Has apple stopped Raw compatibility updates??

Question

I Just looked at all of the raw updates over the past year.  Shortest time between updates.... 3 weeks,  longest time 9 weeks, average, 6.3 weeks.  Time since last update 10 weeks.
i Have brought this up in other forums and people are saying either Apple is dropping support for iphoto and Aperture and to not expect any further updates.  Others say dont worry Apple is committed to photographers.
THe current evidence is supporting the naysayers.  If they do not update soon.... I can read the handwriting on the wall and its off to LR... but I really hope not.

Answer 1

The subtext in your question is really all about Apple's priorities: how much energy is it putting into meeting the needs of pro and amateur photographers who use cameras that shoot RAW?
I doubt that Apple is too busy to find the time (although they've got a lot of money to count), and even if that were so, it says something about priorities. But there are tons of alternatives; even open source RAW conversion applications like dcraw/RAWTherapee have a more recent list of supported cameras.
But consider RAW support and what it means. Traditionally Apple doesn't try to support tons of different kinds of hardware. If you want your hardware to work with Apple's system it's sorta on you to make it happen. Consider another image input: scanners. Canon has to provide the driver; Apple now bundles those in system upgrades, but I doubt they have someone writing them. It's up to Canon to do that. Most camera manufacturers don't publish specs about their RAW files; much of the work has been done by sorta reverse engineering them. dcraw started doing that a long time ago, and is behind some of the software you see out there today (RAWTherapee is an example). That's not necessarily bad, I guess, since the intial processing of RAW files gives developers reason to say their software (CaptureOne, LR, DxO, etc) does a better job of this than others.
And Apple has more to do than say PhaseOne. Their camera RAW updates also work with the image i/o framework to identify the filetype and make it available to more than Aperture or iPhoto; that's why you can "see" the RAWs in icon views in Finder windows, in QuickLook, and in other applications that rely on Apple for RAW support. So I imagine it's not as easy for them as for one-off application developers. I'd also be curious to know whether the camera manufacturers support Apple's work. Do they give them the specs for the RAWs? There's probably no reason why, in addition, that the manufacturers couldn't make a qlgenerator plugin (for QuickLook) that would make their RAW files visible in the Finder. I have one made by EyeTV, for example.
So while we're all speculating here, I'd say that it's possible that some of this might be down to your camera manufacturer. Love to know if that's true. And maybe the whole system for doing RAW is changing. Perhaps Apple is putting more onus on the camera guys to do the work; can't say I'd blame 'em.
I don't know if it's still true, but some folks have had to use Pacifist to load the RAW support if they didn't have iPhoto or Aperture installed. This led someone to write a qlgenerator for folks with that dilemma (http://rene.rebe.de/2013-08-11/exactimage-quicklook-w-camera-raw-support/). Although it wouldn't do the conversion for you, it might make your currently unsupported RAW files more usuable on your Mac.
While I think Apple whiffed with the whole Aperture thing, and I can see why some are very annoyed with them, it's not like there's a lack of alternatives.