burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Very few good ones, IMHO. He rescued Apple from bankruptcy and changed the worlds of music, telephony, photography, filmmaking, and computing. He brought the fantasies of our youth to life. And he was probably the ultimate project manager.

If you're not p*ssing someone off, you're probably not doing your job. Jobs made some scary tsunami sized waves that hit some folks when they weren't looking... not that they didn't need to be hit. (Lead, follow, or get out of the way...)

Jobs' best characteristic in his youth was to care about results, not money or people. By focusing on results, ironically, he made lots of money and attracted lots of great people.

But he became pragmatic enough to care deeply about money and people when he came back to Apple. It took guts to pare Apple back to its fundamental core and rebuild it on that solid foundation.

People seem to love Apple or hate them. I like their products. I have used many of them to accomplish significant career goals. But I've also used DOS and Windows PCs since 1986, often with a PC and a Mac running at the same time.

I chose the Mac because it made sense to me. I used the PC because I had to. Now I run Windows on a Mac in Parallels Desktop when needed.

I wish Microsoft well, too. With Ballmer gone, they have some mojo back. Their products are starting to look really good.

We NEED competition in the electronics world. We NEED Apple vs. Microsoft, Apple vs. Google, Apple vs. Samsung... Competition keeps pricing honest and innovation interesting.

cmoroney Loc: Pasadena, California

Rebuilding MacOS on a UNIX core was a brilliant idea, and pretty revolutionary thinking to take *the* industrial strength operating system and wrap a great GUI around it rather than just tweaking what was already there. Macs look great, have the best OS out there, a gorgeous GUI and they *just work*. So, I can use it for both my software engineering plus my photography, all in one.

Yes, competition keeps everybody on their toes. Otherwise things get stale and everybody loses in the end. Apple has made a couple of big paradigm shifts (OS X, Intel chips) that people who were heavily invested in the old system were unhappy about, but the end result is miles better and worth the disruption.

And, to the original poster, just get used to Lightroom. Migrating is not all that difficult, and LR is being continually updated and improved. Aperture was pretty old and to my mind really wasn't a worthy competitor anymore. I'm very glad to have made the switch myself, which I wouldn't have done without the kick in the pants of Aperture support being dropped.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Adobe's advantage was cross-platform compatibility. Aperture was Apple only.

Steve_m Loc: Southern California

You are right about Jobs. He was very complicated persona. I used to work in Silicon Valley for Verbatim. We were a sole supplier of 5 1/4 floppies for Apple. I never met Jobs, but I met a lot of people who worked directly for him and they described it as a hell on earth. I admired him as a visionary, but disliked his disregard for consumers. True, some of Apple product is excellent and keeps competition on their toes. On the other hand, they expedited some products which shouldn't leave Apple's warehouse. And it did, and for LOT of money. Do you know that Apple's profit margin on the iPhone is 91%? I am all for making money, but this is downright immoral and nasty.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

I used some of those 5.25" floppies!

Hey, they build the most popular/addictive mousetrap. Meanwhile, they're working on the next big things.

Maybe we will see some of their manufacturing come back here... maybe things will change enough so that they can stash cash here without such high tax penalties. 2017 should get interesting.

rook2c4 Loc: Philadelphia, PA USA

I'd put it differently:
The problem is that consumers are powerless, they have little choice other than to accept what they are fed.

InFocusFl Loc: Kennedy Space Center, FL

Still using my Aperture with Sierra and it works great. Also, MacPhun is providing Aurora 2017 and Luminar plug-ins for it, so I have no reason to leave this app. I'm very comfortable with it, I have new tools to access within it, and I own them all outright without recurring subscriptions. As long as it remains functional under future Mac OS updates, I see no reason to leave. For that matter, if a futute update breaks it, I'm good with freezing my workflow iMac at the latest compatible version. It's fast, big and does the job I need it to do.

InFocusFl Loc: Kennedy Space Center, FL

LOL! I stil have a couple of boxes of those floppies, and a functional Mac PowerBook that can use them. :)

InFocusFl Loc: Kennedy Space Center, FL

In case anyone beside myself is interested, Aperture runs on Big Sur with a helper app called Retroactive (https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive#readme).