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Apple/Microsoft Ecosystems — If Mac Pro is EOL, why stay with Apple at all?
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And re: ecosystem, the key component for your device environment isn’t a Mac. It’s iTunes. If you use iTunes, and are thinking about non-iDevices, you’re asking for pain. The majority of iUsers are on Windows, including the handful of members of my family who don’t bleed Apple rainbow colors. Works great. Don’t let your computer or its OS factor into your other ecosystem choices.
As is mentioned here often with other software, once you’re in iTunes, platform doesn’t really factor in.
Of course, I don’t have iTunes installed on my computer at all, so that doesn’t really factor in for me either. LOL
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[Bill Davis] “”fine”, “well enough”, “they get the job done” If that’s your standard for your life or business – then I’d say dive right in.Those aren’t the kind of words I personally prefer to have define my working life – but everyone’s different.”
Well how’s this. I just recently bought, through necessity, a MacPro tower. It is a slow, overpriced, outdated, outmoded POS, but being trapped, for now, in the OSX ecosystem I had no choice. I was drooling at the kind of work stations in PC land, so envious of their speed, connectivity and price that I swore I would never let myself get in this position again. Being tied to a single vendor is business insanity. Waiting around till “sometime in 2013” for an unspecified MacPro replacement would be a little like waiting around to see the FCP upgrade from last year – it might work out for you or it might suck. If I want excitement I go on a roller coaster, for my business I want speed, variety and compatibility – 3 things your not getting from Apple.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Tim Wilson] ” the key component for your device environment isn’t a Mac. It’s iTunes. If you use iTunes, and are thinking about non-iDevices, you’re asking for pain.”
You couldn’t be more correct. My last Ipod died, I’m not interested in a touch screen game player, I just needed something with 64 gig capacity, but the 128 gig Ipod classic seemed a little pricey. I figured there must be a decent inexpensive MP3 player out there. Wrong. Nothing beyond 8 gig flash drive players. One of those will use mini cards to get up to around 32 gig which was still too small and it was incompatible with my cars stereo to boot. In the meantime I set about seeing if I could convert my Itunes files to MP3 to work with this imaginary player. Nightmare. It’s possible, but after spending 2 weeks converting files I wasn’t 25% done. Hopeless. I went out and bought the damned Ipod classic and have just accepted the fact that as far as music goes, they own my soul.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Walter Soyka] “How do you troubleshoot Mac issues? Part of it is familiarity, and that’s something you’d have to reacquire with Windows — but that’s not as hard as you think, and I’d argue that it’s not part of a normal, day to day user experience for most people here. Googling error messages is cross-platform.”
Yes, yes it is. But with Macs, I know them so well, I can tell when it’s a preference trash (does that even exist on Windows), or a restart, or perhaps when the shit really goes down, even an application reinstall.
I just know it, with Windows, all of that will be unfamiliar, and it will take a really long time to sit there and figure out. Maybe we will get lucky and nothing will go wrong because Windows is perfect.
[Walter Soyka] “On your SAN — it’s got cross-platform support, right? Have you tried adding a PC? Did you set it up for your Macs yourself, or did you have some help from an integrator getting it up and running? “
The SAN is run by a PC. When we first had it installed, it was a beta system, and a representative came out and helped me get it setup. From opening up the shipping boxes and placing the SAn in a rack to having 5 computers up and running, it was a total of about 4 hours. He stayed out of the way and let me do it just to observe how it might be done in the field without an integrator.
This particular SAN setup is fairly easy and the drives came preformatted from the factory so there was no raid building there. We ended up buying it after the beta period, and all support has been done via email since then.
[Walter Soyka] “Even staying on the same platform is no guarantee that your SAN performance will be the same: look at the FCPX/SAN issues Oliver and Andrew have raised here.”
