Is Apple set to end the affair with Creative Professionals?

The arrival of FCP X has resulted in a Psunami of outrage, disappointment, venting of frustration, ridicule and just plain confusion. Hardly anything positive has been said and FCP ‘gurus’ like Larry Jordan and Steve Martin have been given undue stick for looking on the bright side.

Just what the hell was Apple thinking?

Well, having given this all some thought, one scenario that comes to mind is that Apple is actively trying to remove itself entirely from the ‘Pro’ market – for EVERYTHING. I suspect that FCP X was never supposed to be a professional application in any current sense, no it was supposed to drive the nit-picking, over-demanding, impatient professional market away, leaving the path open for iOS supremacy in the truly mass market. I doubt there will be any ‘professional’ updates beyond the most elementary, and I suspect they will be half-hearted.

This could well mark the beginning of the end for MacPros, machines the expense of which can only possibly be justified by people who’s livelihood comes from professional creativity based on the Mac-only software that, to date, has shown the path to light, ie FCP and Logic and so many wonderful antecedents like Photoshop and Maya. Is there any software other than ‘Legacy’ FCP (ie NOT X) and Logic that is Mac only that is truly used by professional creatives any more? Adobe and Autodesk provide much stronger offerings in Windows, as do Avid, Corel, Maxton et al. Other than very niche medical / academic software what is there for which one might need a MacPro and its expansion capabilities?

I suspect that Logic will have a similar re-write to FCP soon too. Then there will be no critical software available that requires a hardcore Mac for optimisation. As it stands, the only benefit a MacPro provides for FCPX is multicore threading and Motion benefits from a beefy GPU. There is no option to use external monitoring at all (the AJA fudge is worthless in FCP X as it does nothing more than a second display connected to the graphics card), deck control is not supported and you can get faster i/o on a iMac with Thunderbolt which will likely become more significant in new models – even the graphics cards in iMacs will soon be up to 5780 type spec.

Apple have made it abundantly clear that they no longer value the existing FCP (and by extension MacPro) market, so they are looking to the iMac market. No doubt iMac will develop into iPad on steroids soon enough too, uniting all Apple devices with iOS X and everything touch screen and ‘gestures’ lead. Steve Jobs even said in his iCloud keynote how he ‘wants to get rid of the box’.

I think 5 years is a conservative estimate for this scenario and more likely the final MacPros will be sold within the next 3 years and then, when there is simply no point in staying with Mac for professional creative work even Premiere will be discontinued on Mac (after a few bumper years).

I expect my current computer to serve me, with its current software, for about 5 years (bought last October), then I expect to move to Windows X.

Thoughts?