You can take a cheap PC and dedicate it to one audio application, such as Gigasampler, and it might be reliable enough that it's worth keeping in a studio, but if you build your central system around a computer, I can't see the rationale at all for making it a Windows system. When Macs and PC's both used to crash fairly regularly and Microsoft was talking up NT as the new Mac, then people were investing in that a bit, but now Macs don't crash and they come with a ridiculous spectrum of media-oriented software that supports the user and all of their apps from day one and did I say no crashes. Another important feature in music studios is no crashes.
Most non-Mac PC's in studios are actually purpose-built into a bigger hardware system and no MS Windows. Like the automation on your mixing desk is actually running through a suspiciously PC-shaped black box and there's a UI on a display and there's an Intel CPU somewhere in there, but you are not responsible for keeping it running or nurse-maiding it through viral meltdowns.
Logic is famous for its stability. Even when running on Mac OS 9, you expect Logic not to crash. You run it all day long every day with dozens and dozens of tracks and 20 instruments plugged in and you expect it not to crash. This is no good if it's running on Windows and Windows crashes. Logic 6 on Mac OS X is a singular moment in musical technology equivalent to the finest grand piano or violin; it's really a joy to use and it just plain doesn't crash. You do not get interrupted while working at all.
Killing Logic for Windows was just shooting an already lame horse. If you just flip through the Logic 5 manual you see caveat after caveat for Windows users because of missing features that couldn't be implemented atop MS Windows, and this is true of most music software. Cubase 4 for Windows never even came out, for example! The 4 features couldn't be done on Windows until 5. I don't see how waiting a year or more for industry-standard stuff and then it comes with all kinds of caveats is worth the $200 you saved by buying a Dell to run your $1000 software.
Apps like Final Cut and Logic depend on all kinds of stuff that is free with every Mac. The UNIX apps that come to Mac OS X always benefit from how easy it is to add "import/export to/from any QuickTime media" to your app, for example, so you don't have to write your own PNG/TIFF/AIFF/JPEG-2000 decoder or MPEG-4 encoder. In Maya on Mac OS X you can render right out to QuickTime and then you drop that on iDVD and you have a DVD. Sometimes that is what makes the value of the whole system.
Apple owns the "blue-collar day-in day-out pro audio/video" market and there are so many things missing from MS Windows and Linux for these kinds of apps and users. For example, on Mac OS X apps expect to just ask the system for audio streams and they can share the interface in every way, and they expect to get 32-bit streams, they expect to just ask QuickTime to run the video in a window or over DV (to a camcorder or other DV item) while you work on 48 audio tracks and 150 MIDI tracks. The API's are all there and many have been there for a decade. The work has barely begun in Intel circles to get this stuff going. More promises have been broken on Intel for media creators than were ever kept. Windows NT was going to be the be-all and end-all, remember?
It is the hardware as well as the software. The G4 kicks ass in media. That's what these systems are designed for. Duh. And you have FireWire and a stable UNIX base and next-generation graphics, OpenGL, etc. The whole system is oriented towards running these kinds of apps, and it makes the apps 10x - 100x better, easy.
On the PC, there is often an implied "on the PC" that goes with everything. So, Apple talks video editing, and what they mean is "state of the art, world class", while on the PC you are getting "state of the art, world class (on the PC)". The technology is not even there in the form of libraries and codecs that are used in pro video, that are all part of Mac OS X and every Mac.
In other words, you'd have to add a few hardware components and a few software components to a really good MS Windows workstation in order to make it even ready just to host an app like Final Cut Pro. Most MS Windows video-editing systems have dedicated proprietary hardware to make them go. With Final Cut, you put it on your PowerBook in about 10 minutes, hook up a DV source to the FireWire port and you go. Then you burn out a DVD right there, and those tools are built into the system as well. Macs are doing MPEG-2 ENcoding in software at ridiculous speeds due to Altivec.
Honestly, it is a joke to suggest that MS Windows will be in the same league as the Mac for this stuff anytime soon. Microsoft left those promises behind years and years ago.
Doing music on Windows... it's like asking to be hit in the mouth repeatedly by Bill Gates while you're singing. In my studio, we have about one crash per year that interrupts a take, and that's just an application crash. We haven't had a system crash in two years. You can't get that stability day-in day-out from MS Windows while moving dozens of audio, MIDI, and video tracks around. You are better off with a Fostex 4-track. Truly.
I have a friend who bought a PC last year and a copy of Logic Audio and it took him three months to admit he couldn't get the system to work. (Stress "system"... in my studio there are at least 50 devices hooked into a central Power Mac G4 that does not crash.)
There simply is no reason to do music on Windows except for "well, uhh, I already had this PC" or "I can also play games on the PC" or the mind-numbing "the PC is cheaper (if I completely ignore productivity, downtime, tech support, and all the missing or lower-quality tools)".
I have talked to a lot of formerly-Windows-based fellow Logic users since the discontinuation of the Windows version, and it invariably goes like this: "I was pissed... I was really pissed... I got a Mac... hey this fucking thing actually WORKS!... holy shit this fucking thing actually WORKS!... man, I am glad I'm using Mac OS X... Logic is better than ever... my tracks are always in sync, the audio always works, I don't get interrupted by crashes or error messages all day."
Just purely from a technical perspective, dropping Windows works. To me, you have to criticize Microsoft for simply NOT BUILDING IT. They said they would, and then they didn't. There is nothing in MS Windows to compare to QuickTime, CoreAudio, and CoreMIDI. It's just not there and Emagic would have to build it for Microsoft. It took them much, much more engineers to do the Windows version, and 65% of their users (almost all of their pro users) were on the Mac. Where is Microsoft's answer to Mac OS X for content creators? It's not there. They're after servers and game consoles and PDA's and whatnot now, but they have not done the work for our market. MS Windows is not a suitable platform for Logic 6. If you use a Logic 6 system running on Mac OS X you'll see what I'm talking about. It's not controversial; it's not rocket science... close your eyes to the Microsoft bubble for a second and look at what's going on in the studios. Lots of us tried Windows out at some point in the last five years and then we went running and screaming back to the Mac and the new Mac OS X platform that was BUILT FOR US.
