Is Apple Pushing Away Professionals? 556
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."
Re:Define professionals? (Score:0, Informative)
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).
Read the whole post... It even says "creative professionals"
Only glossy screens? (Score:5, Informative)
You can buy a macbook pro with an "antiglare" [apple.com] screen.
Re:Only glossy screens? (Score:2, Informative)
Expresscard slot, firewire 800 port.
I'm sitting here on a MBP with a non-glossy screen that has a 36 channel sound card hooked up.
I see no issue here.
Physics is mostly Apple (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I have never understood (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:color (Score:4, Informative)
Glossy screens do not make color accurate.
Working in a color managed environment with color aware applications is what does. That means using calibration devices to measure all the color output of your devices, printers monitors etc... and creating color profiles.
Glossy screens can make blacks look deeper, but also have a lot of glare and reflection. Pros arent looking for deeper blacks, they're looking for accurate blacks and color temperature. A monitor that puts out a good wide color gamut, that fits into the adobe rgb color space.
Most monitors are too bright actually for accurate color representation.
Re:This is a software thing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What the hell are you talking about? (Score:4, Informative)
If you limit yourself to Apple software:
And the alternatives are either Adobe or Microsoft, who build products that suck
Re:Define professionals? (Score:3, Informative)
Any narrow advantage held by the Power architecture was quickly disappearing by 2003 when the first Operton chips with AMD64/SSE2 hit the market (for users able to jump to 64-bits), and pretty much obliterated with the introduction of the Core Duo in January 2006.
x86 had an ugly childhood, but it turns out there wasn't anything desperately wrong with its performance potential. Jobs made such a big deal of x86 being somehow deeply inferior. The x86 is deeply inferior when you try to build efficient devices under a watt. The little tricks used in x86 to achieve high performance are expensive in power consumption and nearly impossible to fix without an instruction set overhaul. ARM was the true victor.
You really have the edict entirely backward. It was Jobs' edict that Apple would slug it out on a platform with a small market share, and for which IBM could not afford to develop to market-leading performance on an indefinite basis. Finally Jobs lifted the anti-Intel edict because he had no choice. Not just in performance, but also available production quantity.
When you get right down to it, I'm sure Jobs regarded PowerPC as a convenient walled garden. He didn't want his miracle machine to become too compatible. But it was probably also a huge burden to carry your own ISA for 10% market share. Look how they've done since.
The money made by Microsoft, Apple and Google, 1985 until today [pingdom.com]
The decade of PowerPC pretty much corresponds with the Apple doldrums. Imagine that.
I'm curious whether his reality distortion field penetrates from the after life, or whether Gandalf the White will arrive to perform an exorcism at long last.
Re:Define professionals? (Score:4, Informative)
The fact that the X button sometimes closes the application, and sometimes leaves the application running without a UI is also bad.
Why is it bad? It's a developer choice do do whichever is more appropriate for the app. On Windows an app MUST close when its last window closes, unless the developer puts it into the system tray.
The reasoning for leaving the app open when a multiple document app has it's last window closed is straight forward. It's a common usage pattern to finish working on one document and then start working on another. If apps quit when the last window closes, then this happens:
The user closes the first document, and the UI to open the next document (File/Open) disappears. They then have to restart the app, which involves waiting, before they ca open their next document.
But for apps which are not document based, that argument doesn't apply. Closing the window on a single window app really does mean you've finished working with that app for the time being.
Then there are other reasons for choosing one behaviour or another. If an app does useful work even when there are no Windows, then of course it makes sense to keep it open. iTunes is an obvious example.
There's a reason why Mac developers have this choice and Windows developers don't get it (apart from the system tray utility option). Because with Windows, the disappearance of the last window means that access to the menu has also disappeared. That's not the case with Mac.
Re:What the hell are you talking about? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:You still use Latex?? (Score:4, Informative)
One reason is that WYSIWYG sucks up time and never quite works out while WYGIWYM is better. Plus Latex isn't that painful.