AppleInsider claims it’s becoming a prosumer app. I don’t buy it.

Final Cut Pro is the most popular pro video editing application in the world; it has something like 50% of the market, while everyone else splits the other 50%. Plus, it helps sell high-end hardware, and having real creative pros doing important things on the platform has significant value to the Apple brand.

Apple is unlikely to walk away from all of that.

But the thing about Apple under Jobs — at least since they got OS X on track and the iPod started taking off — is that they’re sort of fearless. They’re willing to launch themselves into markets against entrenched competitors, or launch products that nobody knows if there’s a market for. They’re willing to scrap highly successful products and replace them with products they know critics (and even some existing users) won’t like, but that they believe are better. They’re willing to fundamentally re-think things that nobody else really questions.

In general, they’re willing to do things that they know people will complain about loudly — but this gives them the flexibility to sometimes make exceptional products.

I suspect this is precisely where they’re headed with FCP. We’re going to get the OpenCL and Grand Central Dispatch goodness that everyone wants. But we’re not going to get an app with a strict superset of Final Cut Pro’s functionality. Instead, we’re going to get an app that Apple believes is better overall for the tasks video editors perform, even if some features are cut. And we might also get a significantly overhauled UI; something that results from a process of sitting down and questioning every assumption about how editing interfaces currently work.

In short, I think they’ll come up with something really interesting… that will probably cause a bunch of people to totally freak out about how Apple has ruined everything and make forceful public declarations about how they’re leaving the platform. Meanwhile, people actually willing to embrace the thing might discover it has a bit of that iPad ‘magic’.

I have no inside information; this is all merely based on watching Apple (and reaction to Apple’s products) closely for the last 10 years.