Buy Macs for students who don't have computers, or set up a fund to help students get their own Mac or non-MS box if they couldn't otherwise afford it.
Set up or add to the existing video-editing or music or art studios (again, you would do this with Macs and need no Microsoft stuff even if you were allowed to buy Microsoft... my music studio doesn't run any Microsoft and we have the best stuff). Same would go for the school newspaper or any other print publishing. Macs have always been the leader in this stuff and it is easy to buy and use them... no IT required oftentimes (often the IT put up their nose at Macs and say they don't support them anyway, so users have been getting by even when Macs used to be a little harder to admin than they are now).
Set up an 802.11g network using Apple hardware... it is compatible with any computer with 802.11b or 802.11g so it even serves Microsoft stuff although it doesn't require any Microsoft stuff itself.
Replace some Web servers with little servers running a UNIX-based OS such as Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, etcetera.
Hire a consultant to come in and turn all your DOS systems (Windows 95/98/Me) into Linux systems. These DOS systems are very unstable and very insecure and cost loads of money to retire or update to the newest Microsoft stuff. Convert them to Linux and you can often fill the job of an older system.
Establish a fund to train all your "Microsoft drone" IT types on basic UNIX support so that they know how to work a common UNIX shell, and the basics of what parts of UNIX they can expect to find and use in all UNIX systems (including the Internet, and even MS stuff where it pretends to be UNIX at certain levels like TCP/IP).
Buy a single Mac OS X system for each department, so that the people there can gradually learn what this is all about, so that next time they are getting new desktops or notebooks, they'll be more inclined to look beyond the same-old MS choice and they'll know the Mac will work for them because they already ran their own software on it; already tried it. Even if they never transition, the built-in video editing and many other features that SUCK in the comparable Microsoft product will be a nice add-on to any computer lab. So you can use the existing stuff for whatever, but you'll see some stuff done on DVD video here and there... you add a lot of capabilities when you go from 8 Windows systems to 8 Windows systems and a Mac OS X system.
Hire a new IT guy with Mac OS X and Linux experience and put him in charge of "cross-platform computing". Have him make up plans for gradually strengthening the IT infrastructure by moving some more servers to Linux and more desktops to Mac OS X. Make sure to establish goals such as "once we move this server to Linux, we hope to see it become twice as reliable; and have less than 1% of the virus problems" and "once we move this lab to Mac OS X, we expect desktop users to have no viruses and generally suffer one crash per year" (that's my experience with 4 Mac OS X systems over 2 years). It will be easy for this guy to just go around and save everybody time and trouble and money with his non-Microsoft knowledge. He could pay for himself, easy, actually.
Pay a consultant to do a study of where your IT is now and where it will probably be in five years and what the advantages of Apple over Microsoft would be in that time, or Linux over Microsoft where that makes sense. Microsoft is putting a PC emulator into Windows 2003 Server because their business clients can't port their custom apps from Windows NT to Windows 2003 Server without it... they are just going to run NT in a partial emulator, like Apple ran Mac OS 9 in a partial emulator in Mac OS X. With MS, it is not a different 20 year old OS in the box, though, it's a few years old and it's the same OS. What is it going to cost to move all your Microsoft kit to the "new, improved, security-included, ready-for-the-Internet" versions? Here, we just moved to Mac OS X so we know that's a bit of a bitch, but it feels good once your'e there and you have UNIX all over the place making a good foundation for all of your efforts. Microsoft is just starting this and it's going to hit their customers like tons and tons of bricks. Many of the Windows softwares in use out there don't have developers anymore and now have only MS alternatives, too, so MS will be even stronger in this go-around of licensing. They said nobody was willing to pay extra for security in the past (because they all thought they were getting it included) so your school will be paying Bill Gates for the security that you've been paying Symantec to halfway bolt-on to Windows in the past. This is coming... it's not speculation, it just sounds so spectacular that nobody can believe it.
Buy QuickTime Pro licenses. They are cheap as shit and any Mac or Windows computer you put them on suddenly knows like 50 media types. This stuff is indispensible for media people (artists, musicians, etcetera). QuickTime Pro 6 also has all the MPEG-4 stuff (MS Office: Mac exports and plays MPEG-4 on the Mac because of QuickTime 6) so you are getting ready for that.
Replace any Outlook email with good, industry-standard email that doesn't have viruses. Microsoft's email viruses are most galling because email is the Internet's most popular app and now people are afraid of it, and are afraid of embarrassing themselves by "taking down the network" by "opening the wrong mail". It's sad and it's worth fixing if you can.
There is a universe of computing outside of MS, but it looks smaller because very few are competing directly with MS. I'm a writer, but I don't use a "word processor" because if your app is a "word processor" Microsoft will stomp you. In place of that we have wicked HTML/XML/text editors that make standard documents. The rest of the industry has just kept quietly moving towards the future while Microsoft has its tantrums and their users throw up their hands and use computers less and less.
These guys have a cool music application called MuSing that is basically a drum machine with evolutionary principles so that you can evolve new beats. It's really excellent and you can give it access to your own sample library so that all the sounds are your own.
It's a packaged Java application, so you can work with it just like a native Mac OS X application. It's $25 or so.
I use one Java application on Mac OS X and this update made it much faster and the GUI much smoother. It is almost exactly like any other Aqua application now.
The "rules" on "its" and "it's" vary in different parts of the world. It is different in England and the United States, for example.
This goes with "color" and "colour" and the US idiosyncrasy of using antique measurements. You just get over it and you have a wider variety of reading material.
Languages are always (d)evolving. There are no rules. It's a wonder when two people communicate at all, never mind if they happen to be from the exact same part of the world and have the exact same education so that their punctuation can match. That's asking too much.
Just because you use apps that create weird graphics formats, why would you assume the military would?
You can take a Mac out of its box and start it for the first time and it already knows how to read every common graphics format and many that are only common to professionals.
