo on the back black or white? It's white. What about and text printed on them; is it black or white? It's white. White stands out better on this shade of red.

So a white face on the (iPhone)RED should NOT be even remotely a surprise at this stage. And for my taste, I think it's absolutely the right choice. I think it looks pretty overpowering to have a black face with that strong red body, as shown by the mix-and-match phone in this story. But then, I wasn't a fan of the iPhone 5c series either (even though those phones did use very vibrant colours with black, which was the right thing to do).

As for the ring around the TouchID button… I tend to agree with some comments that it could have looked OK if that had been red too on a white face (though it might have made the button distractingly obvious). But I suspect that making a red ring was probably a step too far; creating the right colour-match would probably have required far more effort and trouble than the limited-edition nature of the product would have warranted. And of all the existing colours (black, silver, gold, rose gold), the only choice on a white face that would complement the red back is silver. So I reckon that's why Apple went with the silver ring – and again, I think it was the right choice.

So personally, I feel that Apple's choice of colour combination makes for as classy a phone as a screaming-red phone is likely to get. If I were in the market for a bright-red iPhone, I'd be very happy to buy this. I think it looks really good. The bottom line is: there's no right or wrong; it's all just a matter of taste. The hybrid phone shown here "proves" everyone right, whichever side of the debate they sit on, because some people prefer it and others prefer what Apple has chosen to do. It's good to see it in real life, but for my money, I'd prefer the version with the while face in combination with the red body. Just my opinion.

Indeed, if I were Donald Trump and needed a bright-red phone for my hotline to Russia, I'd want one of these lovely red iPhones exclusively for that purpose. It'd make it harder to start WWIII by accident, on account of having simply picked up the wrong phone. Once again, Apple is setting the highest security standards to protect us all.

"We estimate that all Mac models will switch to ARM in 12-18 months," said Kuo.

ALL models? What, even the Mac Pro? That doesn't make sense to me. If I'd just spent perhaps in the teens of thousands on a 'future-proof' Mac Pro, I don't think I'd feel too happy if Apple then switched processor families across the line less than a year later.

Mind you, it's only how I'd have felt if I'd been a professional photographer who'd believed Apple's hype about the previous trashcan Mac Pro, and bought one in order to run Aperture on it… (Apple made a big fuss about this use case, and had at least one enticing video about it… and them promptly killed Aperture.)

I wonder why AppleInsider has reviewed this product but not the Monduo, which is the same idea done much better.

Here's Monduo: https://www.monduo.co

I've bought a Monduo recently, and it's really great. The screens are VERY good quality (not quite as good as that of the latest MacBook Pros, but nevertheless extremely good), and have a very useful resolution (2560 x 1600 each).

The Monduo was designed primarily for use with MacBooks and comes with a very nice companion utility. It's not essential (you don't HAVE to use it), but running it makes the experience a lot better than it would be without the supporting software.

The Monduo works with the latest machines (no weird issues of not being compatible with Apple Silicon) and the only downsides I've found are (a) the inherently somewhat cumbersome nature of using three screens at once, which is totally unavoidable with a product like this, and (b) a bit more cabling than ought strictly to be necessary.

Anyway, I'm delighted with the Monduo product itself, and I received absolutely SUPERB support from the company itself when I experienced shipping problems with the courier. I can't praise them highly enough for the trouble and care they took over supporting me with my order. And the product itself is really as good as anyone could hope for.

Monduo is, I think, a little more expensive than the Fopo product reviewed here, but I consider it very good value for what you get, and from what I've read here, the small difference in price is more than compensated for by the superior quality you get with the Monduo.