8 ms·

The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... most of what you liked about Pixelmator is likely no more

by blihp 2y ago

The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... most of what you liked about Pixelmator is likely no more over the next year or two. Depending on Apple's reasoning for the acquisition (i.e. how much of it was just for the talent vs the product) you'll may see some small glimpses of Pixelmator's influence a couple years from now in Apple's stuff. Most of the time Apple doesn't keep the acquired product around.

askafriend 2y ago
Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt. The difference here is how aligned the original team is with their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button. With other products like Dark Sky, the product is substantially different in philosophy or design.
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app and Apple doesn’t actually want to have a separate image editor (let alone two). They used to have Aperture competing with Lightroom and then decided pro photography wasn’t a space they needed to be in, has something changed where now they want their own Photoshop competitor?
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.
    - wlesieutre 2y ago
      Dark Sky would've added more value if they'd just renamed it Weather and made it the built-in app, and yet... I do hope they'll offer Pixelmator as an included app on Macs and Pixelmator Pro alongside Logic, Finalcut, and other "Pro" software. The lack of a built-in image editor can be annoying. Photos works for some stuff, Preview includes basic adjustments too, but sometimes you just want something like a hue/saturation adjustment instead of color temperature and pink/green tint, or multiple layers so you can experiment with different edits non-destructively.
      - stu2b50 2y ago
        Eh, I don’t think it’s the same thing. The gulf between “photos user” and “pixelmator” user is quite high, much more so than “weather app” and “weather app but better”. In particular, if you have the average user Pixelmator, they’d be worse off. The same isn’t really true with weather or darksky - they really just do the same thing. We still have iMovie and FinalCut, GarageBand and Logic. Apple has kept two different product lines before.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        grvbck 2y ago
        Also remember that some of those have been crippled in the past. iMovie used to be way more advanced. Older versions of Pages had (pretty basic but still) layout options that were completely removed. It's also not impossible that Apple moves a few of Pixelmator's tools into Photos but kills the rest of it, either actively or just by stagnant development.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      > This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app. This is comparing apples to oranges. A better photos app isn't even remotely comparable to shipping a raster image editor. One is concerned with overall rendering of the products of a camera, the other is concerned with precise editing of a raster image.
      - zarzavat 2y ago
        Apple sells Macs. The Mac platform is enhanced by the existence of Pixelmator as an exclusive app. If Pixelmator were to disappear then the value of the Mac platform would decrease. There is nothing that the Pixelmator team could do to the Photos app to make up for that.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    > The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app There doesn't appear to be much overlap in terms of functionality. Hell, if this is true I'd actively celebrate it.
- jbverschoor 2y ago
  There’s no way Apple can build this. Their human interface people all seem to be gone on the desktop. So many things work so bad these days when they migrated to the new ui framework.
  - askafriend 2y ago
    Logic Pro for Mac is regarded very well. When they make a focused effort in professional software, Apple can deliver.
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      At the time Apple bought eMagic, Logic's UI sucked. It actually had dialogs that told you to "reboot the dialog for changes to take effect." Given how well-regarded Logic is today, it must be drastically improved. I haven't looked at it lately, but am considering the bundle with Motion and FCP. One piece of software Apple built in-house is Motion. While it suffers from a few UI gaffes, it was an innovative product that still has no competitor in the motion-graphics space.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  > Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt. Even accepting this premise there's little reason to think Apple would have cared about this particular market before they bought Pixelmator. Why would you think Apple would target a given market segment?
Eric_WVGG 2y ago
On acquisitions like DarkSky (RIP), sure. This looks a lot more like a Logic-style acquisition. Pixelmator would slot nicely into the same consumer set of productivity apps that ship with all Macs (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). Photomator will get them back into the market they abandoned when Aperture was shuttered. Speaking of Aperture… am I the only person who remembers that Apple owns Claris? Why didn't Apple just hand off Aperture to Claris and say "just keep this thing working on new MacOS releases"?
- SllX 2y ago
  Claris isn’t really a dumping ground anymore. That’s how it started, but they’ve evolved their own business since then.
- grahamj 2y ago
  ugh don't get me started about Aperture. I'm still salty about that.
  - sersi 2y ago