This article only says "Macs are better for graphics". Everybody already know that, and so it's weird to see PC bigots being so outright bigoted about it. He isn't running Microsoft Access; he's working with HUGE graphics. That's what Macs are used for. Go to LucasArts and you will see Macs doing still graphics; go anywhere. If you can't accept that a Mac is better for graphics, you have some issues of your own that you might want to check into psychologically. You might be buying the wrong system for the job if you can't even choose a Mac for graphics.
Photoshop is to graphics what UNIX is to moving files around. QuickTime is to rich-media what Apache is to spitting out Web pages. If you don't know this, or can't accept it, then you are really just hurting yourself. You're the guy running IIS and complaining that he can't switch to Apache because open source is un-American. When you know better, you can't help but wonder why that guy would punish himself with Windows. Kids are playing in the Apple Store at iMacs while their parents buy some serious tools. It is not a hard platform to approach and try for yourself and dispell the multitude of a) myths, and b) old information.
Continue trying to convince yourself that you really are better off without Mac OS X. Pretend it is "just as bad as Windows". Pretend that there aren't millions of users out there who forget where their Mac's reset button is. Pretend that they have computer viruses, and that they don't trust their system's security. You'll feel better.
Every time Apple asks their customers about mouse buttons they get like 75% saying they still use the one-button mouse and just love it. What are you going to do? You can't argue with success. The whole UI only asks you to use one mouse button, and you NEVER even have to double-click, that is just a short-cut (some people cannot double-click, I have trained people and they just can't do it, especially older people). To open a file or application, you can always go "File > Open" instead of double-clicking. In Windows there are a bunch of things where you HAVE to double-click, and where you HAVE to right-click. If you grew up with a mouse in your hand, have some sympathy for those who didn't and have enough humility to think that a 25 million user platform knows what the fuck it is doing after over 20 years of graphical computing.
Mac OS supports pretty much any USB mouse you can find just by plugging it in, no matter how many mouse buttons (I think the actual upper limit is 32), so nobody is denied their $9.99 right to a two-button scrolling mouse. The single-button optical mouse you get standard with your system goes for $30-40 on eBay, so it even pays for a high-quality, third-party mouse.
Macs are well-known to be widely-used graphics workstations, and the whole system is optimized towards that. I have a PowerBook that's about a half as fast as the one this guy is using and it runs Photoshop like a charm.
The guy did not say he wanted a "prettier interface". He said the Toughbook "slowed to a crawl" when he worked on it and the PowerBook actually works. You don't need to do a bake-off to compare "slowed to a crawl" with "actually works". Get over yourselves.
This guy is not on the Internet pontificating about spec sheets he just read.
He said flat-out that the Panasonic machines would "slow to a crawl" when he tried to do his work on them, so he ordered a PowerBook G4.
Why would you even want to bring MHz or GHz into it? This is a real-world case where a guy traded in his Pentium for a Mac so he could get his graphically-rich work done. For Mac vs PC discussion (ugh) it is not that great. If he got it for encryption then Mac fans could high-five, because it is also faster for that and that's not well-known. The fact that a Mac is a better choice for graphics is, like, duh. You boot a Mac and the first thing you see is a graphical screen with an Apple logo on it, then a boot-up progress bar that's totally graphical, then an OS that's totally graphical to operate. It's no secret that Macs do graphics.
My PowerBook has went in for repair twice, and it took about three days each time. Other than that, I've had over a year of great operation from it, very, very reliable. It was a video problem both times, and they replaced the graphics adapter the first time, and then the display the second time when there was still some weirdness (it never crashed or stopped working or anything). Apple support apologized to me for the two trips in and I quite honestly told them that it's the most reliable system I've used. I don't really mind two three-day breaks in over a year of me just opening up the lid and it awakes instantly and then use it like hell (video, graphics, multitrack audio recording, hot-plugging all the time, moving between wireless networks effortlessly, etcetera) and then close the lid again and do the same thing tomorrow. I would buy this system again in a heartbeat, and the next generation of it is already out.
Also, it is clear that this soldier had a good reason beyond brand loyalty or better UI or better stability/security to have a PowerBook, because he's working with big high-resolution images. The PowerPC CPU itself was designed with image manipulation in mind, because Apple was famous at the time for being the only computer with a graphical interface and also for being a great platform for artists. Rotating a huge image (and many other common image-manipulation functions) on a G4 takes a very short time compared to Intel chips. If you ever see a "Photoshop bake-off" between a Mac and Intel system, watch for the first image rotation... the Mac will go flip-flip and it's rotated, and the Intel machine will sit for over a minute "thinking" before the image rotates while the Mac has moved on to the next steps in the Photoshop script. It's the point where you first will see the Mac moving clearly ahead instead of being a little ahead. The PC never ends up catching up from being so slow on image rotations and resizing and some other common functions. The idea of doing graphics on a Panasonic Toughbook... ha ha. It's so army to get a lot of toughbooks and use them as a generic computer. No security, closed-source core running all the time like a black box, license agreements for the OS that force you to agree to Microsoft cracking it "whenever" and not to mention the IT staff you have to have just to network them.
The $30 is just shipping, guys. It's not a tax or a fee. For $30 they send a box to your house with the Fed Ex label already on it and filled out. You put the system in the box and call Fed Ex and they pick it up and you are done being socially conscious for the day.
They are recycling it for free. All you have to do is pay $30 to ship it to them. Apparently 95% of the components will be diverted from landfill.
I thought that was a weird comment that Mac OS X may have crashed. If he had a kernel panic he would have known it, surely? Text is written across the display in multiple languages including Japanese that tells you to restart your system. Only one of our 4 Macs here has crashed in the last year, so when it happened I noticed it. Other than that I guess the window server could freeze and you would think the system was frozen.
If the Finder crashes it can look pretty extreme if you have a lot of windows open, and then it starts up again but the open windows may be in an earlier configuration. Maybe that is what happened. Of course, this can go on all day and no other application on Mac OS X cares.
Everyone knows you can roll your own for cheaper if you leave out a ton of stuff and can get along without any support. The software and additional connectivity of the Mac is harder than ever to discount, though. Mac OS X and many applications are now very mature and you get so much software even in an iBook.
