Apple discontinues Aperture →
Along with iPhoto, it’ll be replaced with the upcoming iCloud-backed Photos app on Yosemite and iOS 8.
This is bad news for people who liked the organizational features of Aperture, as they’ll probably not be replaced. But it might be good news for many people, like me, who wanted Aperture’s powerful RAW adjustment tools but with simpler iPhoto-like management and iOS-device sync.1 The hole left in Aperture’s absence will encourage Apple to expose more of those great lossless editing tools into Photos. (iPhoto has always quietly offered some lossless RAW editing, but nowhere near the power of Aperture’s.)
Plus, Aperture has been plagued with bugs, poor performance, slow updates, and extreme neglect for most of its life. It defined a useful category, then let the better-executed, better-maintained Lightroom eat its lunch. I’ve used many versions of each for extended periods, and Lightroom is the better app by far, especially in performance, editing tools, and adjustment quality. Sure, the interface is a bit weird, but so is Aperture’s.
Apple discontinuing a mediocre, neglected, poorly competing pro app to focus on a much better consumer app is a clear win for everyone.
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Recent versions of Aperture and iPhoto have been able to share the same library to approximate this balance, but you still needed to launch Aperture to do advanced edits — and recent versions of iPhoto haven’t been very good. ↩︎