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Where Apple Makes Its Money
Final Cut Pro can be assumed to represent a rather small fraction of that green “software” segment (as well as some small fraction of the Mac hardware segment).
High-end film and video users of FCP — those who might need features like OMF, XML, EDL and SDI output — are a further small fraction of those small fractions.
from https://www.cultofmac.com/where-apple-makes-its-money-software/77987
I enjoyed using FCP 2 through 7 (and will continue to use FCP7 until it becomes impracticable), but also am disheartened that Apple is pretty clearly moving away from the high-end of the film and video marketplace with FCP-X —- even if it’s not particularly surprising given Apple’s overall revenue picture shown above, as well as it’s past moves away from that marketplace.
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2 Replies
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Lets not forget that quite a bit of that editing software also sold a Mac Pro and/or a MBP. Some also bought memory, monitors, drives, graphics cards and other toys thru apple.
Lets say the pro’s that represents the small percentage of the over one million FCP licenses spends about 6k average with apple. And there are only about 20,000 of them world-wide. That alone is $120,000,000.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.comI have a system, it has stuff in it, and stuff hooked to it. I have a camera, it can record stuff. I read the manuals, and know how to use this stuff and lots of other stuff too.
You should be suitably impressed…“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
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Apple can charge a premium for most of its products. The question implicit in many of the FCPX discussions is ‘why?’. To what extent is Apple’s brand driven by ‘cool’, and to what extent is that image driven through brand endorsement by many of the world’s leading creatives?
If the company is selling out its position as the creative person’s platform of choice, how might this impact on total sales? While these figures show sales doubling in 18 months, how sustainable is the new high, especially if by dumbing down software a new generation of managers damage the brand?
Hopefully these are questions that are being discussed urgently at the highest levels in Cupertino. There are graphs like the one you replicate in the history of many corporations, but they don’t trend up forever, especially where the mobile phone is concerned. In fact if you can generalise about the history of large corporations, those that become aloof from their original customer base, EOL successful products (even if they are loss leaders) and release products as ambiguously targeted as FCPX, typically experience a decline as swift and as steep as the kind of sudden rise the Cupertino graph illustrates.
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