If your Ethernet port stops working on a Mac, you call Apple and they fix it. They don't have you run a diagnostic on the hardware to see if it's a hardware or software problem before referring you to someone else's company. What you buy from Apple keeps functioning fully for years, and updates its own software even. It's a whole different kind of solution than a white-box PC.
Internet Explorer was the default browser for the Mac for the last five years by an agreement with Microsoft that also had them commit to five years of MS Office, which brought MS Office to the new operating system. The agreement expired and Apple released Safari and Keynote and dropped IE. This was the "huge" deal where Bill Gates appeared as a giant head at Macworld and said that IE and Office would be around for five more years at least and that MS was investing 150 million in Apple and they were settling some old patent disputes.
Safari is a very lightweight Cocoa interface using the system's new HTML and JavaScript rendering engines which are derived from open source. It couldn't be built five years ago so Apple had MS do the honors during the transition. Now Apple's browser is plainly much better than IE so there are no politics involved in switching to it. You can run both side by side and you want to stay in Safari right away.
Safari would have been met with skepticism a few years ago but now all the stuff it includes is mature (KHTML, Flash, Shockwave, QuickTime) on Mac OS X and it is a legacy-free browser from a Mac perspective.
It's not unresponsive, it just responds differently than MS Windows or Mac OS 9 or other legacy systems. You get used to it pretty quickly and not ever crashing sure makes up for having to adjust my muscle memory a bit for Aqua. The system is compositing a beautiful desktop for me every microsecond, creating a realistic environment in which it's easy to get deeply into some creative work and come out with professional results without once cursing or crashing or working around weird technical glitches.
If you can get over the way the UI feels then there is plenty of processing power there, and also low latencies throughout the system, which is important for real-time stuff like multitrack audio editing (which I do on a G4/733 in Mac OS X and it is sweet).
The sub-$1000 Intel notebooks I have seen were a joke to me. There is no software, no security, poor system integration, and the Intel mobile processors are a scandal if you compare them to the desktop processors. You get a quarter-P4 in a P4m at best and then it slows down to half speed when you're on batteries. While on batteries, a P4m/1.5GHz notebook runs at 750MHz, which is slower than the iBook's G3 that does double the work per clock cycle.
A "power user" like this TechTV guy should have a G4 system, there's no doubt. An iBook is a great system but it is not built for speed. It's built for small, rugged, long battery life, cheap, easy, reliable, and it gets people onto the Mac OS X platform which is just ramping up for a great 10-15 years before we will have to do any major transitions because we left so much legacy behind over the past five years.
The modern version of this is an Apple Store. Everything is running and you can try stuff out pretty thoroughly before you buy. It's an amazing contrast to CompUSA.
Switching isn't just about throwing up your hands in front of your Windows XP Pentium4 system with all the trimmings and then getting in your Jaguar and speeding dangerously to the local Apple Store and getting a decked-out Power Mac with two Cinema Displays and every software title with "Pro" in it. It's very much about just giving Apple a look next time you're going to get a new system and comparing what Apple has to offer with what you thought you'd get from your current vendors and what you thought you knew about the Mac. They have $999 iBooks that come with an enormous software bundle and make a great notebook to augment a UNIX or MS Windows desktop machine, so it is not about throwing out your current kit and mortgaging the house to replace it all with Mac stuff.
The $999 iBook even comes with a free printer. Remember when you couldn't switch to Mac because you would have to get a new printer? Ha ha.
It's not that Mac applications heal themselves if moved. It's that they are self-contained inside one icon.
Imagine if every time you saved a text document it had to be in Documents/Text Documents/ and if you moved it out of there the system wouldn't open it. That's what MS Windows applications looks like to Mac users. A Mac application is as self-contained as you would expect a JPEG image to be, so it doesn't break when it's moved.
Breaking when moved is sort of a de facto copy-restriction method on MS Windows, so no wonder they haven't fixed it yet. Less control for the user, more for Microsoft.
> Windows DLL Hell is caused by STUPID installers that > overwrite system DLLS with older (or broken) versions.
No no no. You're making excuses for Microsoft again. If you go and look at how this works on Mac OS X you will understand that you look foolish defending Microsoft on this. It is night and day how it is done right on the Mac and it is completely fucked on Windows. You can't excuse it in 2003.
Listen, all you have to do to break a Windows app is move or rename it. That is outrageous to a Mac user. It's like if I told you not to move a picture file to another disk or it won't be viewable. I rename apps that have ridiculous names, like "Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0" I change to "Photoshop" and it works just fine. There are exceptions to the Panacea I'm describing, but the vast majority of the time, if an application is somewhere that the system can discover it (local storage, network storage, anything the user can access) then it will run. That's it. End of story 99% of the time.
The point is that his $2500 ThinkPad didn't work and his $2500 PowerBook does. It's not that he's enjoyed reliable Microsoft-based computing for years and suddenly something's gone wrong and he should just get a newer version of MS Windows. He mentions that he doesn't want to do that again. Your answer is "more Microsoft" and that's the answer he specificially didn't trust because they've failed him too many times.
The reason he's writing an article is obviously because he himself was somewhat surprised at how easy it was to do all the things he wanted to do with an Apple system. He just moved from DOS to Mac+UNIX almost overnight and it was easy and he is better off in every way. Even the Microsoft software is better on the Mac, and you can admin it, because it's not soup.
I've used MS Windows, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X extensively, and the standards are just higher on the Mac. The software is backed up by the hardware guarantee. You get no guarantees at all with MS Windows so no wonder it doesn't work, and all your other software runs on that and is made less valuable.
"Reinstall" is front and center in this article. I think the guy's problems are with Windows more than MS Office.
Running MS software on a Mac is like the first stage of detox. His standards will just go up from here and next time they bring in a number of desktop systems I'm sure he'll look at the Apple solution and share the support savings and productivity improvements with more people in his company.
Apple is expected to compete directly with Microsoft on every front from now on. Their non-compete agreement is up and Safari and Keynote have replaced IE and PowerPoint with everyone I know. The new Apple software is really next generation in design and operation. It sells itself if you're just willing to look at it and this CTO will have that wider perspective in their future technology roll-outs.
