What can Aperature do that I can't get elsewhere?

Question

I'm looking through the specs on Aperature.. and for the life of me, I can't seem to get my head around what the product offers that the combination of iPhoto and Photoshop can't handle.
iPhoto organizes, does simple red-eye correction, and can print a book. Photoshop handles the heavy lifting, retouching, image control... Why do I need this product? What am I missing?
The only thing I see is that I can move between Aperature and Photoshop easier than with iPhoto. And I'd have greater control over book design. Is that it? iPhoto handles RAW images. Am I wrong?

Answer 1

You're missing the point. Aperture is about speeding up a professional photographer's workflow (quote from apple.com/aperture):
"Featuring a RAW-focused workflow, Aperture makes RAW as easy as JPEG, letting you import, edit, catalog, organize, retouch, publish, and archive your images more effectively and efficiently than ever before. From capture to output, you work directly with your RAW files, never having to first convert them into another format before viewing, adjusting, organizing, or printing them"
Key is it's faster to do this whole process. If you watch the videos, they all have something in common -- LOTS of images (say, 1000 a day), that have to be compared, and reduced to somewhere between 10 (for an SI article) and 100 (for a wedding photographer), very quickly. Retouching (photo editing) is part of things, but certainly it's not the focus of things.
The ability to group photos into stacks and find the best shots (out of 8 or 10) I'm finding quite useful. While I primarily do landscape (and as a hobby), I often take a similar shot 10 times at different shutter speeds, apertures, and exposures (a little bracketing), so I can find one that captures what I want, exactly. Aperture lets me find that shot quite quickly. Then, at the moment, I am doing most of my editing work in Photoshop, because I understand how to do that better, and because I have some tools (Nik Sharpener Pro, and Noise Ninja, specifically), which do things much better than Aperture can, and because I like the ability to later "tinker" with the levels, curves, and saturation layers I've created. Oh, and I use masks. Lots. I LOVE masks. But this is all really the high-end core Photoshop feature set, and really stuff used for fine art photographers, more than wedding/sports folks. So I still use 2 tools. But I like aperture for rating, tagging, and organizing. I've used iView Media Pro (paid for it), and Bridge, but I like Aperture better, already. And I know it will improve.