Aperture simply unusable on new iMac with…

Aperture simply unusable on new iMac with Lion

I bought a new iMac having been a happy user for many years (iMac 21.5" i3 3.06GHz with 4G RAM), and thought I'd upgrade to Aperture as I want to get a little more creative with my photos.

I was astounded when I imported my iPhoto library of about 60GB that it was still "processing"after 24 hours, but I let it be and it seemed ok

I've just done my first import of about 300 photos from a holiday (they're on an 16GB card so it can't be that big...) and all seemed fine until I quit Aperture and reopened it - now it's back to "processing" and running at snail's pace. It's been at it for about an hour so far.

This renders this totally useless software - but if I click on "report a problem" on the email receipt, I'm simply taken to the support pages - and if I try to actually contact Apple they tell me my hardware is out of its free support period so there's nothing I can do!

This is absolutely outrageous - I paid £55 for software that simply doesn't work on an almost new machine - and yet apparently it's tough because my machine is more than 3 months old! Can this be right?

And am I missing something, or is Aperture supposed to take several hours to open up? It's unuseable as it is.

Secondly, where are my photos that I've uploaded into Aperture? I've deleted them off the card, so I want to at least import them into iPhoto so I can give up using this heap of junk and ask for my money back.

Thanks

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Aug 20, 2011 12:00 PM

Aug 24, 2011 7:05 AM in response to SierraDragon

SierraDragon wrote:

This story has been playing out - literally for decades - with pro graphics apps. OS versions change, app versions change, users' demands are widely varied and vendors usually spec only minimum RAM requirements. Users need to realize:

• RAM needs increase over time. Fortunately RAM prices fall.

• GPU demands increase over time.

• New OS versions and/or new app versions frequently present added hardware challenges.

We should expect the above, not be surprised by it. And we should plan our hardware purchases, equipment life cycles and OS/app upgrades accordingly.

-Allen

Allen

Congratulations on a really nicely worded set of observations. This is indeed reality, and it is a good reality.

I would add that the reason for RAM needs increasing over time is precisely because the cost of RAM continues to plummet.

If RAM still cost what it did back in 1985, we'd still be working with Macs with 128 kilobytes of memory!

It is this reduction of cost that has enabled function to be added and responsiveness to be maintained. It is also one of the reasons why all computers eventually run out of gas. Software enhancements relient on the most modern technology simply leave the older computers behind.

To continue to use older computers and avoid upgrades, the only choice is to stay with the software which was suitable for that old computer. There is nothing wrong with that, it worked fine before and will continue to work fine for some time, so long as eventually, the lack of support is not an issue.

To call this "coding errrors and bad software in general, basic QA sloppiness and such" is naive in the extreme.

The last paragraph of your post is such good advice, I have to paste it below. Thanks for a great post, Allen.

"We should expect the above, not be surprised by it. And we should plan our hardware purchases, equipment life cycles and OS/app upgrades accordingly."