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You can take a cheap PC and dedicate it to one audio application, such as Gigasampler, and it might be reliable enough that it's worth keeping in a studio, but if you build your central system around a computer, I can't see the rationale at all for making it a Windows system. When Macs and PC's both used to crash fairly regularly and Microsoft was talking up NT as the new Mac, then people were investing in that a bit, but now Macs don't crash and they come with a ridiculous spectrum of media-oriented software that supports the user and all of their apps from day one and did I say no crashes. Another important feature in music studios is no crashes.
Most non-Mac PC's in studios are actually purpose-built into a bigger hardware system and no MS Windows. Like the automation on your mixing desk is actually running through a suspiciously PC-shaped black box and there's a UI on a display and there's an Intel CPU somewhere in there, but you are not responsible for keeping it running or nurse-maiding it through viral meltdowns.
Logic is famous for its stability. Even when running on Mac OS 9, you expect Logic not to crash. You run it all day long every day with dozens and dozens of tracks and 20 instruments plugged in and you expect it not to crash. This is no good if it's running on Windows and Windows crashes. Logic 6 on Mac OS X is a singular moment in musical technology equivalent to the finest grand piano or violin; it's really a joy to use and it just plain doesn't crash. You do not get interrupted while working at all.
Killing Logic for Windows was just shooting an already lame horse. If you just flip through the Logic 5 manual you see caveat after caveat for Windows users because of missing features that couldn't be implemented atop MS Windows, and this is true of most music software. Cubase 4 for Windows never even came out, for example! The 4 features couldn't be done on Windows until 5. I don't see how waiting a year or more for industry-standard stuff and then it comes with all kinds of caveats is worth the $200 you saved by buying a Dell to run your $1000 software.
Apps like Final Cut and Logic depend on all kinds of stuff that is free with every Mac. The UNIX apps that come to Mac OS X always benefit from how easy it is to add "import/export to/from any QuickTime media" to your app, for example, so you don't have to write your own PNG/TIFF/AIFF/JPEG-2000 decoder or MPEG-4 encoder. In Maya on Mac OS X you can render right out to QuickTime and then you drop that on iDVD and you have a DVD. Sometimes that is what makes the value of the whole system.
Apple owns the "blue-collar day-in day-out pro audio/video" market and there are so many things missing from MS Windows and Linux for these kinds of apps and users. For example, on Mac OS X apps expect to just ask the system for audio streams and they can share the interface in every way, and they expect to get 32-bit streams, they expect to just ask QuickTime to run the video in a window or over DV (to a camcorder or other DV item) while you work on 48 audio tracks and 150 MIDI tracks. The API's are all there and many have been there for a decade. The work has barely begun in Intel circles to get this stuff going. More promises have been broken on Intel for media creators than were ever kept. Windows NT was going to be the be-all and end-all, remember?
> Does anyone use a mac for its Hardware?
It is the hardware as well as the software. The G4 kicks ass in media. That's what these systems are designed for. Duh. And you have FireWire and a stable UNIX base and next-generation graphics, OpenGL, etc. The whole system is oriented towards running these kinds of apps, and it makes the apps 10x - 100x better, easy.
On the PC, there is often an implied "on the PC" that goes with everything. So, Apple talks video editing, and what they mean is "state of the art, world class", while on the PC you are getting "state of the art, world class (on the PC)". The technology is not even there in the form of libraries and codecs that are used in pro video, that are all part of Mac OS X and every Mac.
In other words, you'd have to add a few hardware components and a few software components to a really good MS Windows workstation in order to make it even ready just to host an app like Final Cut Pro. Most MS Windows video-editing systems have dedicated proprietary hardware to make them go. With Final Cut, you put it on your PowerBook in about 10 minutes, hook up a DV source to the FireWire port and you go. Then you burn out a DVD right there, and those tools are built into the system as well. Macs are doing MPEG-2 ENcoding in software at ridiculous speeds due to Altivec.
Honestly, it is a joke to suggest that MS Windows will be in the same league as the Mac for this stuff anytime soon. Microsoft left those promises behind years and years ago.
Doing music on Windows ... it's like asking to be hit in the mouth repeatedly by Bill Gates while you're singing. In my studio, we have about one crash per year that interrupts a take, and that's just an application crash. We haven't had a system crash in two years. You can't get that stability day-in day-out from MS Windows while moving dozens of audio, MIDI, and video tracks around. You are better off with a Fostex 4-track. Truly.
... in my studio there are at least 50 devices hooked into a central Power Mac G4 that does not crash.)
... I was really pissed ... I got a Mac ... hey this fucking thing actually WORKS! ... holy shit this fucking thing actually WORKS! ... man, I am glad I'm using Mac OS X ... Logic is better than ever ... my tracks are always in sync, the audio always works, I don't get interrupted by crashes or error messages all day."
... close your eyes to the Microsoft bubble for a second and look at what's going on in the studios. Lots of us tried Windows out at some point in the last five years and then we went running and screaming back to the Mac and the new Mac OS X platform that was BUILT FOR US.
I have a friend who bought a PC last year and a copy of Logic Audio and it took him three months to admit he couldn't get the system to work. (Stress "system"
There simply is no reason to do music on Windows except for "well, uhh, I already had this PC" or "I can also play games on the PC" or the mind-numbing "the PC is cheaper (if I completely ignore productivity, downtime, tech support, and all the missing or lower-quality tools)".
I have talked to a lot of formerly-Windows-based fellow Logic users since the discontinuation of the Windows version, and it invariably goes like this: "I was pissed
Just purely from a technical perspective, dropping Windows works. To me, you have to criticize Microsoft for simply NOT BUILDING IT. They said they would, and then they didn't. There is nothing in MS Windows to compare to QuickTime, CoreAudio, and CoreMIDI. It's just not there and Emagic would have to build it for Microsoft. It took them much, much more engineers to do the Windows version, and 65% of their users (almost all of their pro users) were on the Mac. Where is Microsoft's answer to Mac OS X for content creators? It's not there. They're after servers and game consoles and PDA's and whatnot now, but they have not done the work for our market. MS Windows is not a suitable platform for Logic 6. If you use a Logic 6 system running on Mac OS X you'll see what I'm talking about. It's not controversial; it's not rocket science
Buy Macs for students who don't have computers, or set up a fund to help students get their own Mac or non-MS box if they couldn't otherwise afford it.
