By Joe Rosensteel

May 17, 2023 3:33 PM PT

Software subscriptions feel weird, but they work

With the recent announcement of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for the iPad we have renewed the same, silly argument about subscription pricing that happens far too often. Without having the apps in hand (literally) there’s very little to say in the way of assessing the value offered by the subscriptions at this time, but there’s plenty to say in favor of recurring payments from behind the safety of this paywalled post (thanks for subscribing).

When Adobe switched to Creative Cloud pricing, there was a lot of sturm and drang, and while it hasn’t been all rainbows and puppies it’s largely worked out for all involved. Yes, Adobe executives have probably bought themselves a nice vacation home, but Creative Cloud has been a success for me, personally. I use Lightroom for my photo hobby, I use Premiere for cutting my demo reel every so often, and I use Audition for editing podcasts.

Let’s unpack why I’m satisfied paying Adobe every month:

1. The barrier to pay Adobe’s monthly rate was far lower than paying the the upfront cost for Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro in a time where I was uncertain how many months, let alone years of use, I would get out of the apps.
2. Adobe releases predictable updates. I felt particularly burned by Apple as a loyal Aperture customer, and as someone who used Shake for my jobby-job. Without much warning, someone at Apple decided it wasn’t worth it to make these apps. Would they do that again, to their flagship pro software? Maybe. Aperture and Shake won prestigious awards. Prestige isn’t the whole story.
3. Familiarity was also important, and I had experience with Premiere from college, so for cutting demo reels it was easier than having to learn Final Cut Pro. Likewise, Audition’s sort-of similarity to Premiere meant it was a more natural fit with my existing experience.

My credit card was put on file, software was downloaded, and Adobe drops in some new stuff every now and then. There’s no major concern about upgrading to a version of macOS and losing my software. (Although Adobe is not always timely with addressing some compatibility issues, they do get there eventually—and I know better than to download a new release of macOS on day one.)

The Creative Cloud a desktop app that pesters me about Adobe stuff is bad, but the underlying service itself? It works as expected. I can turn off auto-updates, or download old versions if I need something for compatibility.

I could have spent less money by knowing ahead of time how wildly successful podcasting would be for me, or by cutting that occasional reel update with a single purchase of Final Cut Pro, but no one really knew how many years of free updates Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro would receive. (I’m not even sure Apple has ever had a clear picture. It mostly just seemed like they didn’t want to add paid upgrades to the App Store so they sheepishly just kept updating the one they sold.) It is an aberration in the world of selling software that Apple has kept investing in these two pro apps with no income from the existing user base.

My point about familiarity might not seem that important when it comes to talking about subscriptions but it absolutely is. Kids generally can’t afford to pay for their own pro software. Back in the day, they might have used cracked codes for downloaded software, but generally their access to pro software would be through the world of higher education. A five-dollar expense makes sure little Braden or Madison is predisposed to consider Apple’s pro software.

The only weird thing is that the iPad announcements didn’t come with any Mac announcements about pricing. Surely, at some point they will need subscription pricing too. It’s been over a decade of free updates for these apps. Deeply unserious people might continue to argue in favor of free updates for apps for eternity, subsidized by RAM and SSD prices from pro Mac sales, but this is an unhealthy business model. It also suppresses competition in the pro app market.

Ideally we should live in a world where if you’re unhappy with your pro software you can cancel your monthly subscription and subscribe to another pro software solution. If you need a specific piece of software for a project as a freelancer, you’re just paying for the timeframe you’re working on that project.

It’s far more predictable to have a monthly recurring fee to estimate your expenses than it is to try and figure out when large sums of money should be plunked down and if you’ve timed your purchase with this year’s NAB conference, and out-of-cycle updates. Particularly if you’re an institution purchasing volume licenses.

Now, one fear that even some sensible people have is this: We might one day find ourselves in a situation where the subscription prices just keep ticking up, or that the software you rely on will be placed inside an expensive bundle of software you don’t need. But those are all fears that could be true in a world of software license purchases, too! Which is exactly why it’s important to have a variety of software vendors with sustainable revenue streams, instead of just Adobe which has the pro bundle of all pro bundles, or Apple which hasn’t seemed all that motivated by drops or gains in app sales.

Perhaps the presence of Apple’s pro apps on the iPad will nudge Adobe to compete for dollars there as well. Other than Lightroom, and now Photoshop, Adobe has only made overly simplified apps for iPad. There’s an Adobe Premiere Rush app, but it’s not Premiere, and there’s not even a toy version of Audition. If Apple just offered their Pro apps for free on the iPad, I doubt Adobe would ever even consider trying harder.

One final point: The App Store is not a free market. Adobe is big enough that it gets to sidestep the App Store with a Creative Cloud login that you acquire on adobe.com, but not a lot of developers get that benefit. If someone has to compete with Apple in the App Store, they do so at an extreme disadvantage for either sales or subs. That dramatic imbalance is really why we should rise up and overthrow our pro app oppressors.

