Marcus Moore
Forum Replies Created
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I hear what you’re saying, Franz- I just doubt you’ll find too many people around here who’ll think Philip would present info as verified unless it was. But let’s leave that- you’ve noted it.
The one point you bring up near the end of the OP is this question of FCPX growth as it relates to Mac growth. Apple has had a strong (some would say dominant) presence in creative computing since the beginning. US Mac marketshare has gone from under 5% in 2006 to 14% in 2013.
https://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2014/01/gartner_4Q13_us_trend.jpg
To think that FCPX sales should scale on the same curve would propose that everyone who’s buying a Mac is a potential Final Cut user. Whereas I think it would be an easy case to make that the Mac growth has come largely from more general computer users who don’t work in creative arts at all. You just have to look around to see the popularity with business users, students, developers… and all those “halo” users who’ve moved to the Mac after having good experiences with iPods or iPhones. If Mac sales growth was being driven strictly by creatives, then I don’t think Mac marketshare would have grown nearly as much as it has in the last decade. There’s just not enough of us relative to the whole computer market.
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I’m curious to see if Apple does a UX revamp of ProApps to go along with OSX this fall. Apple has been quick to get ProApps onboard OS changes in the past- see the 10.0.5 update to FCP X to go along with the release of the Retina MacBookPro. Pretty much simultaneous if I remember correctly.
With all the ProApps now sharing a common design language, I wonder how that sort of shift is handled? Do they all just work from the same graphical asset toolkit, or could there even be an internal ProApps “Xcode”, making any global shifts across ProApps easier for all the teams.
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Philip does press briefings just like Post magazine or Larry Jordan. I don’t think his stuff can be considered any less trustworthy.
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Hey Franz. I had a quick chat with Philip Hodgetts and anything that he puts up on his blog regarding numbers can be considered official. So you can take the 1.5 million sales, 2 million users to the bank.
Same for the “over 1 million” number. That’s sales, not “seats”, for sure.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Thanks for this. Vaguely interesting. Would be good to see back to release date.”
Hey Franz. This graph does represent FCP X rank history from it’s first day of release on the MacAppStore in June 2011.
[Franz Bieberkopf] “Actually we have no idea what the charts of the App Store mean. Apple makes no claims nor provides any information on what they represent.”
Well, it is somewhat self evident. Most downloaded paid apps on the MacAppStore. It’s actually quite remarkable to me that FCP X does as well in the rankings as this- considering “paid” apps are anything down to $.99.
Today, I’ll do an overlay of all the Apple ProApps on the same chart with the same scale so we can see how they rank relative to one another. I can say that since it’s release, Logic has been consistently the highest ranked. And even with the EOL announcement, Aperture continues to do very well.
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Only the info by Philip Hodgetts. Knowing him I’d say anything he says is very likely true, but I can’t support that any other way.
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Great work Franz on collating all the relevant quotes- you just pulled the rug out from under one of my future blog posts! 😉
I have a chart here from a post I’m working on that might bring some additional colour to the curve on FCP X growth.
Though much info is NOT available for publication, joining AppAnnie did give me access to historical charts of MacAppStore sales. Top Grossing and Top Downloads for Paid or Free apps.
Here’s the chart showing FCPX’s placement on the US Top Paid Downloads (NOT highest grossing)
I’ve marked the graph with the Spring 2012 and Spring 2014 numbers. There’s a lot of fluctuation in the graph because it’s based on DAILY rank info. I think a monthly average would give us a clearer picture of what’s going on, but I haven’t had time to do that yet-
If top rank has any correlation with the number of sales (which I can only assume it must), then it seems FCPX’s rank on the scale has been on an upswing since about the release of 10.1.
Before December 2013 FCPX seems to have bounced around between 10th and 20th place for most of 2012/2013. Since last December though, it’s averaged between 5th and 15th.
Theoretically there’s a vertical axis here we’re missing- that would incorporate the growth of the MacAppStore as a whole. The only public number I could find was December 12, 2011- when Apple said they had reached 100 million downloads.
It would seem to me that if FCPX adoption was slowing as your graph depicts; then we’d be seeing something in the graph that looks more like 2012 than what’s happening so far in 2014.
All this is just interesting.
What I do find equally surprising, is that there’s actually so many data points in your graph. For a company as secretive as Apple, have they released more solid info than anyone else?
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I’m inclined to believe that Apple (and as noted by Philip who I trust on these points) counts sales as SALES. Over 1 million = over 1 million x $299. However many machines it’s being used on is unknown. Of all companies, Apple tends to be the most honest in accounting for this stuff. See their quarterly reports of SALES of devices, not shipments, not percentage increase from last year. No one else provides that hard info.
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Nothing gained feature-wise in 10.1.3, but some much needed bug fixes. 10.1.2 wasn’t huge on the feature front either, but some nice enhancements and closing some more holes in the media management side.
With the last two updates primarily geared towards the Libraries and Event Browser windows, most of the big “wants” seem to be around audio and timeline organization- Project Timeline oriented. I hope that’s where the focus will be in the next feature update.
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One thing I’m starting to realize would be really useful would be the ability to command-select a Connected Storyline, so that Final Cut assumes you want to make all your edits into that until you “unlock” it. Too often I find I’ve been working in a Secondary Storyline and accidentally clicked somewhere outside of it, and the next keyboard edit I make puts the new shot into the Primary Storyline.