... my music studio doesn't run any Microsoft and we have the best stuff). Same would go for the school newspaper or any other print publishing. Macs have always been the leader in this stuff and it is easy to buy and use them ... no IT required oftentimes (often the IT put up their nose at Macs and say they don't support them anyway, so users have been getting by even when Macs used to be a little harder to admin than they are now).
... it is compatible with any computer with 802.11b or 802.11g so it even serves Microsoft stuff although it doesn't require any Microsoft stuff itself.
... you add a lot of capabilities when you go from 8 Windows systems to 8 Windows systems and a Mac OS X system.
... they are just going to run NT in a partial emulator, like Apple ran Mac OS 9 in a partial emulator in Mac OS X. With MS, it is not a different 20 year old OS in the box, though, it's a few years old and it's the same OS. What is it going to cost to move all your Microsoft kit to the "new, improved, security-included, ready-for-the-Internet" versions? Here, we just moved to Mac OS X so we know that's a bit of a bitch, but it feels good once your'e there and you have UNIX all over the place making a good foundation for all of your efforts. Microsoft is just starting this and it's going to hit their customers like tons and tons of bricks. Many of the Windows softwares in use out there don't have developers anymore and now have only MS alternatives, too, so MS will be even stronger in this go-around of licensing. They said nobody was willing to pay extra for security in the past (because they all thought they were getting it included) so your school will be paying Bill Gates for the security that you've been paying Symantec to halfway bolt-on to Windows in the past. This is coming ... it's not speculation, it just sounds so spectacular that nobody can believe it.
Set up or add to the existing video-editing or music or art studios (again, you would do this with Macs and need no Microsoft stuff even if you were allowed to buy Microsoft
Set up an 802.11g network using Apple hardware
Replace some Web servers with little servers running a UNIX-based OS such as Mac OS X, BSD, Linux, etcetera.
Hire a consultant to come in and turn all your DOS systems (Windows 95/98/Me) into Linux systems. These DOS systems are very unstable and very insecure and cost loads of money to retire or update to the newest Microsoft stuff. Convert them to Linux and you can often fill the job of an older system.
Establish a fund to train all your "Microsoft drone" IT types on basic UNIX support so that they know how to work a common UNIX shell, and the basics of what parts of UNIX they can expect to find and use in all UNIX systems (including the Internet, and even MS stuff where it pretends to be UNIX at certain levels like TCP/IP).
Buy a single Mac OS X system for each department, so that the people there can gradually learn what this is all about, so that next time they are getting new desktops or notebooks, they'll be more inclined to look beyond the same-old MS choice and they'll know the Mac will work for them because they already ran their own software on it; already tried it. Even if they never transition, the built-in video editing and many other features that SUCK in the comparable Microsoft product will be a nice add-on to any computer lab. So you can use the existing stuff for whatever, but you'll see some stuff done on DVD video here and there
Hire a new IT guy with Mac OS X and Linux experience and put him in charge of "cross-platform computing". Have him make up plans for gradually strengthening the IT infrastructure by moving some more servers to Linux and more desktops to Mac OS X. Make sure to establish goals such as "once we move this server to Linux, we hope to see it become twice as reliable; and have less than 1% of the virus problems" and "once we move this lab to Mac OS X, we expect desktop users to have no viruses and generally suffer one crash per year" (that's my experience with 4 Mac OS X systems over 2 years). It will be easy for this guy to just go around and save everybody time and trouble and money with his non-Microsoft knowledge. He could pay for himself, easy, actually.
Pay a consultant to do a study of where your IT is now and where it will probably be in five years and what the advantages of Apple over Microsoft would be in that time, or Linux over Microsoft where that makes sense. Microsoft is putting a PC emulator into Windows 2003 Server because their business clients can't port their custom apps from Windows NT to Windows 2003 Server without it
Buy QuickTime Pro licenses. They are cheap as shit and any Mac or Windows computer you put them on suddenly knows like 50 media types. This stuff is indispensible for media people (artists, musicians, etcetera). QuickTime Pro 6 also has all the MPEG-4 stuff (MS Office: Mac exports and plays MPEG-4 on the Mac because of QuickTime 6) so you are getting ready for that.
Replace any Outlook email with good, industry-standard email that doesn't have viruses. Microsoft's email viruses are most galling because email is the Internet's most popular app and now people are afraid of it, and are afraid of embarrassing themselves by "taking down the network" by "opening the wrong mail". It's sad and it's worth fixing if you can.
There is a universe of computing outside of MS, but it looks smaller because very few are competing directly with MS. I'm a writer, but I don't use a "word processor" because if your app is a "word processor" Microsoft will stomp you. In place of that we have wicked HTML/XML/text editors that make standard documents. The rest of the industry has just kept quietly moving towards the future while Microsoft has its tantrums and their users throw up their hands and use computers less and less.
These guys have a cool music application called MuSing that is basically a drum machine with evolutionary principles so that you can evolve new beats. It's really excellent and you can give it access to your own sample library so that all the sounds are your own.
It's a packaged Java application, so you can work with it just like a native Mac OS X application. It's $25 or so.
Geneffects
I use one Java application on Mac OS X and this update made it much faster and the GUI much smoother. It is almost exactly like any other Aqua application now.
The "rules" on "its" and "it's" vary in different parts of the world. It is different in England and the United States, for example.
This goes with "color" and "colour" and the US idiosyncrasy of using antique measurements. You just get over it and you have a wider variety of reading material.
Languages are always (d)evolving. There are no rules. It's a wonder when two people communicate at all, never mind if they happen to be from the exact same part of the world and have the exact same education so that their punctuation can match. That's asking too much.
Just because you use apps that create weird graphics formats, why would you assume the military would?
You can take a Mac out of its box and start it for the first time and it already knows how to read every common graphics format and many that are only common to professionals.