    I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc... Never understood the logic of getting rid of it. I know a few people who actually switched to mac because of Aperture
    - kergonath 2y ago
      > I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc... Me neither… I wanted to like Lightroom, which was the solution most of the community seemed to migrate to, but between the infuriating inconsistent UI and the predatory subscription model I did not use it for long. And now I have a Rube Goldberg thing that is janky and feels brittle.
      - grahamj 2y ago
        Yep same here, tried it for a while but Adobe's idea of UI just does not work for me. I reluctantly went to Photos, mainly because of ease of use on the phone for family members, but still I miss full tagging and smart album support.
whamlastxmas 2y ago
I don’t understand why companies buy other companies for the talent and not product. Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time? It would cost so so so much less than these massive buy outs. Maybe not all of them would take you up on it, but if you buy the company a lot of them may not stick around post-buyout anyway. I feel like this would be a lot more effective also because in a buyout, employees just make the same old salary at the new company. In my method, they make a ton more and are more likely to stay
- alexwhb 2y ago
  Ya that’s a solid point. Though many startups give their employees equity options… so you have to factor that in too. Also buying a start up for talent seems risky since many people that join startups are looking for a totally different energy than a large corporation, so it seems reasonable that there’d be a big drop off of that talent as soon as it gets acquired… especially if the vision is not aligned
- dahart 2y ago
  Multiple reasons. That it does happen should be reason to question your assumptions, rather than assume some obvious imagined alternative has been overlooked by everyone, right? While poaching one employee at a time might be usually legal, attempting to poach all employees of a company might not be legal, and either way is considered unethical. Paying off the investors may be the goal. Eliminating the product or competition ethically may be the goal. Buying the competition’s customers, and/or distribution channels may be the goal. Acquiring the top talent, while giving them the expected reward for having bootstrapped a company, might be the goal. Founders are often uninterested in a salaried position for themselves, but may be interested in a return for the company and payoff for everyone in it - as backpay for their investment, completely separate from their salary going forward. Also, your hypothesis is not accurate. Buyouts are not always, or even usually, massive. It’s common for them to be small and medium sized. It is definitely not a given that making persuasive individual offers would be any cheaper than an acquisition, let alone “so much” cheaper. Depends entirely on the situation.
  - 2y ago
jstummbillig 2y ago
Logic and and Final Cut were bought and developed since. Pixelmator fills the open Photoshop space in an Apple way, and will plausibly go the same way — no vague pessimism required.
- mrzool 2y ago
  I really, really hope you’re right about that.
- jmb99 2y ago
  The (almost) direct counter example is Aperture. That was the “Pro” photo application and it was killed for seemingly no reason with no notice. It’s fairly reasonable to be pessimistic about this acquisition given that history.
- troupo 2y ago
  Logic and FinalCut are from the time when Apple cared about software and especially pro software. In the past decade these apps even disappeared from their main menu on Apple.com where they used to have a prominent spot. Can you point to a newer acquisition of great software that is still being developed?
mxey 2y ago
Workflow becoming Shortcuts mostly as-is would be a counterexample.
39896880 2y ago
Note that this hasn’t happened with Shazam, miraculously
- Insanity 2y ago
  Ok so to be fair.. I own an iPhone for about 3 years now and only discovered it comes shipped with Shazam about 6 months ago and only used it twice since. When I told my wife (also a somewhat long-time iPhone user), she didn’t know it came build-in either. I’m not a power user, neither is my wife.. I don’t think it is all that well advertised.
  - 1123581321 2y ago
    That's interesting. Is Shazam a default control center button for new phones? I don't remember how mine got there. (There's still probably a discovery issue with those buttons as they're just icons.)
  - 39896880 2y ago
    Shazam was bought to boost Siri’s ability to recognize music but Siri isn’t really good at much, so it hasn’t been fully absorbed. Now with AI eating the world I assume that functionality will get reproduced by a foundation model and actually integrated into the OS
iwontberude 2y ago
I want to point out that the same management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps. Apple drag and drops teams into their org chart and gives them tons of autonomy.
brokencode 2y ago
Really? Even though the company is in Lithuania? It seems like they’d probably keep on working on Pixelmator or something closely related since any other teams would be a long way away.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... The "ideas" in pixelmator are mostly updating traditional image-mutation patterns to match the native environment language. Let's not pretend that this was some kind of revolutionary application for image development. Is it implemented well? Absolutely. But this is hardly an example of developing new software practices or processes.

