About a month ago, I lined up about 500 Nikon raw portrait photos all taken from an FX format camera (D800E) with the same lens at the same settings. I then bought Lightroom and Capture One, and said, "OK, let's nail this once and for all". I already had Aperture 3. After working with those 3 programs for about a week, I concluded that Aperture won the contest in all categories: ease of use, UI design, color output, raw rendering, export faithfulness. LR and CO have some interesting and powerful tools, but Aperture creates the most vibrant, vital, and truly alive photos, even right out of the box (default settings).

I actually think that CO produces the best raw rendering, but it's hardest to use. The UI is clumsy, inconsistent and confusing; a mess, actually. LR is middle of the road in UI design. LR and Aperture, however, take directly opposite approaches to the UI. Both are clean and logical. LR wants to make you use their tabbed functional dichotomy (library, develop, share, etc), while Aperture gives the user everything he would ever want to do in one packed paneled layout, navigable with simple single-letter keystrokes. I like Apple's pile-it-all-together approach over LR and CO.

And, again, the exported results from Aperture by far beats the output of both CO and LR.

IMHO.

I agree on this one. Not provide any trials at all are not the right way to attract new or former customers.

The price in AppStore is quite good, but I do not want to spend even this sum if I can't try it before I buy it.

100% agree, the poster's experiences tally with mine. I'm a happy Lightroom user, but would still like to give Aperture a go. Given the circumstances and the upgrade policy of the App Store, I thought it best to see if Apple demonstrate its support with version 4 before looking at splashing out.

You can at least read the Aperture reviews in the App Store. It seems this is now yet another neglected Apple app with a lot of unhappy users.

It seems despite all that cash Apple is sitting on it can not maintain and polish its own suite of software. This goes right across the board, not just Aperture but XCode, iWork, iLife etc.

Apple is trashing its reputation with all but the new impressionable bottom of the barrel consumers.

So sad. I think this might be Apple's Titanic II moment. Full steam ahead and damn the icebergs.

What a BS! Aperture is excellent and well maintained application. Apple provided many useful enhancements to current version since it was first published in 2010. Other companies would call it 'new version' and ask you to pay upgrade fee, but Apple simply adds it for free as minor updates. Now we have version 3.4, and it is really fast and efficient piece of software.

Highly recommended to all serious photographers!

BS on your BS! You can not upgrade Aperture, the massive all-in-one minor upgrades, unless you also upgrade your System. Something Apple blocks on not that old Macs.

Hmm... I believe most of the speed issues were with Face Recognition which can take a lot of resources and slow things down, especially after importing a lot of photos. Some people chose to turn off that feature which dramatically increased performance; others just let Aperture run for a few hours after import of photos before trying to use the program.

Same here, 3.4 wouldn't launch for me at all, I was freaking. Decided to try and delete all my preference files for it and it worked like a charm.

Yes, it also says I do not have Aperture 3 installed and quits right after launch. I too have downloaded the demo version, for which I then bought a license in the Apple Store.

Anyone know how to fix this?

Ah, found a fix in Apple's support forums:
Deleting the following file from Library > Preferences fixed this for me (thanks, Jay Klein!):
com.apple.AECT.plist