This article only says "Macs are better for graphics". Everybody already know that, and so it's weird to see PC bigots being so outright bigoted about it. He isn't running Microsoft Access; he's working with HUGE graphics. That's what Macs are used for. Go to LucasArts and you will see Macs doing still graphics; go anywhere. If you can't accept that a Mac is better for graphics, you have some issues of your own that you might want to check into psychologically. You might be buying the wrong system for the job if you can't even choose a Mac for graphics.
Photoshop is to graphics what UNIX is to moving files around. QuickTime is to rich-media what Apache is to spitting out Web pages. If you don't know this, or can't accept it, then you are really just hurting yourself. You're the guy running IIS and complaining that he can't switch to Apache because open source is un-American. When you know better, you can't help but wonder why that guy would punish himself with Windows. Kids are playing in the Apple Store at iMacs while their parents buy some serious tools. It is not a hard platform to approach and try for yourself and dispell the multitude of a) myths, and b) old information.
Continue trying to convince yourself that you really are better off without Mac OS X. Pretend it is "just as bad as Windows". Pretend that there aren't millions of users out there who forget where their Mac's reset button is. Pretend that they have computer viruses, and that they don't trust their system's security. You'll feel better.
Every time Apple asks their customers about mouse buttons they get like 75% saying they still use the one-button mouse and just love it. What are you going to do? You can't argue with success. The whole UI only asks you to use one mouse button, and you NEVER even have to double-click, that is just a short-cut (some people cannot double-click, I have trained people and they just can't do it, especially older people). To open a file or application, you can always go "File > Open" instead of double-clicking. In Windows there are a bunch of things where you HAVE to double-click, and where you HAVE to right-click. If you grew up with a mouse in your hand, have some sympathy for those who didn't and have enough humility to think that a 25 million user platform knows what the fuck it is doing after over 20 years of graphical computing.
Mac OS supports pretty much any USB mouse you can find just by plugging it in, no matter how many mouse buttons (I think the actual upper limit is 32), so nobody is denied their $9.99 right to a two-button scrolling mouse. The single-button optical mouse you get standard with your system goes for $30-40 on eBay, so it even pays for a high-quality, third-party mouse.
Macs are well-known to be widely-used graphics workstations, and the whole system is optimized towards that. I have a PowerBook that's about a half as fast as the one this guy is using and it runs Photoshop like a charm.
The guy did not say he wanted a "prettier interface". He said the Toughbook "slowed to a crawl" when he worked on it and the PowerBook actually works. You don't need to do a bake-off to compare "slowed to a crawl" with "actually works". Get over yourselves.
This guy is not on the Internet pontificating about spec sheets he just read.
He said flat-out that the Panasonic machines would "slow to a crawl" when he tried to do his work on them, so he ordered a PowerBook G4.
Why would you even want to bring MHz or GHz into it? This is a real-world case where a guy traded in his Pentium for a Mac so he could get his graphically-rich work done. For Mac vs PC discussion (ugh) it is not that great. If he got it for encryption then Mac fans could high-five, because it is also faster for that and that's not well-known. The fact that a Mac is a better choice for graphics is, like, duh. You boot a Mac and the first thing you see is a graphical screen with an Apple logo on it, then a boot-up progress bar that's totally graphical, then an OS that's totally graphical to operate. It's no secret that Macs do graphics.
My PowerBook has went in for repair twice, and it took about three days each time. Other than that, I've had over a year of great operation from it, very, very reliable. It was a video problem both times, and they replaced the graphics adapter the first time, and then the display the second time when there was still some weirdness (it never crashed or stopped working or anything). Apple support apologized to me for the two trips in and I quite honestly told them that it's the most reliable system I've used. I don't really mind two three-day breaks in over a year of me just opening up the lid and it awakes instantly and then use it like hell (video, graphics, multitrack audio recording, hot-plugging all the time, moving between wireless networks effortlessly, etcetera) and then close the lid again and do the same thing tomorrow. I would buy this system again in a heartbeat, and the next generation of it is already out.
... the Mac will go flip-flip and it's rotated, and the Intel machine will sit for over a minute "thinking" before the image rotates while the Mac has moved on to the next steps in the Photoshop script. It's the point where you first will see the Mac moving clearly ahead instead of being a little ahead. The PC never ends up catching up from being so slow on image rotations and resizing and some other common functions. The idea of doing graphics on a Panasonic Toughbook ... ha ha. It's so army to get a lot of toughbooks and use them as a generic computer. No security, closed-source core running all the time like a black box, license agreements for the OS that force you to agree to Microsoft cracking it "whenever" and not to mention the IT staff you have to have just to network them.
Also, it is clear that this soldier had a good reason beyond brand loyalty or better UI or better stability/security to have a PowerBook, because he's working with big high-resolution images. The PowerPC CPU itself was designed with image manipulation in mind, because Apple was famous at the time for being the only computer with a graphical interface and also for being a great platform for artists. Rotating a huge image (and many other common image-manipulation functions) on a G4 takes a very short time compared to Intel chips. If you ever see a "Photoshop bake-off" between a Mac and Intel system, watch for the first image rotation
The $30 is just shipping, guys. It's not a tax or a fee. For $30 they send a box to your house with the Fed Ex label already on it and filled out. You put the system in the box and call Fed Ex and they pick it up and you are done being socially conscious for the day.
They are recycling it for free. All you have to do is pay $30 to ship it to them. Apparently 95% of the components will be diverted from landfill.
I thought that was a weird comment that Mac OS X may have crashed. If he had a kernel panic he would have known it, surely? Text is written across the display in multiple languages including Japanese that tells you to restart your system. Only one of our 4 Macs here has crashed in the last year, so when it happened I noticed it. Other than that I guess the window server could freeze and you would think the system was frozen.
If the Finder crashes it can look pretty extreme if you have a lot of windows open, and then it starts up again but the open windows may be in an earlier configuration. Maybe that is what happened. Of course, this can go on all day and no other application on Mac OS X cares.
Mac OS X Kernel Panic
Everyone knows you can roll your own for cheaper if you leave out a ton of stuff and can get along without any support. The software and additional connectivity of the Mac is harder than ever to discount, though. Mac OS X and many applications are now very mature and you get so much software even in an iBook.
