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Is Apple Pushing Away Professionals?
Barence writes "Is Apple turning its back on professional users to focus on consumers? That's the argument in this article, which claims Apple is alienating the creative professionals who have supported the company for 20 years or more. Fury over the dumbing down of Final Cut Pro, Apple's refusal to sell non-glossy screens and poor value hardware is fueling anger from professional Mac users. 'People will get hacked off. I'm only Apple because I want the OS, but if I could come up with a 'Hackintosh' with OS X, I'd be so happy,' claims one audio professional."
I dont think engineers and such have ever been target customers for Apple.
But if you mean image/video field workers as professionals, then you probably are right.
Apple product lines are just following the industry trend of consumerism and becoming more targeted for home users, rather than enterprises(for which they never were targetting to begin with).
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
The people PRODUCING content.
You can buy a macbook pro with an "antiglare" screen.
Apple has always been more of a consumer company, but it did provide some top notch Pro tools in the A/V field. From TFA, it seems they are abandoning that top-tier niche with lesser tools. Can't Apple have a division that works only on top-notch pro tools? I'm an Apple guy (I like it, I have no special needs for Windows only software), but if Apple doesn't reverse a trend of alienating a group (albeit a small group) of previously staunch supporters, could this be a first step to Apple losing what professional footprint it does have?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Why "professionals" love this moving target apple presents, its nothing new and it seems like every time apple farts you have to reinvest in all new software and sometimes hardware. Just doesn't seem "professional" to me ...
For the business and professional users who use Macs on the road, Lion can't do fullscreen apps on a secondary monitor anymore. This is a pain for presentations or videos on a projector.
In the past, Apple catered to pros because they were the ones who would spend $10,000 on a Quadra or //fx model. However, since their pricing model has changed, they are best served at catering to Joe/Jane Consumer.
The only gripe I have is that Apple needs consider the IT market as well, and not just focus on consumers. Right now, Apple is doing well, but the enterprise is not just a huge market, but also is very hungry for Apple products. (As an IT person, oftentimes the top brass of companies will be using Macs as their own laptops. It makes me glad Lion has complete hard disk encryption, although having a TPM chip and BitLocker-like access would be ideal.) Apple could easily get some offerings into the IT sector. A redesigned Mac Pro that could work horizontally and fit on a drawer with attachable rack ears would be a start. A standalone disk array with redundant drive controllers and FCoE would bring them up to date for SMBs needing storage.
IT is definitely a market that Apple might do well in, although Apple's main success is with consumers.
Looks like the author has only done some superficial research on some aspects.
For example, 3ds Max is a Windows-only application, but it's far from the only major application in this sector. For example, LightWave licenses are less expensive, there's a Mac client as well and right now the features it has to offer are running circles around Max. And that's coming from a long-time Max user.
It's one of the major applications in the business, but far from dominating.
CAD is mostly done on Windows and *nix, but that's partly for historical reasons (code bas which has grown over decades in some cases).
Part of the problem is also the specialized hardware support on the Mac platform. You just can't expect an overpriced two year old entertainment graphics card to beat the results professional graphics software will achieve on a Quadro/Fire with optimized drivers and certified compatibility. That's like expecting an AMC Gremlin to beat a well-tuned Formula 1 racer.
no, most are built into the machine except for the mac pro and the price tag that could get you 2x the machine elsewhere and the mac mini which you could use the same amount of money to make a much better mini-itx system.
At least microsoft targets business users as well.
However, if this trend continues, and other companies follow Apple in targeting the average Joe, then I foresee a sad future, where devices are locked down, professionals pay big bucks to get the tools they need, and universities and open source developers can't get hardware they can freely develop on.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Apple's corporate support is weak, often consisting of "take it to the Genius Bar". If you don't deal with a VAR, there just isn't good corporate support, or at least, there wasn't 4 or 5 years ago. Driving to the Apple Store doesn't scale if you have an enterprise with dozens of hundreds of MBPs. Also, no docking stations/port replicators. The docking station thing is pretty lame for corporate people too.
They're very focused on user experience but have never to my knowledge tried to make themselves corporate friendly. Dumbing down their software is a part of that. But I don't look forward to standing in line for half an hour with a Mac Pro watching iPod after iPod ahead of me get replaced at the Genius Bar ever again.
C'mon. There are currently 16 definitions for "professional" in the Urban Dictionary. Care to clarify the ones that apply?
I thought pros like the better color accuracy of the glossy screens?
Offering it all.
To that end I expect to see Macs continually improve in running VM and native OSs other than Mac OS X.
The more options you offer, the more customers you drag in & ...
They certainly want out of the server market.
www.itjerk.com
... and I have a lot to apologize for, but OS X being BSD-based is there such a difference between it and Linux? For audio professionals, for instance, can it do things specialized Linuxes can't (like e.g. have real zero latency or whatever)?
Shake. industry standard motion graphics/SFX programme. expensive. Apple bought it. sold it for a while and killed it.
Color. industry standard top end color grading system, expensive. Apple bought it, put it in Final Cut Studio. After a while it almost worked reliably!. Its now been killed.
XSAN - the specialist XSAN hardware has been killed. the software has been rolled into Lion
and as for their premium equipment like the mac pro, its really funny that their software like FCP only used one processor of these 8 core machines. biggest waste of money ever. Only now have they got FCPX multi threading and no professional wants that crap. Even if you wanted to edit and jump out to daVinci for colour correction (now they've killed color) you couldn't as it won't export EDLs.
The article starts with mentioning "traditional Mac loyalists in the creative industries". Wikipedia will tell you what "creative industries" means.
Obviously Apple are taking further steps to commoditize the software on their platform in order to increase the price of their hardware. The App store was just the first step.
Mention 1 poor value hardware piece on any of the latest apple product.
"Server grade" WD Greens in the Time Capsules.
come on... 95% of laptops are non-glossy and if you are a super pro detail designer, you will not use a laptop screen to work.
Whereas you can get a non-glossy MBP (17") with an additional fee, you'll be hardpressed to get a non-glossy iMac or Thunderbolt Display.
First off Apple still offers anti-glare displays as an option on ALL their MacBook Pros. So the rant about not offering matte displays is completely off base. In fact, I'm writing this post on a later model Macbook Pro with an antiglare screen and a quick glance at the store shows this option still available.
The real ire is the SOFTWARE, namely the utter fiasco that is Final Cut Pro X. But this is a well known issue and Apple has tried to smooth things over a bit by letting people DOWNGRADE to the last version. So it seems that Apple is well aware of how badly it messed things up and being that Final Cut has been a huge success until now, it only stands to reason that Apple will not make the same mistake twice and will release a new version that addresses their user's concerns. And while that is mere speculation, seeing how much money FCP has brought in and how much hardware it has ended up selling for Apple, it stands to reason that they will not idly stand by while their egg laying goose dies a painful death at the hands of an angered user base.
