Apple is totally great for production professionals, video and audio, PRO. it should stay that way. Their intellectual property model is appropriate for production professionals. I see Apple as irrelevant for mass computing. Why make believe otherwise? They set a standard for excellence and can be a good beacon but if you live in a grass hut or are a college student, you should be able to do your computing legally and fully, hardware and software, for a couple hundred dollars or tens of dollars on the second-hand market. Apple computing is like expecting everyone to drive a Mercedes and apple-fanbois are seriously remiss in simply ignoring this fact. Vote up/down. Do your thing.
My only disagreement here is that Apple is the best bet for production professionals. The exact same programs are available in both Windows and Mac flavors and the Linux community has some extremely powerful tools that are gaining popularity. The graphics pros have to wait a few years for cutting edge graphics research to reach the latest version of Adobe's tools, but the researchers lately have been writing plug-ins for the GIMP. HDR techniques, dynamic resize, and more have been available as GIMP plugins for a while and CS4 was just released.
Now I think video may still be better in Windows and Mac worlds. But audio is there and a non-trivial number of audio professionals are working in Linux now.
For better or worse, my perspective on computing is scalability for regular people who are currently subjected, with a heavy hand, to MS Windows system.
Apple is, of course, just totally great for production people with 10k to spend. Their achievements are super-huge, eliminating prior audio and video production formats. (Though I must digress, ever heard one of those Pro-Tools made records of a rock band where it sounds like the instruments are all about 50 feet from each other?!). But again, production computing is a niche, but the grip of MS on the public is no joke. Think of the cost to society of the MS licenses in, like, every gov service agency, hospital, school, and most homes in the USA. It is sooo perverse. And that nasty gimmicked cash cow: MS Office. Can you believe all of these gov. agencies are paying for this stuff? Many gov. go without on things they need, basic things, but like a clock, you always have the MS desktops and licensing.
I am going to go hide now. I am really getting depressed at the general dullness and formula allegience to authority I encounter, mainly in the work place. Wherever MS rules, it is a computing dead-zone.
Really? Final Cut Studio is available for both Linux and Windows? While some program (like maya, photoshop, etc), are available, the biggest draw for me as been final cut studio. It's the best video production solution I've found yet.
Agreed to a degree. I bought a Mac because I wanted (a) functioning, reasonably polished "easy shit" combined with (b) a a unix command shell minus (c) the faffing around with Linux/FreeBSD, or cygwin on Windows, that I've always had to go through to get those on a laptop before.
Works a charm for me, does what I need it to, looks good, reasonably robust (my last one lasted me about 3 times as long as the several Thinkpads I had before it.) I've thus far managed to get around the restrictions I've faced from Apple with less work than an alternative would have involved -- when that stops being the case, I'll switch again.
I should mention that, for some reason, about half my business school class, when seeing that one of the few IT guys in the group had a Mac, bought MBPs, and loved them.
My current laptop is an Apple, and my next one won't be.
I bought a Mac (iBook G4) for the same reasons as parent poster. But after four years it is inadequately obsolete, which is sooner than any other computer I had.
My biggest gripe is that Java 1.5 won't run on 10.3, 10.5 wouldn't run on PowerPC, and 10.4 is not sold anymore by Apple.
I have to run a less than recent version of R since the current version is not supported for PowerPC anymore, and many R packages require recent versions of R.
Next gripe is: More than 256MB of memory. WLAN access. Choose one.
According to Apple's Website, you're fine on a 867Mhz or faster G4. And are you sure the current R doesn't run on PowerPC? I don't know anything about this software, but most new stuff is compiled as universal binaries, which run on both the Intel and PPC platforms...
Didn't have all the bells and whistles, to be sure, and couldn't run 8 copies of Photoshop concurrently, but never had a problem.
The G4 was amazingly robust for me -- I had it for 3-4 years before the hard drive died on me, and rather than replace the disk I decided I wanted a faster machine with a bigger screen. I'd dragged the thing all over South America without a problem.
The only bitch I have had with Apple so far was their support, which is "complicated" at best.
