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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."
You can buy a macbook pro with an "antiglare" screen.
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.
It's because they infiltrate and dominate all of the colleges that produce creative professionals. Any art/design school basically requires you to have a Mac, and as a result, almost every art/design job requires a Mac.
BS. I recently financed my stepson's education at Vancouver Institute of Media Arts, a fairly well known "art/design" school. We went up to the campus, looked around. Lots and lots of Windows. A couple of Macs in the corner, sitting unused.
Talking to the faculty (who to a person started out on Macs) one finds two major issues: Graphics cards for the MacPros suck hard compared to Windows offering and Apple's random walk as far as long term strategies make it hard for a company to invest a couple of million dollars in Apple gear. Nobody suggests using Macs for anything other than cool laptops.
There were a bunch of MacBooks running around - all running Bootcamp.
So, you're view of the Mac centric artistic universe was probably true a decade ago, but it certainly isn't true now. Windows 7 really is a pretty good, quite stable applications platform. Same for the Windows toolchain. And, as TFA points out, SolidWorks and 3DS Max, two very important 3D programs are Windows only.
Apple has lost this battle and really isn't even fighting a credible rearguard action.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Nah, you can also get a 15-incher with a matte screen, but not a 13".
If you limit yourself to Apple software:
And the alternatives are either Adobe or Microsoft, who build products that suck
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.
If you limit yourself to Apple software:
Wait what? Why would you limit yourself to apple software? You mean to say that if Apple stops offering some feature in a product then, for people to use only Apple software those people are limited? How does that make any sense? You might as well say that for people who use only HP products you can't do any real video editing because HP doesn't make any decent video editing software. Man that's just full of crazy!
On top of that, it's just plain factually incorrect. DVD Studio, iDVD, and Final Cut are all still available after a brief period where Apple stopped making them, then listened to users who said their needs weren't being filled and put them back up for sale until they can roll those features into the new product line. iWeb isn't gone it was updated 3 months ago and can be used to publish automatically to any site that supports FTP or publish to other sites by transferring the files in amore secure way. Dasshcode is still available although no one seems to use it. You're really trying to claim Apple is limiting users by not continuing the abysmal HTML export from their word processor? Seriously?
And the alternatives are either Adobe or Microsoft, who build products that suck
Or, you know, every other company on the planet. I don't even understand how wrongheaded you have to be to think that Apple not offering a few features in their own software packages limits the consumer, under the assumption that no other software vendors count. Bizarre.