Adobe were the breakthrough company to develop video editing on Mac, with what is now Premiere. Final Cut was a spinoff of that when the developer left for Macromedia, which was in turn split between Apple and Adobe (FC & Flash, respectively): http://steveblank.com/2009/05/11/supermac-war-story-x-the-vi...
Now you're right about Apple's price cutting, and it's more obvious how this drove down the cost of video - but on the music side while you had ProTools at the extreme high end and Logic at the prosumer price, over on the (post-Atari) PC side you had very aggressive competition from Steinberg (Cubase), then Cakewalk, and ultimately a host of others - not to mention trackers. eMagic had a big first-mover advantage in their price space, but competitors were really eroding that with a combination of pricing and ease-of-use. I personally think EMagic would have gone bust within 2 years if they hadn't been able to fall into Apple's arms.
To be fair to Apple, they were very smart to focus on things like high bus bandwidth and high-resolution hardware timers which are de rigeur for this sort of work. Wintel was able to play catch-up in large part because of the rise of electronic music, where things like hardware latency and so forth were less critical.
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Well, the cliff notes version:
Adobe were the breakthrough company to develop video editing on Mac, with what is now Premiere. Final Cut was a spinoff of that when the developer left for Macromedia, which was in turn split between Apple and Adobe (FC & Flash, respectively): http://steveblank.com/2009/05/11/supermac-war-story-x-the-vi...
Now you're right about Apple's price cutting, and it's more obvious how this drove down the cost of video - but on the music side while you had ProTools at the extreme high end and Logic at the prosumer price, over on the (post-Atari) PC side you had very aggressive competition from Steinberg (Cubase), then Cakewalk, and ultimately a host of others - not to mention trackers. eMagic had a big first-mover advantage in their price space, but competitors were really eroding that with a combination of pricing and ease-of-use. I personally think EMagic would have gone bust within 2 years if they hadn't been able to fall into Apple's arms.
To be fair to Apple, they were very smart to focus on things like high bus bandwidth and high-resolution hardware timers which are de rigeur for this sort of work. Wintel was able to play catch-up in large part because of the rise of electronic music, where things like hardware latency and so forth were less critical.
Wasn't Premiere actually developed by SuperMac and purchased by Adobe?
Yes, sorry. I should have said 'product that became Adobe Premiere' - my point being that it was another 3rd party app.