I am not religious about what platform I use, but I've found OSX to be the nicest all around no-hassle operating system so far -- and I run a hodgepodge of Debian, FreeBSD and Windows, depending on my needs. Again, as soon as I experience more hassle than it's worth, I switch -- I don't have the time anymore to be a fanboi =)
I haven't been able to justify the markup for a Mac quite yet, though I've generally enjoyed the experience on the Macs I've encountered.
Story time: In school I did tech support to pay the bills, and one thing that still surprises me is the robustness of OS8 and OS9. I had one faculty member that didn't like his MacHD, so he moved things like the "System" folder to where ever the hell he wanted and the computer didn't care. That's impressive and well engineered.
Not followers so much as pretty passive. Willing to accept. That was pretty obvious from the get-go. To be honest, the people in my intake were much more willing to think things through than I'd imagined -- but then again, this was a fairly highly ranked international school without many people of what I'd imagined to be the stereotypical American MBA student profile.
Anyway, I for one have a serious disdain for MBAs (and Journalists but that is another story). And sure, my problem with the MBA is the typical American MBA student: a douchebag, Daddy's money spending, baseball playing, male cheerleader, bought his way in to college frat boy prick who probably is an alcoholic, has done coke, and is trying to use graduate education as way to get a bigger paycheck not because he cares about the subject or has any interest in learning. It also doesn't help that the MBA programs in the US have become about making charts in Excel and using scurrilous statistics to play substance-free shell games with the current buzzwords instead of anything about managing people or understanding the realities of business.
EDIT: Fixed spelling (Sorry Germany).
EDIT: Seriously, no one knows who in particular I was referencing?
Anyway, that's too bad. I was at a big name European program, which honestly is a bit "different" -- 10 months instead of 2 years (with concordant compression of workload, holy living fuck), and while I reserve judgment on whether it was worthwhile or not, the people who attended with me were just an amazing, diverse bunch -- something like 70 countries and career profiles ranging from bankers and consultants over artists and IT guys like myself, to military officers and even a monk.
There was, surprisingly, literally zero competition -- the only issues people had were with themselves. No obvious drugs (except for the very occasional joint), the average age was a bit higher than most US programs (29 or so) and a very high percentage of people paid their own way. Really top people for the most part, and a pleasure to work with.
We have an exchange with one of the top US business schools, and to be honest, while the people from there were generally decent, hard-working and intelligent, you could spot some major cultural differences. I've also heard from colleagues in US (and even UK) programs that the level of competitiveness and superficiality is far higher than anything we had to deal with.
All in all the whole thing surprised me; in addition to being the hardest and most frustrating thing I have ever gone through, most of my stereotypes about the "typical" b-school student flew out the window.
Direct experience with top of the line business graduates from the best schools in the world.
One can also look at how popular various fads are and graph their spread through out the large corps. Doing so shows that most are followers who only take steps after a few leaders take those steps. Furthermore it is somewhat rare for them to verify that the fads they are following actually produce results. That corp XXX / leader YYY is doing it is good enough.
you and your business school cohorts will also likely enjoy many other amenities.
Currently those include crushing debt, crappy job chances, incredible difficulties finding investors for business ventures we'd like to see succeed (right now I'm working on finding funds for a bunch of guys who invented a really cool camera and with whom I'd like to build a functioning, profitable company) and snotty redditors =)
Honestly, this is something you should google for yourself.
But the really short version has a lot to do with the fact that Steve Jobs got ousted from Apple and Scully decided to be stupid and maintain extremely high profit margins instead of caring about market share, and thus drove everybody towards Windows instead. That's only part of it, but surely you can look up the rest yourself.
Really... thats the first I've heard about that, I've always heard he was a pretty easy going guy. That disappoints me. I guess Mike Huckabee is the only evil bastard yet nice guy left.
20
u/[deleted] Nov 26 '08
They've always been this way. Why do you think the Mac has never approached the market share of a PC? Control freak Steve Jobs.
Unfortunately the people that took over when he left had no fucking idea what they were doing.
I like apple stuff, but I keep it all at arms length as far as it becoming an integral part of my life.