Also, Apple is more reliant upon developers now than ever. Those trendy consumer gadgets such as iPhone and iPad require a strong developer base, and it requires those developers to develop within OS X and with Apple Tools, even Flash Builder and Titanium require XCode to do the compiling. So to drive away your development community would also make no sense since that would only boost rivals creating apps for other products such as Android phones and tablets.
Apple is trying to normalize the look and feel of it's two operating systems iOS and OS X to make them not only easier to use for the consumer but easier to develop for for the developers. OS X Lion, while causing ire for it's sweeping UI changes now features a lot of the same features as iOS -- which from a UI development standpoint simplifies the development process.
So in the end, time will heal these wounds. Give it a few more months and see what the upcoming release of FCP has to offer it's core user base as well as how iCloud and iOS5 reshape how users and developers interoperate with OS X and iOS based devices. I think then a lot of these changes will make sense and some of the shock at these changes and the handful of missteps will die off.
Looks like Slashdot fell for the time-honored "OMG APPLEZ IS ABANDONING US PROZ!" linkbait garbage that pops up every couple months. Anyone who claims they'd be just fine with a Hackintosh either doesn't know what a PITA that represents or is only a "professional" in the sense that they spend 12 hours a day whinging about Apple on forums...
Sorry, apparently 15" MBP can have non-glare-displays too, for a markup.
Certainly not focusing for some time now, so eventually a few things are left behind. Businesses tend to look at it more rationally, what productivity increases do we get - which translates fairly directly to dollars, compared to the costs. Consumers generally don't have any tangible productivity or revenue, it's more a matter of disposable income and what they like. It's like trying to compare the army and a regular person buying a sweater. The army will look at technical things like thermal properties, durability, washing instructions and other technical things, what brand and fashion statement you make is utterly irrelevant. Then you get into a fairly low-margin business of who can provide a piece of clothing that satisfy those requirements, and Apple doesn't want to be there. The only reason they've stayed with graphics professionals is that many of those have had very high hardware and software budgets, just like there were some ridiculously expensive SGI workstations for engineers. Apple wants to sell to the people who'll pick a $699 iPhone over a $399 Android because they want an iPhone. Not because of an rational feature-by-feature comparison, but because they have a want and the money to buy what they want. The margins are much, much nicer that way.
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Macs are no longer limited to graphics artists and web designers. While that market may not be what it was for Apple it's being more than made up for in other areas. I'm a Data Center Architect and use nothing but Macs. Cisco, EMC, and VMware now offer Macs as standard offerings for their SEs and field people and last I heard Cisco had gone 30% Mac in just a few months. It's rare I'm in a meeting with those guys where Mac is not the majority.
Pushing away professionals? Hardly. Nice link bait.
I'm not a professional at all but an amateur who has used Apple professional tools for music. I was also excited about Final Cut Pro X since I also like to create shorts and wring every last bit of power from iMovie.
I read the message boards to see what was going on with the different tools and--personal opinion--some professionals aren't very. First, as a professional you constantly evaluate your workflows and tools to deliver your end product. I get that some people do not want to change what works, but I moved from Sonar Producer (DAW) to Logic Pro with very little issues and could leverage some of the different features quickly (of course, I did miss Sonar exclusive features too). Some posters on the boards were simply not able to understand there might be better workflows using the power of new tools. Second, some of the tools added were phenomenal which would probably save them enough time to focus on how to do work with the new tool. Third, the squeaky wheels got a lot of press while many on the boards were very happy with the changes and improvements. I personally found the enhancements fairly exciting based on the limitations I hit in iMovie every day.
From my own experience would I be upset if Logic Pro started looking like Garageband...yes. Would I adapt to leverage what it offers..absolutely. I already find myself using Garageband for quick songs because it is far easier to get in and out quickly; there is some real value there.
As technologist, what would we say to a professional programmer who never wanted to learn a new language, evaluate new programming tools (e.g. IDE) or leverage new build automation?
Finally, it is fortunate there is a great ecosystem of video and audio tools that can fill any gaps in Apple's portfolio. That's a good thing
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
Lion is really good when you get used to it. At first I was really annoyed to have my grid removed in spaces for the flat line that is Mission Control, but after some use I greatly prefer it, in part because of the integration now between Spaces and Expose.
Mail is greatly improved, and the tokenized search is genius. It's the best way I've ever seen of exposing a more complex search to users that have no idea what "AND" means.
If it was just the reverse scrolling then you can switch it back, though again after some use I either prefer it now or got used to it such that it doesn't matter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple was supporting IT with their XServes, and they worked with a company called Aqua Connect in developing a terminal server which works under OS X. Then they killed the XServe, and tried to send people to Mac Pros, not really designed for racks.
Dumbing down the UI is not always a sign that you are killing professionals, but making it lower learning curve entry.
What has to be asked is does the new, dumber interface, make the work more difficult or is it just bitching because the interface is different. They didn't kill Final Cut Pro, just changed it.
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I am a Windows user who has mostly switched to Mac to developer for iOS because it's an unbeatable embedded platform for music and video software. But I'm constantly floored at how poorly the Mac is designed for power users. The window management and control is awful, keyboard setup for text editing is awful, touchpad drivers are awful, XCode is buggy and a mess, the iTunes Connect interface seems like it was made 10 years ago, documentation is unbelievably poor, and in general, it's shocking how bad some of their user interfaces are for their developer tools when they're supposed to be all about user experience. This is stuff you are supposed to learn in User Experience 101. And although some similar problems exist in Windows, you can adjust what you don't like! Apple goes out of its way to insure that you can't change things, drives me nuts.
The only viable solution to the problem is to buy a screen from a third-party manufacturer. “I want to see only the images and applications I’m using, not reflections of the room around me, and I often look at the screen for up to 16 hours a day,” says photographer Bill Wisser. “Recently, I bought $7,000 of computer equipment, including a new eight-core Mac Pro and a new 30in monitor – a Dell.
he could have just bought much better pc equipment and an even bigger monitor with a whopass budget like 7000. he chose to buy macs. and he suffers for it.
stupidity.
Read radical news here
it seems they are abandoning that top-tier niche with lesser tools.
This is not the case; Apple is a company inherently not satisfied with simply building what existed, but in trying to advance the state of the art. So they are willing at times to throw an interface under the bus for something new they consider to be better.
Yes in FCP a few pro-specific features were left behind, but much of that has been addressed already and they also continued to sell the old FCP for those that want to keep using it until the new FCPX supports features they feel they need.
