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."
Apple is going where the money is... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the past, Apple catered to pros because they were the ones who would spend $10,000 on a Quadra or //fx model. However, since their pricing model has changed, they are best served at catering to Joe/Jane Consumer.
The only gripe I have is that Apple needs consider the IT market as well, and not just focus on consumers. Right now, Apple is doing well, but the enterprise is not just a huge market, but also is very hungry for Apple products. (As an IT person, oftentimes the top brass of companies will be using Macs as their own laptops. It makes me glad Lion has complete hard disk encryption, although having a TPM chip and BitLocker-like access would be ideal.) Apple could easily get some offerings into the IT sector. A redesigned Mac Pro that could work horizontally and fit on a drawer with attachable rack ears would be a start. A standalone disk array with redundant drive controllers and FCoE would bring them up to date for SMBs needing storage.
IT is definitely a market that Apple might do well in, although Apple's main success is with consumers.
Re:Physics is mostly Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
- bash unix environment
- good user interface, better for personal use than Linux variants
- laptops had state-of-art hardware (though, not so much anymore) and excellent battery life (still the case)
- academic discounts
Of these, the bash unix environment is by far the most important for scientists. This means that they can write a program or script on their personal machine, and it will more or less behave the same way on the Unix computing resource. This is enormous -- and the main reason we put up with overpriced, non-expandable hardware from Apple.
If Microsoft wanted to sway millions of research academics away from Apple, they would need to ditch the DOS underpinnings that remain in Windows and switch to Unix conventions. I don't see this happening anytime soon, but at least Microsoft is no longer covertly trying to sue Linux into oblivion the way it was a decade ago.