Boston is a college town. Here in Boston, you can walk down a main street and see tons of coffee shops. In these coffee shops, like in many other coffee shops all around the country you will see many people sipping their coffee while surfing the web, checking their email, or doing any other thing on their Apple laptop.

This got me wondering. What would one of these many Mac users say if I were to ask them what kind of products Apple made. I assume that most people would answer that Apple is a hardware, operating system, and basic, consumer line, software company. Not many of these people would include that Apple makes some of the most used, professional grade creative applications. These include the more known Final Cut Pro, Aperture, and Logic Pro, as well as some of the lesser known pro applications such as Soundtrack Pro, MainStage 2, and Color. This got me thinking again. My thinking went a bit like this:

Adobe has CS5, their “Creative Suite” of professional design applications, many of which I am sure you have heard of. These include Photoshop, Dream Weaver, After Effects, and many more. One can buy the “Master Collection” which is all of the applications included in CS5 for around $2,500. Considering what you get, this is not a bad price.

Of course, like before, I got thinking. Why can’t Apple make their own creative suite? It would include all of their creative applications. It would have the more known things such as all of Final Cut Studio, or Logic Studio. But if you were to make a master version, of all the pro applications it could have the following:

Aperture

Final Cut Pro

Motion

Soundtrack Pro

Color

Compressor

DVD Studio Pro

Logic Pro

Studio Effects, Instruments and Loops

MainStage

At first this list looks like nothing compared to all of CS5, by when you really think about it, you can get almost as much done in these 10 applications, coupled with the applications built in to OSX as the 24 applications in CS5. Of course, you can not do some of the killer features that CS5 has (advanced photo editing with Photoshop, vector art with Illustrator, animation with Flash ect…) but you can come close.

I am not trying to argue that this could be a replacement for the master collection of CS5, but it would allow you to use your beloved Apple programs, instead of the Adobe competition. For example, Final Cut Pro is a much more advanced video editor than Premiere Pro CS5. In my opinion, Aperture is better than Light room.

If you were to add the prices of all of the aforementioned Apple applications, the MSRP of this collection would be around $1700 but I think Apple could sell it for $1400 and for what you get, that would be a steal.

I doubt Apple would ever come out with a set such as this, because it would not make sense to have someone who needs a photo editor, a video editor, and a music editor. These applications take years to master, and I doubt there are many professionals who need all three of these functions. If I were to guess, there are also probably not many people who legitimately buy the master collection of CS5 and use all of its features. This is why Adobe splits its suite into smaller collections, which Apple also does with having their own suites.

In summary, it would be cool, but it is not going to happen.