What you are not seeing is that Apple is trying to change at times what it MEANS to be a professional, how they work...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That there'll be an upgrade to Snow Leopard for desktop users. Things like removing scrollbars and adding autosave in Lion are stupid, the latter totally incompatible with common workflows.
Some of the ommisions in the original release of iMovieHD were addressed by a recent update. Now I'd like to see a version with a UI targeted at working editors. When AvidMC and Adobe Premiere both get 30-40% sales increases, that's a good indicator of what a huge fuckup Apple made here.
If Apple don't respond to the needs of professional users (a term extending beyond media production), the attrition they witnessed after the iMovieHD debacle will expand and accelerate.
Matt screens also are affected by outside sources, just not as strongly - which is why professionals to whom that would matter either control the environment to eliminate them or buy a monitor hood (or both).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would pay for a copy of OS X licensed to go on my PC. I have a 1st gen MacBook Pro that I can install Lion on. Apple is making there newer computer non-user upgradable.
Apple may want out of the high end rack mounted server market, but they are very happy to sell a quite capable small server in the Mac mini (which you can order pre-configured as a server).
For a small company that only needs a handful of servers a number of mac minis could make a lot of sense.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm a research scientist at particle physics institute and my anecdotal experience is the opposite: Nowadays, it seems like at least 3/4 of the laptops I see at conferences are Apple laptops (plus a growing amount of iPads). The desktops at my institute are either Linux or OS X.
OS X is a great environment to use LaTeX in, make presentations (Keynote + LaTeXit for equations is awesome), code scientific software or run apps like Mathematica or Matlab.
Plain and simple. Apple products don't play nice in an enterprise network, from passive resistance (no support for domain-controllers/Group-Policys etc) to active violance like spewing ._* and .DS_Store files across the fileserver that annoy the hell out of windows users (the later can be turned of, but the user has to play nice for that, and the first can't be turned off, TheGreatSteve has decided that they are needed, no matter if you delete them...). Dumbing down their few REALLY professional Products (like Final Cut) does the rest.
Someone once explained to me, that sales in enterprise IT are considered collateral success by Apple.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1236352
read post 6
what a joke.
Apple needs mac os sever for any VM
Audio Pros are all snobs. You dont need a mac. Buy a pc, there is plenty of great hardware and software for it that rival a mac with ancient protools.
Nuendo... learn it.
It's not just the "just a toy" claim. The phrases before that are even more telling
My boss upgraded to Lion, and I used it for about two minutes before deciding to stick with Snow Leopard for the foreseeable future
Even if the "two minutes" is an exaggeration... Practically any UI change, for example, feels difficult at first, even if it ends up being a lot better once you've gotten used to it. (It took me a month to stop hating the ribbon UI of MS Office even though I now consider it mostly positive thing) Deciding "I won't try this" about an OS in a matter of minutes is just silly.
What dumb ass "creative professional" does all their work on a laptop screen? You want either a desktop machine or a macbook plugged into a desktop monitor and keyboard.
Apple computers are slightly overpriced, but they're built better, and the offer a nicer OS. Apple monitors otoh are insanely overpriced and offer nothing beyond what's available from other manufacturers, well slightly reduced cable clutter. Apple only sells monitors because some morons pay through the nose so their monitor's case matches their computer's case.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Not sure about Apple's lack of antiglare screens, but as I understand it, the sort of matte-finish antiglare screens always measure lower in contrast than glossy screens. Antireflective coatings that used to be fairly common on CRTs aren't routinely applied to the typically larger LCD screens because they limit viewing angle- colors start to shift when viewed from an angle because of the way AR coatings work. Apple goes to the extra expense of putting in IPS screens with extra wide viewing angles, so thy definitely won't want to screw that up with an AR coating. In the end it's all about specs for contrast and viewing angle, and what looks good in a store where the reflections can be somewhat controlled.
I have a netbook with a glossy screen that's annoying as hell, so I applied an aftermarket AR film and it works beautifully.
The mac pro is about $1000 - $1500 over priced as it is and only 3gb ram at $2500?
The mini is ok but it should be a little bigger for better cooling / easier to get to hdd are the 2 big things also bigger will give it room for desktop cpus / better video chips/ more ram slots.
Base mini with 5400 RPM HDD's?
The sever mini has quad and 2 hdd's but why do have to pay for sever and a 2th HDD just to get quad? and they it has Intel video but the mini other that has a low end ati chip but no quad (best is a Core i7 dual)
Also a mid tower at $800-$900? $1000-$1500 with desktop cpu quad core or better with at least 2-3 pci-e slots 1 X16 dual wide for video card and maybe 1-2 x4 or x1 slots. 4 ram slots or 6 ram slots (if useing higher end i7's) 2 or more HDD bays, DVDRW or a bay for 1 also 1 or 2 TB ports.
Maybe have have on board video with the base system having no video card.
The mac pro can be the dual cpu (dual quad or better) 4 slot (at least all x16 or x8) system with 4 or more HDD bays. With the room for 12 or more ram slots.
Maybe even room for dual high end video cards.
The imac are ok but can we get a way to get to the HDD with out having to take the screen off?
Have the Xserve come back or let mac os sever run on any hardware in a VM.
Xserve comeback or let sever run on any VM running on any hardware system.
The mac pro sever is not a good system no lights out, no dual PSU, poor rack mounting system.
Name a single thing you used to be able to do on Mac OS X that you can't do anymore on Mac OS X. They fumbled around with the new Final Cut Pro release--and they're trying to recover from that now. There is absolutely nothing else you can point to. You can still run Flash on OSX.
The 'iLine' is a new line of products specifically targeted at the handheld/mobile market. It has different constraints and craves a different solution. In case you haven't noticed, they're doing pretty well. Millions of people who otherwise wouldn't be using smart devices now are; and it hasn't prevented anyone from doing anything they could do before on Macs or any other kind of computer. If you think there is something bad about a type of technology just because it is aimed at non-technical users; then you just flat out do not understand the point of technology. Like many other so-called nerds on this forum, you think the point of technology is to create some sort of exclusive club with a sign out front that says "you must know *this* much about tech to enter".
BTW: if you are naive enough to think that the absence of web standards leads to a better, more democratic internet, then you are a lost cause.
Nobody cares that you are having some sort of one-sided feud with Apple. What the hell is your deal with Turing, anyway? did you just watch some documentary?
It looks to me that Apple has been focusing on revenue for the last 3 or 4 years, alienating some of their users, while polishing, simplifying, and dumbing down their product line. This is too bad. They have an incredible operating system, and an amazing level of integration between their services, hardware, and software - but as their products become more mainstream, the demographics of their user base is changing, and I would say that Apple markets itself more as 'hip' these days than 'professional'. The sad thing is that in this process, they forgot where they came from. It use to be 'think different', and now, there is hardly a more conformist crowd than the Apple customers.