But until then, I’ll just let Adobe charge my credit card so I can focus on getting work done.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]

By Shelly Brisbin

May 12, 2023 2:42 PM PT

Tracking the many social-media migrations

Last week, I joined Bluesky, the new hotness in social platforms. It’s the latest refuge for those who have beef with the way Elon Musk runs Twitter. Last November, I queued up to rejoin Mastodon, the existing-but-revitalized platform that was the first beneficiary of agita over Musk’s Twitter takeover.

Despite boarding the outbound train relatively early, I still maintain Twitter accounts for myself and the things I make. All that is to say, I’m experiencing these three platforms all at once and finding them very different from one another in more than the obvious ways.

Being on Mastodon feels different than being on Bluesky, which is not like today’s Twitter. This despite the fact that a lot of people besides me appear to maintain accounts and even continue posting on all three. In my feed, the multiplatformers tend to be journalists of the tech and general-interest varieties, along with an array of other content creators. Some folks copy-paste their stuff everywhere, but many seem to understand how easily that behavior rankles. Like me, they’re hesitant to make a commitment to a single platform. And, like me, they’re probably thinking a lot about the kind of voice they want to project on each.

The people I follow because I like them personally are a little more likely to have chosen one place to be active, even if they have accounts spread around. That’s also true of interest-based communities who have collectively decided where they want to pitch their online camps. If I want to talk with fellow classic movie geeks, that’s Twitter. Lots of software developers and accessibility-focused peeps have migrated to Mastodon. The scarcity of Bluesky invites means it’s hard to judge who will make it home. But so far, the place feels like one where people crave seeing and being seen. Somewhere you might go to get followed by a famous person.

These are all logical ways of understanding your place online. Who do you want to reach, and who do you want to hear from? But it’s also true that each of these places has its own personality – a vibe that’s created by users who feel at home enough to contribute their words and pictures and maybe push the envelope in a way that advances their version of a desirable online world. And for my money, some vibes are better than others.

The Blue Bird of Complacency

Twitter rarely did me dirty in my own feed. After more than 15 years there, it was just the place that everyone was; the place where I bantered with other podcasters back in the day, got plugged into accessibility communities for the first time, promoted my books, and figured out how to follow Texas news obsessively on Election night or during the six months every two years the Legislature is in session. Musk’s takeover created a bright line – the beginning of more promoted content, the unwelcome For You tab, making my feed even more algorithmic than it was. In other ways, nothing much changed. Almost every reporter I know still tweets. The classic film bloggers and fans who keep up a running commentary on the movies we love still gather to watch TCM together. And my friends who are both Twitter users and non-tech people keep commenting on traffic or their favorite TV shows. Up until earlier this year, when Musk signaled a lax attitude toward hate speech on the platform, even the few famous-people-accounts I followed were still out there plugging projects or posting pictures of adorable things. It was possible to ignore a lot of how Musk has remade the platform.

You can still ignore it if your feed is well-groomed and you don’t care about legacy blue checkmarks or the API’s destruction of benevolent bot accounts. But it feels fragile, as if one troll or a neglected security feature could break up your happy reality, just as the disappearance of all those cool accounts did for those who’ve already left.

Utopia Has Rules

On Mastodon, the noncorporate, tech-forward dream is still alive. The folks who abandoned Twitter the earliest have plowed enormous energy into their homesteads on the federated plain. They write up intro guides for newbies, consider carefully which server feels like home to them, and wax on and on about the quality of specific third-party Mastodon apps. They boost strangers’ posts and follow liberally. They are earnest and sometimes starry-eyed about the promise of a social network not controlled by one company’s algorithms. Spend a lot of time there, and you’ll start believing everyone has migrated over from Twitter. Or everyone you would actually want to talk to, anyway.

I feel comfortable on Mastodon because I want to live in a world where my data is not currency. But I have seen people correct those who are not embodying the upright Mastodon dream. I had to switch servers when a dispute between major servers and those who ran my old one led to mine being defederated in a few places. I wasn’t asked my opinion or told it was happening. The defederation caused me to lose contact with lots of people I followed. Defederation is a core remedy for conflict over how Mastodon servers are run, but it’s not a very utopian process when it happens with no warning to the community.

School’s Out

If Mastodon is like a Habitat for Humanity build – all goodwill and productive earnestness – Bluesky is like Lollapalooza. It’s loud. It’s irreverent. It’s mischievous. And it’s crawling with people who want to be noticed. You’ll find celebrity journalists, politicians, and entertainment types with adorably low follower counts – because it’s invite-only so far, and those coveted codes are hard to come by. You’ll also find nudity, AI-based thread hijacking, and harassment. Everyone seems to be flirting with everyone and using their outside voices. And it feels like the people who are happiest there are those who bucked up the hardest against Musk’s Twitter regime. Whether you lost your legacy blue checkmark or had your posting bot murdered by the API lockdown, Bluesky feels like freedom, and a lot of its early fans, and the people they’ve invited, are acting like they’re on social media spring break. That’s totally a choice, and one that some folks a bit younger than I am will embrace wholeheartedly.