If your Ethernet port stops working on a Mac, you call Apple and they fix it. They don't have you run a diagnostic on the hardware to see if it's a hardware or software problem before referring you to someone else's company. What you buy from Apple keeps functioning fully for years, and updates its own software even. It's a whole different kind of solution than a white-box PC.
Internet Explorer was the default browser for the Mac for the last five years by an agreement with Microsoft that also had them commit to five years of MS Office, which brought MS Office to the new operating system. The agreement expired and Apple released Safari and Keynote and dropped IE. This was the "huge" deal where Bill Gates appeared as a giant head at Macworld and said that IE and Office would be around for five more years at least and that MS was investing 150 million in Apple and they were settling some old patent disputes.
Safari is a very lightweight Cocoa interface using the system's new HTML and JavaScript rendering engines which are derived from open source. It couldn't be built five years ago so Apple had MS do the honors during the transition. Now Apple's browser is plainly much better than IE so there are no politics involved in switching to it. You can run both side by side and you want to stay in Safari right away.
Safari would have been met with skepticism a few years ago but now all the stuff it includes is mature (KHTML, Flash, Shockwave, QuickTime) on Mac OS X and it is a legacy-free browser from a Mac perspective.
It's not unresponsive, it just responds differently than MS Windows or Mac OS 9 or other legacy systems. You get used to it pretty quickly and not ever crashing sure makes up for having to adjust my muscle memory a bit for Aqua. The system is compositing a beautiful desktop for me every microsecond, creating a realistic environment in which it's easy to get deeply into some creative work and come out with professional results without once cursing or crashing or working around weird technical glitches.
If you can get over the way the UI feels then there is plenty of processing power there, and also low latencies throughout the system, which is important for real-time stuff like multitrack audio editing (which I do on a G4/733 in Mac OS X and it is sweet).
The sub-$1000 Intel notebooks I have seen were a joke to me. There is no software, no security, poor system integration, and the Intel mobile processors are a scandal if you compare them to the desktop processors. You get a quarter-P4 in a P4m at best and then it slows down to half speed when you're on batteries. While on batteries, a P4m/1.5GHz notebook runs at 750MHz, which is slower than the iBook's G3 that does double the work per clock cycle.
A "power user" like this TechTV guy should have a G4 system, there's no doubt. An iBook is a great system but it is not built for speed. It's built for small, rugged, long battery life, cheap, easy, reliable, and it gets people onto the Mac OS X platform which is just ramping up for a great 10-15 years before we will have to do any major transitions because we left so much legacy behind over the past five years.
The modern version of this is an Apple Store. Everything is running and you can try stuff out pretty thoroughly before you buy. It's an amazing contrast to CompUSA.
Switching isn't just about throwing up your hands in front of your Windows XP Pentium4 system with all the trimmings and then getting in your Jaguar and speeding dangerously to the local Apple Store and getting a decked-out Power Mac with two Cinema Displays and every software title with "Pro" in it. It's very much about just giving Apple a look next time you're going to get a new system and comparing what Apple has to offer with what you thought you'd get from your current vendors and what you thought you knew about the Mac. They have $999 iBooks that come with an enormous software bundle and make a great notebook to augment a UNIX or MS Windows desktop machine, so it is not about throwing out your current kit and mortgaging the house to replace it all with Mac stuff.
The $999 iBook even comes with a free printer. Remember when you couldn't switch to Mac because you would have to get a new printer? Ha ha.
It's not that Mac applications heal themselves if moved. It's that they are self-contained inside one icon.
Imagine if every time you saved a text document it had to be in Documents/Text Documents/ and if you moved it out of there the system wouldn't open it. That's what MS Windows applications looks like to Mac users. A Mac application is as self-contained as you would expect a JPEG image to be, so it doesn't break when it's moved.
Breaking when moved is sort of a de facto copy-restriction method on MS Windows, so no wonder they haven't fixed it yet. Less control for the user, more for Microsoft.
> Windows DLL Hell is caused by STUPID installers that
> overwrite system DLLS with older (or broken) versions.
No no no. You're making excuses for Microsoft again. If you go and look at how this works on Mac OS X you will understand that you look foolish defending Microsoft on this. It is night and day how it is done right on the Mac and it is completely fucked on Windows. You can't excuse it in 2003.
Listen, all you have to do to break a Windows app is move or rename it. That is outrageous to a Mac user. It's like if I told you not to move a picture file to another disk or it won't be viewable. I rename apps that have ridiculous names, like "Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0" I change to "Photoshop" and it works just fine. There are exceptions to the Panacea I'm describing, but the vast majority of the time, if an application is somewhere that the system can discover it (local storage, network storage, anything the user can access) then it will run. That's it. End of story 99% of the time.
The point is that his $2500 ThinkPad didn't work and his $2500 PowerBook does. It's not that he's enjoyed reliable Microsoft-based computing for years and suddenly something's gone wrong and he should just get a newer version of MS Windows. He mentions that he doesn't want to do that again. Your answer is "more Microsoft" and that's the answer he specificially didn't trust because they've failed him too many times.
The reason he's writing an article is obviously because he himself was somewhat surprised at how easy it was to do all the things he wanted to do with an Apple system. He just moved from DOS to Mac+UNIX almost overnight and it was easy and he is better off in every way. Even the Microsoft software is better on the Mac, and you can admin it, because it's not soup.
I've used MS Windows, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X extensively, and the standards are just higher on the Mac. The software is backed up by the hardware guarantee. You get no guarantees at all with MS Windows so no wonder it doesn't work, and all your other software runs on that and is made less valuable.
"Reinstall" is front and center in this article. I think the guy's problems are with Windows more than MS Office.
Running MS software on a Mac is like the first stage of detox. His standards will just go up from here and next time they bring in a number of desktop systems I'm sure he'll look at the Apple solution and share the support savings and productivity improvements with more people in his company.
Apple is expected to compete directly with Microsoft on every front from now on. Their non-compete agreement is up and Safari and Keynote have replaced IE and PowerPoint with everyone I know. The new Apple software is really next generation in design and operation. It sells itself if you're just willing to look at it and this CTO will have that wider perspective in their future technology roll-outs.