I would assume it's because younger generations of creatives are using their software less and less, increasing the risk of losing the market completely on the software side. At this pricing, more of them will turn to paying Apple rather than paying for multiple services, keeping them tied into the ecosystem.
Also so many people are paying for Canva, Capcut etc that taking a piece of that cake is quite a low hanging fruit if you have a distribution platform.
The acquisition of the Affinity software by Canva I imagine motivated this.
It’s even a similar pricing model, though technically with Pages / Numbers / Keynote covers a little more ground but I think the main intent is to get creatives using Apple’s creative software again
Pixelmator being the only 3rd party software because Apple never made a competitor to Photoshop
Though since Canva went full on toward more robust tools I imagine they have started capturing the entire editing chain more than they did 2-3 years ago, hence the Affinity acquisition
Apple hardware has "only" a 36% margin, while their software and services have a 75% margin. They definitely want to make more money on software with absurd margins.
Most of the comments here demonstrates the lack of abstraction abilities here at HN.
My comments weren’t related to whether apple has data centres or not (afaik they don’t and actually use google hardware).
My comments were related to a business model used by amazon to destroy local shops in our neighbourhoods: offer products at vastly reduced prices, making a loss but covering those losses by profiting on aws. Once there is no competition left, prices rise and shareholder profits are made.
Hence my conjecture that apple was doing the same and hence they were offering this product at undercut price. As was the OP was wondering about.
I was actually criticising the business model increasingly used by big tech. Which has the consequences that are neighbourhoods are emptied out and left with stores that act as amazon package pickup stores or stores where packages are returned to be sent back to amazon.
Pretty spot on. I think what's new is that Apple is employing this tactic, before they always went with "Our stuff is more expensive because it's better", but as they seem to slightly pivot into other directions now, this choice also seems to align with the new direction.
They want marketshare to enhance their other market positions and give them optionality for future strategy.
They'd love the whole market, but they don't need it and they won't employ too many resources chasing that.
They're a powerful giant with hands in so many places. Each enforcing other endeavors.
This encourages people to stay in the Apple hardware ecosystem, for instance. It dog foods their silicon. It keeps people thinking of Apple as the creative brand and operating system. More creatives buying Apple -> more being produced and consumed for and on Apple.
Also the strategy of getting kids young has always been genius. They started that in the eighties, I think.
They don't need to, but they do lose a bunch more of the 'feeder' market. If need to edit video to a semi professional standard I'd pick this bundle at 12.99/month (and get extra tools i might need) vs adobe premiere for 22.99/month.
As someone who came up along side adobe, the only reason photoshop is as entrenched as it is is simply because of piracy. Ditto for premiere. It created the market that they then locked down with subscriptions.
I think you are going to see shops that are smaller, doing their own design stuff internally, increasingly moving away from adobe subscriptions.
Is that AI generated by any chance? Seems like an AI crystal ball that you're looking into.
It's fine to have that opinion, but please frame as an opinion or else give me the lotto numbers for next week if you can predict the future that accurately.
Much news is biased towards specific political PoVs so that if you’re not aligned with those views, it can be frustrating to hear the same opinions, day after day, on matters that should be solved differently.
It takes a lot to move the needle, and I can understand anyone who simply doesn’t have the energy.
And then other folks ignore international law and simply do whatever they want, while others look on or pay the matter only lip-service.
Berlin, Germany just had a blackout because a left from centre organisation decided to set an electric exchange on fire. Right over new years and at a very cold time of year.
Apparently the data on where the exchange was and how it would affect the surrounding neighbourhoods was openly available. The neighbourhoods affect were largely affluent.
It’s probably also the reason why this is being reshared.
You can drive around an area you’re interested in, or look at satellite or aerial photos, to find these facilities. “Security by obscurity” is no more useful here than it is in software systems.
One can see easily make out the power station Lichterfelde and the affected substation inside of it. The area to the east of the power station was without power between Saturday and Thursday morning.
So what? The benefits of openly sharing this info greatly outweight the risks.
I heard multiple times that professionals in the energy sector relied on shitty, difficult to obtain and incomplete information until the open source revolution.
Soviet Union heavily edited publicly available maps, although it had great cartography for the military-industrial complex. And where it is now?
Have I said that it's bad or good? I was just pointing out that yes, apparently data like this does get used in for bad things. I am not judging, as you seem to assume, I'm pointing out.
It's a pity that others aren't as broad minded to consider both or all sides of technology. Technology isn't always automatically an improvement of the current situation. Yes it might solve the obvious problem but there are also side effects. Social media, for example, is a good demonstration of a bunch of side effects that weren't intended.
And so it is with open infrastructure, it can have unwanted side effects and we should be aware of those instead of hand waving them away. Mitigation here is difficult: open access and meshing up of data is important and should be encouraged. Hiding this data away won't help.
If you are not interested in disrupting the grid then yes - you implied it’s bad. You only mentioned the bad sides of such info being widely available.
And like already mentioned in more nested comments - it’s not difficult to get such info if you are determined enough.
I stated a fact - it really happened and it was so communicated that the left-of-centre organisation obtained their information online, your assumption that I'm "implying it's bad" is in your head.
…and then you go on to imply it has bad side effects. But you haven’t actually made that case. Do you really believe that a hostile group would have difficulty finding important infrastructure to attack without an open infrastructure map?
> Do you really believe that a hostile group would have difficulty finding important infrastructure to attack without an open infrastructure map?
I honestly do. A large part of what protects open, free societies is that the smartest people generally have better things to do than blowing shit up. If you’ve ever taken a close look at any heavy infrastructure, it should strike you how easy it would be to break into and disable (particularly if you aren’t concerned about getting caught).
On the balance, I still prefer these data being open. But there probably is a domestic-terrorism risk that’s amplified.
Having spent a log of time with visual programming and having also loved yahoo pipes, for me, it's time to find a new paradigm.
Last year, I came up with Breadboard Programming[1] which is visual programming using Node-RED but with a different perspective, that of a breadboard[2]. The point is take another perspective on programming and to find new parallels to how electronics are created using breadboards.
Breadboarding is prototyping but with the intention of throwing everything away or iterating by simply copying and pasting the entire code base and then throwing it away. The difference to typical software prototyping is that the prototype can easily be copied and iterated on. Normally prototypes mutate into the final product and then remain those mutated monsters that we were going to refactor before they went into production.
Seems to me that breadboard coding would be a like a spreadsheet where dependencies between cells are visible at a glance and could be "rewired" in a way that's easier than hand editing the formula text
Ah, yes - cross finance your loses by selling compute in your own data centres / hosting service because you can.
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