However, Apple are currenty trying to own the whole process. There's little chance that a third party can build a supported plug-in, there's no chance that somebody can gain access to the RAW transformations outside the application. Adobe are making their process more open, and as with Photoshop, that's what is going to attract power users. Once you've applied a RAW transformation to all or many photos, other plug-ins or applications can work with the photos easily.
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DrGoon

I confesss to feeling a bit cheated that I can't run Aperture on my Mini, especially as there's 2 gigs of RAM turning up for it today, and it looks as if this Merom upgrade will be feasible (although whether cost-effective is another story).

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I must say that I find the Intel graphics included on Minis and MacBooks (as opposed to MacBook Pros, shite naming) a bit disappointing. I was hoping they'd release a notebook smaller than the 15" with decent graphics. Even the otherwise superb Fujitsu Lifebook Q2010 (the size I'm looking for, but not the price) has one of these horrid graphics chips. It has to be an ATI X1600/X1800 or an nVidia Go 7800/7900 folks.

You know what Apple should do? Sell OS X without the trusted computing chip requirement for a premium price - so that people can run it on any PC. Sure, they'd lose some Mac sales from people affluent enough to buy Macs but dishonest enough to steal software, but I suspect they'd gain more from people who'd spend a few hundred bucks on a decent OS for alternative platforms. Like tiny notebooks, or huge ones like the latest Dell 20".

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DrGoon

So won't folk be able to hack it? I mean, Tiger's been hacked to run on x86 hardware, so surely every new version will be as well.

That Lifebook looks extremely sexy..

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Trusted computing is bad. So bad we'll probably all be forced to use it to access a public network in all Wassenaar signatory counties one day. Meanwhile, if you want to watch the TPM in action, you can use this:

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/syscall/

The Lifebook is super sexy (apart from the shitty video) until you see that it costs $5000.
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DrGoon

The latest Aperture (1.5.1 as I type) supports any old graphics card, and therefore runs on my Mini. Loads of folk out there reckon it's too slow to be usable, but the brief play I've had with it reveals that it's more or less the same, speed-wise, as the latest Lightroom beta (4.1).

At times, there is a spinning beachball, but it isn't there for long.

I would miss the workflow sections of Lightroom if I had to use Aperture.

But I like the way Aperture creates a new image for each adjustment you make to the original, so you can have 'versions' without having to export multiple times.

And the way it uses 'stacks'.

So the jury's out on which of these I'll eventually buy once Lightroom's released.

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