...is not from Apple... Turning the "Final Cut Pro" nerfing into a broad argument for a dumbing down conspiracy is a bit much. The one thing that Apple has done consistently over the years is treat all of their software developers like competitors and all of the 3rd party hardware developers like enemies. The path of Apples success is littered with corpses of once supporters like Supermac, Radius, RasterOps and many others.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Macs for the masses.
Apple has already been highly successful in alienating all the geeks (I include myself in this) and pushing them over to android (and to developing for it, and recommending it to their friends). Policy decisions which drive the "love the product; hate the company" would include:
- constant lockdown of iDevices. (yes, we understand that jailbreaking should only be for the techies, should be warranty-voiding, and should not be easy for
"grandma" to do by accident and then get upset about the consequences, but if we really want to, we should be able to).
- making it so hard for iPods to work on Linux - why can't they help out the libgpod devels by publishing specs.
- support for patents in general, and litigating against the competition rather than competing fairly. Also, DRM (though they've now mostly learnt that lesson).
- iTunes not working on Linux (or under Wine).
- not giving back as much as they take. Yes, Darwin is BSD, so it's legal, but it's really not cool to give back so little.
- killing off the "hacker" culture that they began with. Apple's hardware is really hard to tinker with: of course some of this is just because it's harder to experiment with a BGA A4 CPU than a DIL socketed 68k, but at least making parts available to hobbyists, and not suing them, would be a good start!
Finally, a personal gripe: Apple have lead the industry into making sure that only shortscreen-LCDs are available on any new hardware. I want 16:12 aspect, not 16:9 (and no doubt soon to be 16:8) !
I am so beside myself upset about apple that I just sprung for a new mac air. I mean for christ sake apple quit producing hardware that I really want to own.
Same Apple complaints - different day.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This is not a technology issue but one of branding. Apple needs to sell high-end pro tools to maintain brand attractiveness towards consumers - unless they're planning on total re-branding of Apple as merely a fashion label. (Some might say this has already happened.)
For this reason the pro end cannot be sold off or left to wither. It must be kept in-house, but run with pros in mind. Digital media workflow is crystallizing, and if Apple won't provide tools, someone else will. Pros want device support, power, and innovation - in that order. That may mean sucking it up and accepting it as part of a grown-up tech business, something Apple don't seem to want to be as long as they can fleece the kids with this quarter's new shiny toy.
Apple is breathtakingly ruthless about killing off what it sees as legacy technologies, and I've always had the impression that they have no desire to be shackled to the backward compatibility train as Microsoft has been. Jobs was well known for being totally unsentimental, almost contemptuous, of the past, and when he became CEO of Apple in 1997, not only did he kill off a number of product lines and projects, he also donated Apple's large collection of historic products to the Computer History Museum.
As Apple demonstrated with the then-new version of iMovie, when they decide to go in a new direction they simply make the leap, and devil take the hindmost. They infuriated untold numbers of iMovie fans when all of a sudden all their projects wouldn't work with the new version, but Apple's rationale was that the new iMovie provided the basis for an improved way of doing things, and they refused to hobble it by making it backward compatible. They gambled that it would lure enough users to their point of view that the discontent would blow over, which it eventually did.
They took a similar gamble with Final Cut X. They were fully aware that it would probably alienate the entire professional editing community, not only because their projects wouldn't work with it, but because so many features they depend on were absent at launch, and worst of all, their years-long investment in polishing their workflow and expertise was suddenly out the window, and they'd have to start again from scratch. I'm still amazed that angry mobs of video editors didn't storm 1 Infinite Loop with torches and pitchforks.
That being said, some professional reviewers were of the opinion that despite the fact that they couldn't and wouldn't recommend it for production because it was clearly unfinished, Final Cut X really was a huge leap forward and some of the features already present would lead to greater productivity. One reviewer (forgive me; I can't recall the link) predicted that while it would certainly alienate current professionals, it would eventually attract and give rise to a new generation of professional video editors, especially those familiar with iMovie, and that it would only be a matter of time before Final Cut X was once again the industry standard.
To revisit the premise of this story, Apple made a conscious decision to potentially push away the current generation of professionals, because they're gambling that they can spur the rise of a new, larger generation. It's a bold, incredibly arrogant move on their part, but frankly I think they're going to pull it off.
Apple's refusal to sell non-glossy screens and poor value hardware is fueling anger from professional Mac users
So buy a screen from someone else. Not as if Apple even makes the LCD themselves anyway. Plenty of good screen options out there.
Apple hasn't had tech friendly desktop hardware in over a decade. School districts buy desktops in bulk. It's nice when the hardware can stack - (not counting laptops). It's cheaper if common tools can repair desktops; not suction cups and Torx drivers. Techs I work with whine if anything more than a phillips driver is needed. I feel Apple is forgetting the creative professional market and the educational.
The "Apple Bubble" has burst.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
nowadays, what notebook vendor would you choose?
Dumbing down of Final Cut Pro
This is how Apple progresses. Rewrite the future generation from scratch with 80% features. Finish over the next few years.
Refusal to sell non-glossy screens
Anti-glare is the only option on the MBA, and MTO on the MBP.
Poor value hardware
You're joking, right?
Whenever I read an article critical of how a corporation chooses to manage a market, I try to pay attention to where they glean their insight. As with this article, many use a few anecdotal interviews. Had the author backed up the assertion with an example of, say, a company with over 50 content creators switching to PC, then perhaps their claims would have merit. The very rare exception is a scientific survey (non-web-based). So without any kind of solid evidence, this is pure blog filler and naval gazing. Fun to talk about, but ultimately meaningless, which is fine. I would just rather read articles about market trends annotated with sources or reasonable proof.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Back up the train for a moment: "Apple's refusal to sell [...] poor value hardware..." Never mind the OS and hardware I'm buying, if I'm paying retail price for poor value hardware, I'd be enraged too. Why would I want to shell out retail prices for what turns out to be a 99 cent piece of @*(%? Apple has a reputation for quality precisely because Jobs refused to compromise on hardware quality. If you want cheap $)(#, then buy a PC for newbies at Walmart.
When my last engineering team demanded Macs they got them, but i stayed Windows. This time I jumped first.
I have a new MacBook Pro w/matte screen and all the power you could ask for. it comes with svn, ant, java, c compiler, python, preinstalled. xcode is free. vi with tabs. pop-up man pages. no more cygwin. no more \ in dev, / in production. and a gorgeous UI. What's not to like?
