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The Apple Paradox, Closed Culture & Free-Thinking Fans
waderoush writes "The secrecy surrounding the expected Apple tablet computer is only the latest example of the company's famously closed and controlling culture. Yet millions of designers, musicians, and other creative professionals love their Apple products, and the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity. How can a company whose philosophy of information sharing is so at odds with that of most of its customers be so successful? This Xconomy essay explores three possible explanations. 1) Closed innovation, overseen by a guiding genius like Steve Jobs, may be the only way to build such coherent, compelling products. 2) Apple's hardware turns out to be more 'open' than the company intended — Jobs originally wanted to keep third-party apps off the iPhone, for example. 3) Related to #1: customers are pragmatic about quality, and the open source and free software movements haven't produced anything remotely as useful as Mac OS X and the iPhone."
Further the notion that "the Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity" is about a decade out of date.
I spend most of my days in various professional recording studios video production houses and you see a lot fewer Macs than you used to.
You are welcome on my lawn.
From my perspective, getting an Apple laptop is the easiest way to get a nice, portable laptop which runs a Unix system (which, with MacPorts, I can get all the unixy goodness) AND to make sure that the hardware is guaranteed to work. I don't need to worry about whether the new kernel broke support for ndiswrapper, I don't need to worry about the regressions in hardware support that have hit my Linuxy friends, and I have a GUI that gets as close as I've seen to the DWIM pattern.
And I have a scriptable GUI. Say what you will about its syntax, AppleScript allows some wonderful scripting possibilities. And you can call out to a shell script, so it's also powerful :)
:wq
I spend most of my days in various professional recording studios video production houses and you see a lot fewer Macs than you used to.
Funny, all the IT professionals and programmers I meet seem to be using MacBooks these days.
- These characters were randomly selected.
The lack of Intel processors the first half of last decade went a long way towards that. Programs like Lightwave and Maya began optimizing their rendering engines for x86. By 2005 there was a stark difference rendering times on PPC and Intel machines with Intel beating the crap out of the PPC. Plus some of the larger shops began supporting Maya on Linux. Especially for their render farms.
That being said, I dealt with those on the small to medium side of the house almost all went Mac primarily for the software. I know a of shops that used dedicated NLA devices for editing in the 1990's and then went to Final Cut Pro. I know many more who switched from Premiere on the PC to FCP on mac because Premiere 6 was highly unstable on a lot of Windows boxes compared to FCP 3. Then Apple acquired Shake and made sure that Shake + a PowerMac/MacPro cost the same as Shake for Linux. And then dropped the price to $500 for OSX three months after I paid $3k for the software....
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The exact same thing can be said for Linux fans, Windows fans, or any other clique.
I heard something this morning about the "hidden brain" on NPR's Morning Edition, and the author was explaining how the choices we make may not entirely come from our "rational" conscious mind. I know I'm butchering this up so go find a podcast, but your "hidden brain" is rather dumb and makes its choices by what is sees as prevalent in the environment around them.
So this could be:
"I like Windows - because everybody around me uses windows." or
"I think Apple Users are gay, because I observe that 1) the "creative artists" in popular culture appear to be gay, and 2) I see Apple is creative with their designs therefore they must be gay too." or
"I like Apple because I observe a lot of Windows machines crash and have viruses" or
"I like linux because I observe a lot of nerds uses it and I want to be a nerd too."
Anyway, it's just a theory...
I like Apples myself and I'm not gay and I don't think all my scientist colleagues which use Macs are either... not that there is anything wrong with being gay (Sienfield Reference).
Use what you are happy with, everything else is an illusion.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I just got done hearing a report from a young guy who suffered amnesia in India. He was a Fullbright scholar studying for a year, but when he came to, he had no idea where he was or what he was doing, or even who he was. He got taken into drug rehab because people thought he was a heroin user. He bought into this storyline because he had absolutely no basis for challenging it. He finally called his parents and started apologizing profusely for being a bad son. "We just talked to you on Tuesday".
:)
He said that the only clues he had as to who he was were how other people treated him, so he totally went with it. There seems to be a mental need to conform to your surroundings and other people's expectations of you.
I think this was the last story on This American Life. Yay for NPR!
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso