Apple is acquiring Pixelmator

What this could mean for Apple’s photography app strategy

Just when you thought all of the big Apple news for the week was done, today we learned that Apple is acquiring Pixelmator. For those unfamiliar, Pixelmator is a company that makes software for doing advanced photo editing, photo organization, and design in a very Apple-like way, and exclusively for Apple platforms. I think of them as developing software that is beyond the capabilities of Apple’s own Photos app for people who need more, but don’t need the full Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Having said that, I think it’s also fair to say that Pixelmator’s products compete with many of things that Adobe’s products do.

Apple used to have a pretty simple Mac hardware strategy: iBook and iMac = consumer hardware, PowerBook and PowerMac = professional hardware. Likewise Apple really used to emphasize its free iLife consumer software like iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand versus its professional software like Aperture, Final Cut Pro, and Logic. Over time the Mac hardware lineup has gotten a little blurred between consumer and professional customers. And while Final Cut Pro and Logic live on as Apple’s pro creative software, Aperture was abandoned many years ago.

So what will Apple do with Pixelmator’s software products? If it goes like the Dark Sky acquisition four years ago, then Apple will just take the Pixelmator team and task them with enhancing the feature set of Apple Photos. That would definitely be a win for Apple’s customers, but I think it would be a disappointing development given the potential of that team.

What I hope they actually do is, yes, make Photos even better, but also continue to offer Pixelmator Pro as a pro (or prosumer) app to stand alongside Apple’s other pro software titles. There’s a real potential for Apple to capture much of Adobe’s customer base, if they want to go for that. Companies all over the world are currently paying high licensing fees to Adobe to equip their creative teams with the full Adobe Creative Suite. Pixelmator can’t replace all of the things that Photoshop and InDesign can do, but there’s an awful lot of firms that could get all they need out of Pixelmator.

Apart from Apple moving the existing Pixelmator software products under the Apple section of the App Store, there’s probably not much that’s going to happen in the way of news about Apple’s software strategy around this until WWDC 2025 at the earliest, but it’s certainly an area that it’s going to be interesting to watch.