A week after starting I'm almost back to 100% productivity on the Mac. on Windows i'm having trouble not swiping. but that's Ok because it turns out that 15 years of developing on Windows isn't the limitation i thought it was. turns out you can switch pretty easily.
Developers used to have to ask for good hardware. now getting better hardware costs less than the hourly-rate equivalent for me and the dev to have the conversation. maybe the Mac is a few hundred $ more expensive. or maybe the total cost of ownership is less. but in the grand scheme of things, who really cares?
Apple is no longer a computer company, they're a consumer electronics company. Pros aren't the focus - the general consumer is. Computers are less than 20% of their revenues - they're now at the level of a Sony, in terms of distribution of revenue streams. Pros? Out of the way, there's general consumers to sell iPods, iPhones, and iPads to!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I'll never understand why there are people out there with some degree of technical skill who are still willing to pay such a high markup for Apple products, which are effectively low-quality Foxconn hardware in a shiny box, just to use OSX.
Seriously, look on Google. You can have OSX running on an excellent set of PC hardware, for literally half the price or less, with a minor amount of effort required. And you'll probably learn something in the process. The hardware will be higher quality, and you can easily dual or triple boot Windows and Linux on it for compatibility with other software or games. For a person capable of doing it, you simply can't lose.
At the end of the day, I think many of these people just don't want to admit that they buy into the whole Apple lifestyle intentionally, because they want a pretty machine which says something about them to others. And that's fine. But if that's the case, stop complaining about what you're buying and how much you're paying for it, because it certainly isn't Apple's fault that you gave them your money.
Apple is not the same company it was even in the 1990s. Yes, it's more profitable. Yes, they have a wider range of products.
No, they are not a computing company. I've made this argument here recently, and people argue the nitty points without looking at the broader picture.
Apple does not produce a server platform (hardware + software). This right here should be telling: they make consumer products, not production products. Even their "Server" OS is quite lacking.
Apple has been short-changing developers on their platform for some time, both with their developer programs for App Store and how they've made fairly drastic API changes without giving the bigger shops a forewarning.
Every single one of Apple's products in the past 10 years has been a reductionism - a move towards minimalism. This is contrary to what a professional wants. Professionals need more, better tools, not fewer.
Apple's consumer 'media players' intentionally lack features audio and video professionals would like, such as the ability to do what the Sony Discman could do 10 years ago (record high quality lossless audio). Playback quality is also significantly lacking.
The distinction is nuanced, but there is a distinction. Apple doesn't really give half a shit to the nuanced or professional user. Many graphics professionals abandoned Apple a long time ago due to dick moves they pulled that made things difficult for eg. Adobe to continue producing software or for graphics artists to work effectively with the platform (threading, multiprocessing, etc.).
Anyone who thinks Apple is still a "computing" company and not a "consumer electronic device" company needs to pay better attention. Apple has not done a single innovative thing in the world of computing for quite some time. Marketing, sales, and consumer products? Absolutely - they're incredible. But don't expect them to be the same company they were for professional needs in even the late 90s.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
but if I could come up with a 'Hackintosh' with OS X
Because that's so hard to do...
Advice: on VPS providers
Apple have for a long time now been heading down the mass market road, professional tools where people use a computer for serious work with complex applications is not what Apple is interested in any more. Such markets require a lot of investment to provide features for a relatively small market, many of the features missing from final cut pro X for example are probably only really used by a few thousand serious professionals worldwide. Apple has clearly decided that selling to a wider audience is more profitable. The more mass market tools they can get on their platforms the more hardware they will sell. So if Final Cut X is seen as an almost professional video editing system for a cheap price they could sell a million more macs, where as the perfect pro suite might net them a few thousand top end systems. A million more consumer level mac sales are far more valuable to them as their economies of scale go up, they can push the component prices down and make higher profits on every mac sold. OSX Lion has been dumbing down with features like versions and local snapshots that can't be turned off, I have stayed with snow leopard because Lion spends to much time trying to force me to do something its way rather then letting me choose how I want to work. Finally Apple stumbled across the app store model after the release of the iPhone, consumers pushed to install their own apps on the device and Apple reluctantly created the walled garden that requires you to pay to play and takes a cut from every app sold. What use is selling 1000 copies of Autocad via the app store even with a $300 commission when you can push out 5 million copies of some silly game that will get forgotten about in 6 months time and the next craze comes along and sells another 5 million copies. Apple is all about increasing market share, get as much hardware out here as possible to fuel the app store model and get as many mass market titles in the app store as they can to further extend the captive market for even more apps from the app store.
developers, developers, developers!
Ever since the iLine, and Steve Jobs turning from a benevolent genius to a narcissistic, goose stepping lunatic, the scene has changed to apple being creative, and you can too, just as long as you're creative in the "Apple" sanctioned way.
Do you know anything about Steve Jobs' history?
He was always a "goose stepping lunatic", as you put it. He was always obsessed with his idea of perfection, to the point where many of the early software engineers on the Mac project absolutely hated his guts. If you disagreed with his ideas, you weren't just wrong, you were wrong, stupid, and bad.
One of the reasons he was forced out at Apple the first time was that he was absolutely awful to work with (there's a bracing account in one of the biographies about him of a trip he took to Sony's floppy drive factory in Japan, and he made such an ass of himself that Mike Markkula puled him aside and reprimanded him).
Steve Jobs was many things, but he was never, ever benevolent. He's always been a cult-of-personality dictator from his earliest days, and Jobs was always trying to push people into his vision of what genius and creativity was. This notion that he was some great supporter of freedom of computer users is nothing but marketing tripe. Jobs... and by extension, Apple... wasn't so much for freedom as they were for a world that they thought was cool, and they were going to make you pay plenty for the privilege of being part of it. You make it sound like Jobs was some kind of technical-artistic libertarian. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jobs wasn't fighting for your freedom to do things the way you wanted to. He was fighting for your dollars so you'd do things the way he wanted you to.
The only difference between Early Jobs and Late Jobs is that Late Jobs was actually a good businessman, due to hard lessons learned from his money-losing experience at NeXT.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"when he became CEO of Apple in 1997, not only did he kill off a number of product lines and projects, he also donated Apple's large collection of historic products to the Computer History Museum."
He did no such thing.
The contents of the Apple Library was given to Stanford University. The IL4 second floor was then taken over by Ive's group.
With the exception of permission to release the MacPaint sources, CHM has never received anything from Apple, Inc.
The small exhibit of Apple products, including the Apple II prototype, disappeared from the IL4 internal lobby one day after Jobs
was rumored to have said "get this shit out of here".
It's not a secret that professionals were a major target of Apple's marketing for a long time, and now things have changed.
Most of Slashdot readers here might remember the time when "Pro" was among the items of apple.com's menu bar. Professionals were important to Apple then because they were the source of a considerable portion of company's revenue. Apple's main campaign then encouraged people to be different. Now it encourages people to buy an iPhone because everybody else have one. Because there's no need to focus on a niche market when you can have a major market.
But Apple is not pushing anyone away. Why should it do that? It just doesn't put them at the top of their list anymore.
"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it's still a foolish thing."
"I was under the impression that they had been given tot the Computer History Museum."
I've tried to find out what happened to them, without luck. Hopefully someone in facilities knew what they were and hid them somewhere.
The prototypes in the lobby disappeared several years after the Apple Library was given away.
Ubuntu app store is waiting for them
developer http://flamerobin.org
Apple doesn't have a virtual monopoly on the arts and graphics area that it once had, most vendors release stuff for Windoze and MacOSz, Adobe even does a number of Win only products and they used to be Mac only. Sadly it's about the market and as a HARDWARE and SOFTWARE bundling company, I would guess that in it's current business model, high end stuff must be a drag.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Yes.
Cancellation of the Xserve RAID, cancellation of the Xserve. Long product lifecycles for the Mac Pro. Abysmal support for Apple-branded Promise RAID.
Refusal to sell a previous version of the OS, or support it on new hardware, the day a new version of the OS ships.
Consumerisation of their pro software lines. Glossy displays on everything.
Mac OS X Server - once was $1400 AUD in 10.5, dropped to $700 AUD for 10.6 and then dropped to $50 as an optional install in 10.7 - plus this includes a $1k license of Xsan too. I think this pricepoint shows the amount of attention it is going to receive in terms of development effort.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Final Cut Pro will be fixed by the next version, this is pretty much a given. Apple isn't stupid. As for matte screens, come on. Get an external display.
Any citations for that?
I have a brand new Mac Book Pro, and if they stop selling non glossy screens, I would like to stock up 10 more before it really happens.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I spoke with a couple of guys at Apple re: Logic, and it seems obvious that they're planning to drop the environment from Logic and make it a more consumer-friendly product. I couldn't give them a good enough reason for them to keep it, and they did not seem to care so much that I miss SoundDiver (a super-important tool in my studio which is filled with vintage synths). It might make sense to keep an older Mac running 10.4 around in the studio so I can do my fiddly-synth-programming stuff.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Which is where anti-glare is the most popular. Glossy makes some sense on laptops because you get better light transmission which means more brightness with less battery. Ok fine. However on a desktop screen, that's not an issue. You have more backlight than you need. Only real reason to go glossy is on cheap displays it is cheaper to do right. Well again, not an issue here, mac displays are high end. However they aren't just glossy, they are monkey-fuck retarded glossy because they have a glass cover.
That's the issue. It isn't what professionals want either, it is what fanboys who like shiny things want. Go have a look at NEC's PA series of monitors, or Eizo's ColorEdge series, or LaCie's 300 or 500 series. All matte all the time. These are what professionals want (and use) they are designed with pro features in mind, like hardware calibration, quality IPS or VA panels, fully adjustable stands, and matte screens.
Well Apple doesn't do that. They use good IPS panels, and charge a premium price, but they provide a simple tilt stand, no ability for calibration, and a highly glossy screen. That isn't what pros are after.
Hence supporting the assessment of the "Apple pushing away professionals."
I bought a Mac Pro when they first came out and were marketed as capable of "HD Video" editing. I already had 5+ years of SD digital home video and knew I'd upgrade to HD digital soon. Wanted a machine that would make it easy for me to make basic HD home videos - you know, the sort you insist on showing the relatives that have overstayed their welcome....
At first I was thrilled - compared to Windows where I spent countless hours trying to restore what broke after every upgrade (of almost any bit of h/w or s/w) the Mac was trivial to administer. Had a RAID mirror up in an hour; drop into Terminal and write my own synch to get files in iTunes onto my Sansa; I had time for the fun stuff because I wasn't spending all my time fixing problems.
Now, however, some 5 years later Apple still does a rubbish job of supporting HD video for plain old home video users:
AVCHD - support is very limited. You can only import from an undamaged "camera archive" - you can't import AVCHD files themselves. Compared to Apple's usual standards of usability it's pathetic. Everything transcoded to 3X the size - no option to import and archive original AVCHD and only transcode clips you actually want to use in a project [I could build my own system for doing that, but then wouldn't see the archive in iMovie). There is also little or no useful documentation on AVCHD, particularly on transcoding back to AVCHD. It would be easy for Apple to help me out here - but they seem to go our of their way to make AVCHD hard/awkward.
1080p - I can edit and save in 1080p but getting 1080p off my mac and into my living room (let alone to relative) is a nightmare. Can't use AppleTV (only 720p so far); can't burn a BluRay w/o spending a bundle on 3rd party h/w and s/w; My Oppo blu-ray player supports a variety of formats on USB, but as far as I can tell iMove can't create any of them (and 4GB FAT limit is problematic - if only I could transcode back to AVCHD....). Not going to drop $600 on a mac mini just to play home movies on my big-screen in 1080p.
BluRay - As far as relatives are concerned it's the same as a DVD. A new player is $100 and anyone with a DVD player can upgrade easily. I know disc media is going away, but not before my daughter has grown up. In the mean time I'd like to send Grandpa HD video of his granddaughter. I'm way too private to put home videos on the Web - will never put terabytes (I'm just passing 1TB now) of personal data on servers someone else owns. Even if I did, there's no way Grandpa is going to set up something more complicated than a DVD. No help from Apple on this problem.
HDMI - If only I could get Audio and Video over one wireless HDMI link from my Mac Pro to my TV (w/o spending a fortune). Apple seems to be allergic to HDMI - or at least resistant. Maybe it's just my old Mac Pro with DVI, but when I've looked I've not found inexpensive way to add HDMI.
AVCHD, BluRay, HDMI - these are the consumer standards. They are now old standards. They are what everything except my Apple gear uses. Apple seems as intent on making it hard to use these standards as Microsoft seemed intent to break PalmO/S synching with every upgrade (even little patches) to Windows. As a consumer my patience is just about gone.
So at the end of the day Apple has so isolated themselves from the rest of consumer electronics that creative individuals (and calling my birthday party videos creative is a real stretch) can't even do simple things like send a BluRay to Grandpa without having to practically become professional video editors - with a h/w and s/w budget to match.
I'll never go back to Windows, but if I'm going to have to assemble all the parts needed to do what I want myself I might as well be using Linux. If Apple hasn't made my HD video life easy before this Mac Pro dies my next machine will probably run Linux.
My employer still uses TeX (not even LaTeX) for everything. They're just starting to plan a migration to LaTeX. It's still highly popular in math and scientific communities. What do you suggest they use instead? MathML? LOL
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
based on what hardware it has vs what you can build / other systems.
