Filed under: Software, Reviews
Ars on Aperture
Dave Girard over at Ars Technica has a must-read review on Aperture. I particularly like the first bits of the review: "Apple has cojones. Let's not pretend otherwise. Jumping headfirst into the fully mature digital imaging market requires the shameless bravado of a one-legged man at a butt-kicking contest or any number of contestants on So You Think You Can Dance?" It's a good review complete with screencast examples of different parts of Aperture being discussed. As we've come to expect from Ars Technica, it's a thorough review, weighing in at 9 pages.Unfortunately for Apple, the conclusion isn't all that great: "Maybe by 2.0 Apple will have the foundation sorted out. At this stage Aperture is a big, expensive misfire and considering the hefty price tag, I can't think of a reason to recommend it." I guess I'll wait for version 2.0.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jeremy said 4:21PM on 12-05-2005
I tried, um, a "demo" version of Aperture to see if it would be worth buying (I'm a serious photographer). I, too, came to the conclusion that, while it's a "better iPhoto", it's not worth buying. And certainly one should NEVER use it for RAW conversion, at which it is quite bad.
And it's slow as crap on my mere dual-2Ghz G5 with 2 gigs of RAM. I mean, come on.
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Daniel said 5:12PM on 12-05-2005
As with any 1.x release, there will be serious bugs and "features" which just annoy people.. The one thing that annoys me is the sheer processing power this needs, hell did anyone in the dev team actually have a crap mac to code on or was it dual core machines all the way?
I have a dual 2ghz with 8gb of ram and this runs like a dog.. Hell even my Logic 7 with 12 instruments loaded runs better. Come on apple your getting like Bill now
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Kevin Long said 5:40PM on 12-05-2005
I am quite sure that these comments are a farce. I have read a number of reviews and wile powerbook users say the app is slow, G5 DP users are not having the same issues.
Were did you get a demo copy of the app?
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Mirko said 5:44PM on 12-05-2005
This is weird but I'm glad both good and bad reviews are coming out.
Others reported quite different opinions regarding Aperture. Derrek Story over at the Mac Dev Center writes: "my laptop is only about a year old. It's a 1.5 GHz PowerPC G4 with 1.5 GB DDR SDRAM and a 80 GB hard drive. I have the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics card with 64 MB VRAM." and as Aperture goes he writes: "Overall application performance is quite acceptable."
http://macdevcenter.com/pub/wlg/8644
Now I guess the measurement of an application being slow or fast is purely subjective in this case. If anyone has any benchmarks I'd like to see them.
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djones said 6:51PM on 12-05-2005
These "bad" reviews are great news, especially the one at Ars, which is arguably one of the few reliable places for reviews. Many of the positive ones I've seen so far are from amateur photographer bloggers. No thanks. The experience of a professional production environment that the Ars author has is absolutely necessary for an accurate review of a $500 piece of software targetted at that precise audience.
Now, as to why I consider this GREAT NEWS? Did any of you ever read any industry reviews of Final Cut Pro 1.0? :P
If the 1.0 is this good, then by the time we get to 3 or 4, we'll have another fine piece of software that demands respect and turns a stale industry on its head.
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Kevin Long said 9:57PM on 12-05-2005
I am quite sure that these comments are a farce. I have read a number of reviews and wile powerbook users say the app is slow, G5 DP users are not having the same issues.
Were did you get a demo copy of the app?
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Kevin Long said 10:18PM on 12-05-2005
I am quite sure that these comments are a farce. I have read a number of reviews and wile powerbook users say the app is slow, G5 DP users are not having the same issues.
Were did you get a demo copy of the app?
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zetasmack said 11:26PM on 12-05-2005
i have a dual 2.3ghz g5 with 3.5gb of ram and aperture runs pretty damn slow. i mean its not painful to use, but it's not nearly as quick as i would like. and it was written for the ppc architecture, it's not a universal binary.
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Andrew Turner said 10:37AM on 12-06-2005
I believe all of the commenters posting their specs are missing a very important piece of information to share:
Video card.
From what I've read on Aperture's specs and how it works, it relies heavily on the GPU. This is especially true on Mac OS X (vs. other OS's), since Apple has moved a lot of graphics processing over the pipeline to graphics card.
Therefore, you could have a Dual G5-2.5GHz machine w/ 8GB RAM and run slower if you have an older video card (ATI 9400?), vs. someone with a G4 powerbook running with 9700.
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Isaack said 11:51AM on 12-06-2005
I've seen several reporting it being "dog-slow"/"crawling" on their otherwise very fast computer with plenty of RAM. It sounds a bit weird, however from another personal review I discovered that Aperture apparently does alot of background processing without really letting the user know. And especially in the beginning when you are importing your huge library where it might indicate that it finished importing while it's actually still doing lots of background processing for possible hours.
This is ofcourse awesome, that it lets you begin working as soon as possible. But it might also give a wrong impression for first time users, or people who are just demoing the software.
Note. I haven't even touched Aperture myself yet. Just very interested and sucking up all articles and reviews I can find.
Along with the Arstechnica review... here's another interesting one
http://www.macintouch.com/aperture03.html
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geoff said 2:31PM on 12-06-2005
If the only annoyance was the RAW exporting, Aperture still wouldn't be worth buying. It's really unfortunate how this app was released - what were they thinking?
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