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.