Aperture versus Lightroom
I just read with great interest your comparison between Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom (“The New Digital Darkroom,” July 2007). It seems to me that you left out the most important difference between the two: their hardware requirements. I downloaded the Aperture demo and attempted to use it on my 1.67GHz PowerBook G4, even though the company states that a G5 or Intel Mac is the preferred platform. Aperture crawled on my PowerBook. It took forever to import Raw images and load those images for editing, and in general it was very sluggish. Lightroom, on the other hand, seems like it was made for older Macs. Downloading, loading, and editing happened quickly. I bought Lightroom for those reasons and for its integration with Adobe Photoshop. The hardware issue could be the thing that makes someone choose one piece of software over the other—especially since they’re so close in terms of what they do.– Paul Papanek
The hardware requirements for Aperture are certainly more stringent than those for Lightroom. But both prod-ucts will tax your sys-tem regardless of your processor, particularly as your library grows.—Rick LePage
The other advantage
Your article on Apple’s use of LED backlit displays (“LED-Backlit Displays Coming Soon,” Mac Beat, July 2007) missed a key point about this issue: battery life. It’s been reported that in some testing, LED displays increased battery life up to 11 times. That means no batteries dying during important Skype calls or PowerPoint presentations, or while you’re watching DVDs on a plane.– Harrison Roday
Safari’s incompatibilities
One thing Safari needs to get right is compatibility with secure sections of Internet commerce sites. Several times, when trying to make a purchase via the Internet, I’ve been stonewalled on the last link before checking out, and Safari has just given up on me. So I start all over again using Mozilla Firefox instead, my transaction goes through, and then I switch back. It’s a pain, but I hold out hope that Apple will work it out . . . sometime soon. If Internet Explorer and Firefox can do it, then why can’t Safari?– Michael Martin
All the way to 11
Somewhere between the time you polled readers about their plans to upgrade to Leopard and the appearance of that poll’s results in the July Feedback, the number of respondents grew: according to your pie chart, 125 percent of respondents indicated that they were going to do something or other about Leopard. Now that’s enthusiasm!– Rob Gillespie
Please accept our apologies for that typographical error. “I don’t have plans to upgrade at this time” should have read 11 percent, not 36 percent.—Dan Miller