A single job posting for an engagement team doesn't really tell you if its a company strategy or not.

Directors hire on random ideas all the time and then pivot as needed

Bring. Back. Aperture!!! Yes there are alternative to Lightroom out there (Capture One, for example), but Aperture was so Mac native and was such a joy to use on OS X.

The Creator Studio is a pretty big miss for Apple. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote have always been productivity apps, not creativity apps (and there is a difference). Of the remaining apps, Pixelmator Pro is the only one that is remotely relevant to my needs, and I'm not subscribing to a $12.99/mo plan just for Pixelmator. Compared to $19.99/mo cost for a much more coherent set of Adobe photography and imagery tools, it's a no brainer to go with Adobe. Not the outcome I would prefer, but a bunch of audio and animation tools will be functionally useless to me, so I'm being asked to pay $12.99/mo for a photo editing app and some productivity tools I already have. I'm sure there are some people who will benefit from the breadth of the Apple bundle, but I don't expect there are THAT many.

The fact that it is impossible to get Pixelmator Pro outside the bundle just makes the situation more ridiculous, unless you want the legacy version.

Create serious pro/prosumer tools for creative verticals again (Aperture, you are dearly missed) and you'll have my attention.

I much prefer the interface of Pixelmator and Pages to Photoshop and InDesign, and paying once (for the non-AI-augmented version of Pixelmator, which Apple indicate will continue to receive some manner of updates going forward) is a nice plus.

It’s unfortunate there’s not a real Illustrator equivalent; Pixelmator has okay enough vector editing and export support for my needs, but notably will render the canvas rasterized at whatever the nominal resolution is even when zoomed in editing an SVG. Vector exports work as expected, just the editing is rasterized. Still, a small price to pay for not paying monthly for Adobe’s mountain of crufty malware.

It's a pity that Apple neglects its creative apps. I've been working on a video project using Motion recently, and while not as capable as After Effects, it's pretty serviceable and with some love could be excellent.

Probably safer to assume that they always had someone serving in this position and they recently left.

There’s no escaping that whatever money Apple makes from this will be a rounding error compared to iPhone / iOS revenue. I honestly think the apps would be better served to be sold to a smaller company where such revenue was a bigger piece of their pie and they were therefore incentivized to care about them.

Side note to author: the web renders really bad on mobile

Well it's a good thing they killed Aperture, then. Makes perfect sense.

(I was badly affected by that and decided not to trust them to maintain anything over the long term anymore)

Update: I now re-read the job posting and also realized that none of the responsibilities listed there are good for the users. This is bad news.

Why is this on front page HN? There is no concrete information here