1) Regarding the OP, I don't know how he doesn't know that "hackintoshes" have existed for YEARS. If he wants to get one, then get one!
2) Apple has pushed away professionals for at least 20 years. Artsy types went for Apples all along, but other than that it's been hit and miss in terms of meeting anyone else's needs either in terms of hardware or software all along. And I don't know how it's a surprise they are overpriced, they've been let's say "premium pricing" going all the way back to the Apple II. I have no idea why these complaints popped up now, because they've been a "problem" for almost 30 years. I put "problem" in quotes because these same people who complain Apple is not accomodating them keep buying Apples anyway.
As if. (La)TeX is still the best choice by a considerable distance, and "those days" are certainly not "long gone".
To earn a lasting place of in the pantheon of legendary technology firms, Apple should absolutely keep in the pro game.
Toyota supports a stable of motorsport and racing teams. Eastman Kodak is still a major name in motion picture imaging. The HP of old build their business on test, measure, and medical gear. Corning is in your kitchen, and in the lab. Sony headphones are on every head in studio/production/post
How can you claim your dogfood is really that good unless you let the top dogs take a taste?
We're in an amazing time where the damn near the best ever computers, cameras, sound gear, and shoulder fired missiles are available to just about everyone to get their hands on. I pay attention to what pros really use for their tools of choice. (Motion - who the heck uses Motion over After Effects?) Except for shoes - I can lace on those Air Jordans and still have no hope of sinking a free throw.
I own a Mac Pro tower, Apple are definitely pushing away the professionals. Their video pipeline is top quality awesomeness. But... the Xeon based systems are WAAAAY overpriced. Apple want $1050 for 24gb of ram. I bought the same RAM from a normal vender for $300. ECC server ram 1333mhz DDR3 exactly like Apple sells. They sell 7200 RPM 2tb HDDs for $300! $300! You can buy the same high spec drives for $130 from most places. Their machine costs are insane. An ATi 5770 GPU costs $160 the apple equivalent costs $250. Which is about the only component with a reasonable price. Base dual CPU systems are starting at $4199. I can buy dual 6-core Xeons for $2200. I got my Mac Pro at a firesale deal. Apple do NOT release cpu firmware updates. A 2009 Mac Pro can be BIOS flashed into a 2010 Mac Pro and will take the ram/cpu upgrade, the motherboards are identical so for $4500 I can build a mac pro that would normally cost $8299 for any professional to buy. The professionals are getting ripped off blind. No dual CPU motherboard/1000 Watt power supply + case is worth $3800 to make up the difference in cost. Apple is screwing its professional user base. On the software side I am pretty content with how things are going, there is maya, photoshop etc. Final Cut Pro's rewrite was necessary and each new patch will add features to the cocoa rewrite. Apple has just released a new version of their tool without completing it, which is fine considering the massive price drop. Patching will solve Final Cut Pro X, and people are whining about a non-existent problem. FCPX is only bad for an entering professional who doesn't have the last Final Cut Pro copy before it came out.
They already added back in XML exports and the other shit is getting added in upcoming free updates. It's was basically a total rewrite. I guess they weren't expecting these so-called professionals to upgrade to a x.0 version the day it's released. Get real. Final Cut Pro is fine, it's just going to take time to add in all the other shit. And just wait till Logic Pro X comes out and blows everyone's mind. The death of Apple pro gear is greatly exaggerated.
make more money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
LaTex == Typesetting system. If you want to use a "word processing" system, go ahead, but never compare it to typesetting! That goes hand in hand with LaTeX's philosophy of "what you write is what you mean". The one thing I hate most about writing a document (with WYSIWYG "word processors"), is making it look the way it needs to look (imagine trying to change the way headings, references, etc are displayed [all at once] in a "word processor" for a 200 page scientific document).
Point is, word processing != typesetting.
Apple is absolutely clueless in all things enterprise. The fact that board members prefer and get mac's for personal desktops means nothing more than they have the power to get their personal preferences paid for by the company. The idea that Apple could easily get their offerings into the IT sector is laughable at best.
From imaging new computers with a standard image (PXE, you know the standard everyone in the world except apple uses), to the lack of virtualization (what do you mean I can't load Lion onto a VM on the lab server?) to the dearth of packaging tools (platypus!!!) to a lack of more than bare minimal AD support (why am I paying tens of thousands of dollars for a third party product like Quest just to get basic policy support?) to just now getting full disk encyrption in 10.7 (what do you mean partial disk encryption isn't HIPAA approved?), a lack of supporting NTLMv2 by default (let's drop it in 10.7 and replace Samba!) and so on and on.
It's not that tools are completely lacking, in some cases alternatives exist that require you to have an entirely separate infrastructure in place just to manage your macs (netboot instead of pxe etc). Apple makes absolutely no provisions for the enterprise environment. The entire enterprise mindset for managing apple computers doesn't even exist. Until I can manage an apple computer at a cost rate anywhere near what it costs me to manage a windows computer your suggestion that the enterprise is hungry for Apple is nothing more than fan boy level delusion.
The cost of secondary infrastructure and the additional costs in cleaning up after clueless mac uses (I thought mac's couldn't get viruses!!) is something that keeps them out of the enterprise and will continue to do so until mac finally get's the enterprise culture and starts accepting industry standards widely embraced by Windows and Unix operating systems and hardware.
I am responsible for managing an enterprise environment that's 40% mac. If you don't know what your talking about and start spewing nonsense someone who does know if going to pop in and call you in it. Consider yourself called.
The Mac Pro hasn't been updated significantly in a VERY long while. Intel's slow roll-out of Sandy Bridge for the pro market doesn't help, but still...
As a 22-year pro/consumer user of Apple, I can't really complain... Infinitely more beautiful, useful, productive, and easier-to-use, more stable products than I've ever used. My MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad are amazing. OTH, my Quad Core tower at the office is a mess... And isolating the problems requires a close labor intensity of the plague-ridden Quadras and PowerPCs from the 90s. But this is primarily because, as the odd man out at the office, I literally have to "do it all." I put together psentations and proposals for an ad agency, which requires being fluent in multiple versions of both Adobe CS and Microsoft Office on both Apple and Windows. (And don't get me started about how equally sloppy and conflict-ridden both CS5 and Office 2011 are.) With that out of the way, I still find Apple to be more user friendly across the board. There was an interesting article in thiis week's WSJ about how more Fortune 500 companies are embracing the iPhone over other mobile devices, particularly Android, because it is so much easier to manage in terms of security... But low-end consumers opt for Android devices for the price point. My company already follows Apple strategy... While the IT department helped me set up my iPhone, I set up my laptop and new iPad all on my own. For better or worse, once I'm plugged in, I'm in.... So, while there is more from Hidden Valley than just ranch dressing, it all depends on the options the user has at the salad bar, in terms of toppings and dressings.