by blihp 2y ago

askafriend 2y ago

Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt. The difference here is how aligned the original team is with their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button. With other products like Dark Sky, the product is substantially different in philosophy or design.

wlesieutre 2y ago
The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app and Apple doesn’t actually want to have a separate image editor (let alone two). They used to have Aperture competing with Lightroom and then decided pro photography wasn’t a space they needed to be in, has something changed where now they want their own Photoshop competitor?
- zarzavat 2y ago
  This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app.
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    Dark Sky would've added more value if they'd just renamed it Weather and made it the built-in app, and yet... I do hope they'll offer Pixelmator as an included app on Macs and Pixelmator Pro alongside Logic, Finalcut, and other "Pro" software. The lack of a built-in image editor can be annoying. Photos works for some stuff, Preview includes basic adjustments too, but sometimes you just want something like a hue/saturation adjustment instead of color temperature and pink/green tint, or multiple layers so you can experiment with different edits non-destructively.
    - stu2b50 2y ago
      Eh, I don’t think it’s the same thing. The gulf between “photos user” and “pixelmator” user is quite high, much more so than “weather app” and “weather app but better”. In particular, if you have the average user Pixelmator, they’d be worse off. The same isn’t really true with weather or darksky - they really just do the same thing. We still have iMovie and FinalCut, GarageBand and Logic. Apple has kept two different product lines before.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - grvbck 2y ago
        Also remember that some of those have been crippled in the past. iMovie used to be way more advanced. Older versions of Pages had (pretty basic but still) layout options that were completely removed. It's also not impossible that Apple moves a few of Pixelmator's tools into Photos but kills the rest of it, either actively or just by stagnant development.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    > This would be very short sighted as Pixelmator adds way more value to the Mac platform than a better Photos app. This is comparing apples to oranges. A better photos app isn't even remotely comparable to shipping a raster image editor. One is concerned with overall rendering of the products of a camera, the other is concerned with precise editing of a raster image.
    - zarzavat 2y ago
      Apple sells Macs. The Mac platform is enhanced by the existence of Pixelmator as an exclusive app. If Pixelmator were to disappear then the value of the Mac platform would decrease. There is nothing that the Pixelmator team could do to the Photos app to make up for that.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  > The main worry is that it will be an acquihire into the Photos app There doesn't appear to be much overlap in terms of functionality. Hell, if this is true I'd actively celebrate it.
jbverschoor 2y ago
There’s no way Apple can build this. Their human interface people all seem to be gone on the desktop. So many things work so bad these days when they migrated to the new ui framework.
- askafriend 2y ago
  Logic Pro for Mac is regarded very well. When they make a focused effort in professional software, Apple can deliver.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    At the time Apple bought eMagic, Logic's UI sucked. It actually had dialogs that told you to "reboot the dialog for changes to take effect." Given how well-regarded Logic is today, it must be drastically improved. I haven't looked at it lately, but am considering the bundle with Motion and FCP. One piece of software Apple built in-house is Motion. While it suffers from a few UI gaffes, it was an innovative product that still has no competitor in the motion-graphics space.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> Pixelmator as a product is literally what Apple would have built anyway if they made an attempt. Even accepting this premise there's little reason to think Apple would have cared about this particular market before they bought Pixelmator. Why would you think Apple would target a given market segment?

Eric_WVGG 2y ago

On acquisitions like DarkSky (RIP), sure. This looks a lot more like a Logic-style acquisition. Pixelmator would slot nicely into the same consumer set of productivity apps that ship with all Macs (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). Photomator will get them back into the market they abandoned when Aperture was shuttered. Speaking of Aperture… am I the only person who remembers that Apple owns Claris? Why didn't Apple just hand off Aperture to Claris and say "just keep this thing working on new MacOS releases"?

SllX 2y ago
Claris isn’t really a dumping ground anymore. That’s how it started, but they’ve evolved their own business since then.
grahamj 2y ago
ugh don't get me started about Aperture. I'm still salty about that.
- sersi 2y ago
  I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc... Never understood the logic of getting rid of it. I know a few people who actually switched to mac because of Aperture
  - kergonath 2y ago
    > I still haven't found an app that's as good as Aperture used to be with my workflow in term of UX/convenience etc... Me neither… I wanted to like Lightroom, which was the solution most of the community seemed to migrate to, but between the infuriating inconsistent UI and the predatory subscription model I did not use it for long. And now I have a Rube Goldberg thing that is janky and feels brittle.
    - grahamj 2y ago
      Yep same here, tried it for a while but Adobe's idea of UI just does not work for me. I reluctantly went to Photos, mainly because of ease of use on the phone for family members, but still I miss full tagging and smart album support.

whamlastxmas 2y ago

I don’t understand why companies buy other companies for the talent and not product. Why not just make everyone working there an incredible offer at the same time? It would cost so so so much less than these massive buy outs. Maybe not all of them would take you up on it, but if you buy the company a lot of them may not stick around post-buyout anyway. I feel like this would be a lot more effective also because in a buyout, employees just make the same old salary at the new company. In my method, they make a ton more and are more likely to stay

alexwhb 2y ago
Ya that’s a solid point. Though many startups give their employees equity options… so you have to factor that in too. Also buying a start up for talent seems risky since many people that join startups are looking for a totally different energy than a large corporation, so it seems reasonable that there’d be a big drop off of that talent as soon as it gets acquired… especially if the vision is not aligned
dahart 2y ago
Multiple reasons. That it does happen should be reason to question your assumptions, rather than assume some obvious imagined alternative has been overlooked by everyone, right? While poaching one employee at a time might be usually legal, attempting to poach all employees of a company might not be legal, and either way is considered unethical. Paying off the investors may be the goal. Eliminating the product or competition ethically may be the goal. Buying the competition’s customers, and/or distribution channels may be the goal. Acquiring the top talent, while giving them the expected reward for having bootstrapped a company, might be the goal. Founders are often uninterested in a salaried position for themselves, but may be interested in a return for the company and payoff for everyone in it - as backpay for their investment, completely separate from their salary going forward. Also, your hypothesis is not accurate. Buyouts are not always, or even usually, massive. It’s common for them to be small and medium sized. It is definitely not a given that making persuasive individual offers would be any cheaper than an acquisition, let alone “so much” cheaper. Depends entirely on the situation.
- 2y ago

jstummbillig 2y ago

Logic and and Final Cut were bought and developed since. Pixelmator fills the open Photoshop space in an Apple way, and will plausibly go the same way — no vague pessimism required.

mrzool 2y ago
I really, really hope you’re right about that.
jmb99 2y ago
The (almost) direct counter example is Aperture. That was the “Pro” photo application and it was killed for seemingly no reason with no notice. It’s fairly reasonable to be pessimistic about this acquisition given that history.
troupo 2y ago
Logic and FinalCut are from the time when Apple cared about software and especially pro software. In the past decade these apps even disappeared from their main menu on Apple.com where they used to have a prominent spot. Can you point to a newer acquisition of great software that is still being developed?

mxey 2y ago

Workflow becoming Shortcuts mostly as-is would be a counterexample.

39896880 2y ago

Note that this hasn’t happened with Shazam, miraculously

Insanity 2y ago
Ok so to be fair.. I own an iPhone for about 3 years now and only discovered it comes shipped with Shazam about 6 months ago and only used it twice since. When I told my wife (also a somewhat long-time iPhone user), she didn’t know it came build-in either. I’m not a power user, neither is my wife.. I don’t think it is all that well advertised.
- 1123581321 2y ago
  That's interesting. Is Shazam a default control center button for new phones? I don't remember how mine got there. (There's still probably a discovery issue with those buttons as they're just icons.)
- 39896880 2y ago
  Shazam was bought to boost Siri’s ability to recognize music but Siri isn’t really good at much, so it hasn’t been fully absorbed. Now with AI eating the world I assume that functionality will get reproduced by a foundation model and actually integrated into the OS

iwontberude 2y ago

I want to point out that the same management team that brought us ClarisWorks is still leading Apps. Apple drag and drops teams into their org chart and gives them tons of autonomy.

brokencode 2y ago

Really? Even though the company is in Lithuania? It seems like they’d probably keep on working on Pixelmator or something closely related since any other teams would be a long way away.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> The talent and ideas that were Pixelmator will be substantially diffused as it's absorbed by Apple... The "ideas" in pixelmator are mostly updating traditional image-mutation patterns to match the native environment language. Let's not pretend that this was some kind of revolutionary application for image development. Is it implemented well? Absolutely. But this is hardly an example of developing new software practices or processes.