These opinions are mine, of course, and subjective based on my own feeds. And they’re a snapshot in time. Users come and go from social platforms all the time, and communities can evolve into hellscapes or into vibrant stews of news and information with room for diverse voices. Hopefully, the tools we use to connect can evolve, too, along with community standards. Bluesky doesn’t really have those yet, and users should ask hard questions about their security, their ability to address misinformation and harassment, and the ultimate business model of the place.

Mastodon fans will have to decide if they’ve got access to as many people and as much information as they once did on Twitter, and whether that affects the way they want to use the platform.

Twitter users should probably continue to expect the unexpected.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

By John Moltz

May 12, 2023 12:44 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Finally Cut Pro

This week Apple gets around to making its own dog food and eating it too, iPhones take over the U.S. market, and it may soon be time for that “Cheers” re-watch you’ve been thinking about for years.

Can I get a “Finally.”?

Yes, this week Apple announced that Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro would be coming to the iPad. Now we can put the rest all the arguing over whether or not you can get work done on an iPad hahaha just kidding—we’re going to be arguing about that for the rest of our natural lives (and unnatural lives, if uploaded intelligence becomes a thing).

In a new move for Apple apps, both will only be available via a subscription, but the prices are quite reasonable at $4.99 a month or $49 a year. You don’t even have to be a professional to afford that. That’s doable even on just a fessional salary.

Because everything has to be taken in the context of products Apple hasn’t announced yet, Mark Gurman speculated that the two apps could conceivably run on the much-rumored Apple headset. I look forward to years of arguing over whether or not you can get real work done on your face.

The company also used the announcement to snare a leaker and the leaker’s sibling using a canary trap consisting of a combination of false release dates for each of the new apps. When the rumor-publishing sibling claimed the apps would be coming on the incorrect dates, Apple was able to identify their sister as the leaker.

Thanksgiving this year is going to be very awkward for at least one family, if it even happens at all.

We’re num-ber one! We’re num-ber one!

The iPhone has had long had a minority share in the smartphone market but now, at least in its home market, that’s no longer true:

While US iPhone shipments also fell, they did so more slowly than the smartphone market as a whole – enabling Apple to boost its market share from 49% in Q1 2022, to 53% in the same quarter this year.

In retrospect, it seems sort of natural that as the smartphone market has matured, the more staid, reliable platform — the one often accused of being boring for not shipping features before they’re completely ready — would start to do better. People just want phones that work.

You know, most of the time.

Smartphone evolution hasn’t completely stalled. This week Google announced the Pixel Fold which, get this, folds. Its screen also has pixels, so who says there’s no truth in advertising?

If we’re keeping track of technologies Apple’s behind in — I have a three-ring binder full of them! — this is considered by many to be another. Ming-Chi Kuo and Ross Young both believe that Apple won’t ship its first foldable product until 2025 at the earliest.

That is if you don’t count iPod socks.

That’s right. An iPod socks joke. I’m bringing it back.

There are at least a couple of reasons for that, though. Apart from Apple’s usual conservativeness in shipping technologies that might not be all there yet, it’s hard to get foldable screens in the kind of volume Apple would need. At the price points foldable phones hit — the Pixel Fold starts at $1,799 — one wonders how many of these screens even Apple would need, but it’s certainly a lot more than Google.

My innie is on strike

Gather ye television shows while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying and, uh, well, there’s a writer’s strike is the point I’m trying to get to, so you might run out of shows this fall. Not only are shows like ”Daredevil: Born Again” and ”The Last of Us” running on those other streaming services affected, but so are shows you get from your favorite fruit-themed company in a very plus manner.

Such as… “Production of Apple TV+ show ‘Severance’ suspended amid writers strike.”

Oh, that’s just great. Now where am I going to get my weekly dose of existential dread and loathing of late stage capitalism? Reality? I mean, yeah, I could do that, but that’s even more depressing than watching “Severance”. Too real, man.

Nobody likes their favorite shows being delayed, but writers are an incredibly important part of the production process and deserve to get paid fairly. As streaming services have proliferated, that hasn’t happened:

Since 2018, inflation-adjusted pay for screenwriters has fallen 14%, according to the guild. For writer-producers, pay has sunk 23%.

That’s not sustainable and it’s not fair.

Look, it’s not like the writer’s union is asking for tips. Cough.

But if any of the writers of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” are looking for tips, I have a lot of ideas. Call me.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]