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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.
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.
I suspect that certain characteristics of the "Professional" market(notably the ones where it overlaps most strongly with the "IT" market) are a poor fit for Apple, so they will, indeed, be very temped to ditch them as time goes on.
The high end of the "Pro" market is touchy because they tend to depend on fairly large tangles of interconnected products: If asked "what do you use?" they might say "Final Cut"; but they actually mean "Final cut, two dozen specialized plugins, one or more boutique hardware components for capture or output, some sort of storage backend, possibly some in-house custom tools...".
One of Apple's strengths, particularly of late, has bee their ability(and willingness) to just pick up and say "fuck everybody who thinks some legacy feature/interface/API is good enough. As of today, it is the new shiny or nothing!"(see ADB, Adobe/64-bit Carbon, Final Cut Pro, etc.). Combined with some good taste, this has worked very well in the consumer and low-end "prosumer" markets. By largely ignoring legacy issues and expecting people to keep up or suck it up, they've been able to maintain a pretty aggressive release schedule for new and interesting features with a comparatively small engineering team. However, that is absolutely incompatible with the requirements of more esoteric professional environments(along with institutional IT, their less colorful but considerably larger counterparts). You just can't keep a spaghetti ecosystem of critical 3rd party hardware and software moving that fast, at least not at a price anybody is willing to pay.(Even fairly basic things, like supporting pro-level video cards, can be pretty dire, despite the fact that Mac Pro is more PC-like than it has ever been. The default options suck to an almost comical degree, and driver support for anything else is atrocious.)
For consumer and prosumer requirements, where it is much more likely that the integrated hardware and a small number of common software packages are enough, Apple's approach works just fine. It seems unlikely, though, that they can reconcile that with the requirements of the more specialized users. And, now that they have a big, lucrative, consumer market, their incentive to try isn't what it once might have been.
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!
THIS was once the spirit of Apple Inc. Shame on you for losing your way.
Reminds me what Jason Newsted said, when asked for his response to people saying Metallica had sold out: "Yeah we sold out. We sold out every arena we played for the last five years."
Until the general public stops eating up every single thing they produce, it will never change. They make far too much money to give half a crap about the loyal customers that kept them viable before the iCrap era. They'd rather you just shut up and keep buying those iPhones/iPads. It's sad, but true.
That is the funny thing about Apple. I got a Mac to try out some iOS development, and was truly suprised at just how bad the UI was. Macs were supposed to be good at UI, and it turns out that they are pretty darn bad at it. Yet the Apple fans keep instisting that "I'm holding it wrong". I agree, and have stated myself many times, that the single menu at the top made perfectly fine sense when we were running on a single 640 x480 screen. Back then, pixels were precious. Today it is just bad UI.
The fact that the X button sometimes closes the application, and sometimes leaves the application running without a UI is also bad. The green + shrinking the screen is a poor UI choice. The list goes on and on.
It is just strange that the UI gets held up as Apples triumph, when the UI is sub par and the good parts of a OSX are under the hood.
If you limit yourself to Apple software:
And the alternatives are either Adobe or Microsoft, who build products that suck
This is a narrower issue. I am a professional editor and VFX artist, workflow supervisor, etc. I know our community is miniscule compared to the rest of the world. And we love iPhones, too. But from our point of view, we've been inhaling MacPro workstations and FCP licenses like crazy for years. We depend on them, but Apple's support for us has been on the downward slope for several years now. If Mac OS suddenly adopts a new document model and a bunch of other experimental stuff, and eviscerates FCP, and starts dumbing down MacPros, it creates a very serious bunch of question marks about the stability and sanity of our prime tech platform. It doesn't matter how much we loved or hated Jobs. For all the talk about how pro features are coming to FCX, that's getting old. We should not be having this conversation. Post houses are not waiting, they started jumping to Adobe CS5.5 right away. They are even going back to PCs, despite the codec issues and fear of windows. This is not actually fresh news. You are not seeing PC fanboys crapping on Apple here. You are seeing people whose livelihoods are in jeopardy.
With Windows or common Linux desktop environments when you maximize a window the window takes up the full screen, regardless of whether there's enough content in the window to fill the whole screen. This often leaves vast areas of white space on the sides and bottom of the window.
On the Mac, the green button zooms the window to be big enough to see everything that's inside the window, and if you click it again it just returns to the size it was before. The maximize button to exit full screen in Windows behaves *identically* to the green button in OS X when exiting full screen. It returns the window to a user-determined size that doesn't necessarily show the full content of the window. Your lack of understanding of it doesn't make it bad design.
In the same way, having the icons on the right side makes more sense, because normally the windows cover up the space on the left. When I hit the green button, I can see 1. All of the content of the window, 2. the icons on my desktop, and 3. the windows behind my front window. How exactly is having vast areas of white space within the front window better than being able to still see the full content of the front window but also being able to use your much-valued screen real estate to see other things in the unused space around and behind it?
The x button closes the application if the application is only capable of having one window(like utility programs) and closes just the window if the application is capable of having multiple windows. This makes it so you don't have to wait for a whole application to relaunch if you accidentally close the last window. But most Mac users know that you can hit command q to completely close a program(which is the functionality you're claiming that OS X doesn't have) or command w to close just the window. It's interesting that you'd deride OS X for the fact that Windows lacks that granularity of function.
Because FCX won't ever catch up. It's a question of scale.
The old versions of FCP are designed to allow teams to work on projects. The new software is designed to be used by a single user. If only one person at a time is editing, the new version may well be better than the old version. That workflow matches how a huge number of people work, so it makes sense for Apple to focus on that market. From amateur home user to professionals working on smaller projects, Apple is moving in the right direction.
For the broadcast market, it's the wrong direction. If your work scales beyond one user per project, it's time to move on. Apple makes high margins on consumer electronics, lower but OK margins on home computers, and not much at all from businesses or government sales. Apple is going to focus on the market segment where they make higher profits, not the niche market with high sales and support costs.
At one time, if it had an engine, Ford and GM made it. Ford sold tractors and airplanes. GM sold buses, locomotives, and heavy trucks. Those markets are willing to pay a higher initial price for products which last a long time and can be repaired and rebuilt over and over. The market for cars is different. People will junk cars after 10 years if they get a lower price up front. Consumers don't see cars as an investment used to make money, cars are an expense. Make it as cheap as possible and sell me a new one every couple of years, driving the latest model impresses people. Ford and GM still sell light trucks, and probably always will. But they got out of those other markets. Some of the technology may be the same, but each market demands a different set of trade-offs, a different way of doing business. It's easier to structure your business around one large market than try to do everything.
Apple sells to consumers. They're good at it. If they sold vehicles, they'd sell cars. If you need the equivalent of a van or pickup, Apple is still in that market. But they won't, can't, scale up a pickup to a tractor trailer.
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.
so the target size is effectively infinite. No bad UI about that.
That would be true if the menu bar were the target. But typically we target menu ITEMS.
It also fails to account for the fact that AFTER we use a menu item, we tend to want to put the cursor somewhere in the application window we were using... which if on a different monitor in a 2 large monitor system is a small target a VERY long way away. And we wouldn't have to make that trip if we hadn't had to go up to the menu bar.
Trying to suggest suggest the OSX menu bar is a good application of interface design using fitte's law in a multi-monitor setup is like concluding the best place to put the ketchup on a large picnic table would be at the bottom of a steep slide attached to the picnic table that ends in a brick wall.
Anyone who wants the ketchup can just run down the slid at full tilt into the brick wall... its pure genius.