Re: Is Smoke 2013 already futureless because of Arrogance and Apple?

By all accounts, it worked pretty well. My guess is that they sold more FCPX licenses by far than they ever did of Final Cut Original, and brought a lot of new users into the camp as well. So "how did that work out" depends on how you look at it. You can look at it from a personal perspective as a professional who didn't really respond well to what they did, or you can look at it from a business perspective, in which case what they did was quite successful. And Apple is a business, not a bunch of entertainment industry professionals.

Besides, that's really not what I was referring to, although the spirit is similar. Over the years Apple has never been reluctant to abandon technologies and form factors that they feel are nearing the end of their useful lives. They jettisoned NuBus, the Power PC chip line, 5 1/4 inch floppys, CRT displays, and three piece desktop computers, all when they were still standards, and present on nearly every computer that Apple was making at the time. And, in some cases, at the very high risk of alienating nearly their entire user base - which was certainly the case when they abandoned NuBus and the Power PC. My comments were in that context. I feel that Apple might be looking at Thunderbolt as the technology that finally "frees" them from needing tower/slot configurations, since the main advantage of those form factors is buss speed peripherals. If you can achieve that in a more compact way, and with lower manufacturing costs and probably higher reliability, it's very attractive to do it, even if you irritate part of your user base in the process. In Apple's view, those users will get over it, just like they have in the past. And within a year or less, every PC manufacturer will do exactly what Apple pioneered, just as they have in the past. Now, I could, of course, be completely wrong about this. Time will tell.