"People will get hacked off."
That sounds very frightening.
With machetes?
Is this a real expression? If so, is it younger or older than ginormous?
Answering my own question, oh, it's a British expression.
What's wrong with "very angry" ?
First laptop with ddr3? I find that hard to believe. Also, poor value is not equal to poor quality. Even if MacBooks are the best equipment on the market, their price makes it a bad value.
Just as an example, the current MBP line doesn't even have 7400 rpm drives, a sub-par selection of processors, and doesn't even have a 1080p screen available. Spend the same money on a high-end Dell or HP, and you get a better computer.
No true professional is going to be using final cut pro. It is an armatures tool. Prosumer at best. This is the crowd they are abandoning. They are making angry the little guys and nothing more. I use video editing tools are other platforms and there isn't exactly a reason others can't too. There are good tools out there if you just open your eyes a little besides final cut pro.
It took only 10 days to start losing strength?
The article is essentially 2 contradictory points
1) That Apple hardware is to expensive and pros are drawn towards PCs to keep costs down
2) That Lion's move towards consumer (i.e. less expensive) devices is bad for pros.
The reality is that 10.4-10.6 did a lot for pros. Core animation, core video, core audio, core image, Quartz Composer.... The pros have plenty of technology they need to take advantage of.
Meet the Mac Mini
I wouldn't really disagree with you, except for one item. I'm *really* starting to question how useful a dual redundant power supply is? In all the years I've worked with servers in corporate I.T. -- I have yet to run into a situation where a power supply failed in a server, but it kept running thanks to the secondary backup. Servers tend to have large wattage, well constructed power supplies in the first place, that outlast just about everything else on the system, especially when they spend their life in a clean, climate controlled computer room.
If a P.S. does fail on you, in most cases, it's an item that's not too difficult to swap out and get the system back online. If it's really a mission critical server where ANY small outage can't be tolerated? You better be mirroring it in real time to a second complete system for hot failover, not worrying about it having redundant power supplies!
Personally I don't use the menu bars for most Windows or Linux applications, I use the right-mouse click to bring up context menus. I've been doing so for many years. It's not as obvious to the average user, but that's mainly a training issue.
Surely the Mac has outgrown that single-button mouse nonsense by now?
It's also one of my pet peeves with web apps -- the context menu has been stolen by the browser.
Most of the time I've read about media editing on the Mac, it was using third-party products. Unless Apple bought out all those software companies and dumbed-down their products, it's not Apple that's to blame.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Apple has been a consumer electronics company for years. You're just figuring this out?
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
One reason is that WYSIWYG sucks up time and never quite works out while WYGIWYM is better. Plus Latex isn't that painful.
Apple removed support for MySQL from Lion by deleting the mysql user that was found in previous versions. There are some workarounds that are fairly obvious to the /. crowd, however, you can't find an answer by Googling or calling Apple. (If you upgraded from an earlier version of OSX, you won't encounter issues.) You also can't use DBI in Perl because they mismatched 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Perl and MySQL libraries.
When I called and asked for support, I was transferred twice, then when one of the "geniuses" couldn't answer my questions and I asked to speak to someone in Xserve support, they put me on hold for 45 minutes then hung up on me.
Thanks Apple!
So stop whining and build the computer you want. Installing OS X on a home built is about the same difficulty as getting a Linux computer up and running these days. Easy and a lot cheaper. My i5 2500 with dedicated graphics, 3 hard drives and 8 GB RAM cost about $500 and is completely bulletproof.
As for monitors....uh....so don't buy Apple. Buy a nice 1080p 32" TV for 1/3 the price. Jeez, how hard is that?
HP ML350 G5's (and some G6's)
Second power supply saved our bacon plenty of times, since there was faulty batches of PSUs. Rough guess of 20% of all ML350 G5 installs over two years.
Having spares for a *known* issue with power supplies is a cost I'd rather do without - unless I can pass that to the customer.
I do miss the ILO support of the xserves, since Mac Mini and MacPro don't.
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
and have several Mac VM's. as well as various Windoze, and Linux OS's which I boot up as needed. That way I didn't have to pay through the nose for a Mac, and I have all of the advantages of running what I need when I need it on a laptop I have upgraded to 256Gb SSD and 1Tb HDD as well as 16Gb of RAM for less than what a Mac Pro would have run me and it will blow all of their hardware away. Gotta love technology - the Mac is redundant and a waste, go with your own system and run a virtualized image of what you want to run on your terms and stop paying inflated prices for old technology that is in all of the Apple products.
Steve Jobs is dead, and so is Apple - get with the times...
It's not as much pain as it looks like from the outside when you are looking at something put together by a person that knows latex backwards and has reused a lot from previous documents. It doesn't have much of a learning curve at all if you don't need to know everything about it. I know that because I had to relearn how to use it from scratch after a gap of more than ten years.
The idea is to get plain text and just put a few lines at the top and bottom to tell tex what to do with it - just like a very simple web page. Beyond a certain point it is a lot less stuffing about than in a word processor or graphical DTP program. Formula entry still sucks just about everywhere else.
Just about every recording studio runs some type of Digital Audio Workstation, and a lot of those are OS X machines running Avid's ProTools software.
While ProTools is available for Windows, I don't see many Windows boxes in recording studios.
In music production Apple products continue to dominate.
Apple has never been on the forefront of shared applications. For instance, if I try to run iPhoto using the iPhoto library on my wife's computer, I don't see her photos - we don't share the library.
That may be OK for home use, but not for professional use.
Oh stop lying. Your post just screams gamer dweeb.
An anti Apple story in a PC mag, whoever would have guessed. Just who is pushing this anti Apple FUD and do any of these companies have a special relationship with Microsoft or any affiliated companies?
Addictive Media: Simon Marcus
Agent8: Nick Pye
Blueprint Digital: Richard Bron
Finger Industries: Marcus Kenyon
Independent video producer: Keith Woolford
Kevin Cook: Institute of Videography
Matt Wyre: Haughton Design
Photographer: Bill Wisser
Podcast editor: Ewen Rankin
Sure, final cut pro sucked, but the rest of the argument.... sorry don't see it.
Yes, the mac pros are a very expensive machine if you load them up with RAM from apple. Don't do that. Problem solved? They aren't very much more expensive than other similarly specced PRO level machines (i.e., with workstation class boards containing xeons) from other OEMS.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You're looking for a motive? Profit. Professionals are a small market. Deal with it.
Has made me very often consider jumping ship to iOS.