I’ve raised my own and it has to do with the NTFS nature of my storage. But so far for an out of the box application , FCPX has offered the most in terms of having actual built in SAN support and it actually solves a ton of issues that people have with FCPX and the Project/Event placement (or buying the venerable Event Manager X). It’s almost as if FCPX was built for SAN editing, although like the rest of the application more control and options are needed. In the case of Oliver, his SAN doesn’t work that way due to the Volume nature of it. XSan is not volume based either. It’s a shame this functionality isn’t built in for regular volume based editing as it makes putting a project on any machine fall down easy and also builds in an easy Project/Event management system that is controlled right in the application. No other NLe I have tried is doing this right now without third party help. Smoke supposedly has some of this built in as well, but it’s not currently available in PreRelease 1.
Speaking of Smoke, my SAN isn’t handling the image sequence based renders very well either. There’s more work and testing to be done there as well by me.
[Walter Soyka] “I do not want to downplay the planning and effort that would be involved in switching your facility from OS X to Windows. It’s a lot to take on in addition to the work you get paid to deliver, so I believe you when you say it’s not a good choice for you. I just don’t see Apple going out of their way to make the transition seamless for customers in general if they stick with Apple hardware and software.”
I am not saying Apple is making it easier (or harder), but not having to relearn an entire system makes it easier in the short run at least, for me.
[Walter Soyka] “The problem I see is that the date when we collectively expect clarity keeps getting pushed back. FCP Legend was getting creaky, and FCPX was supposed to be awesome last year — and then the SuperMeet scared the community. After launch, we all had to wait to see what “old” features Apple would add and what workflows third parties would support before we could adopt FCPX in collaborative workflows. There was supposed to be a new Mac Pro at WWDC, and now we have to wait until “later next year” for “something really great.”
It’s not just Apple. MC5.5/MC6 was going to make Avid relevant again among the FCP crowd, but MC is barely even mentioned here and maybe it’s merging with Symphony anyway. Adobe showed tons of improvement in Premiere Pro CS6, but it still has a few very notable weaknesses. Smoke 2013 is in pre-release, and has a gentler learning curve, but is still somewhat idiosyncratic and runs on suboptimal hardware when compared to the Linux version.
If you can hang on for a while longer to see how things shake out, that’s a good move, but I think the last year has given us more questions than answers.
It’s hard to tell people who have already been waiting a year (or two or three) to upgrade that they should wait another year — no, really this time — to see what the post landscape will look like.
We certainly live in interesting times.”
Yes. I’m definitely hanging out. I’ve waited one year, hopefully we can make another? I don’t know. I think the next NAB and hopefully big NLE software rev will tell me where I am going to spend the bulk of my time.
Right now, even though there’s some very mature applications out there, it’s all very very new and change is certain.
Jeremy
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[Jason Wood] “By EOLing Mac Pro, the core of my workflow, did Apple knock over the first domino in what might lead to complete computing paradigm shift for me?
Has anyone else thought about this? “
The recent (lack of a) Mac Pro update is probably going to have me building a Windows machine for our new DI theater, but just because Windows is, right now, the best choice as the core of a ‘Resolve appliance’ doesn’t suddenly mean I want to run it on my personal laptop, on my tablet, or even on systems used for creative editorial.
The last of those might be up for grabs if you need your offline NLE running on a massively powerful system, but how many people still do? Today’s MacBook Pros are faster than 2008’s Mac Pros, and Thunderbolt provides both RAID and video I/O connectivity without slots. I picked up one of the new Retinal MBPs, and FCP X in particular just runs like melted butter on this thing — it’s the most fluid and responsive video editing experience I’ve ever had.
There’s no doubt that Microsoft is doing some interesting things these days, but realistically, their new Metro environment is going to take a while to really catch on. Those tablets aren’t going to immediately have the kind of ecosystem of touch-optimized apps that iPad has. The ‘RT’ (ARM processor) version of their tablet doesn’t look to be on par with iPad 3 hardware (seems to only be a 720p screen, for starters), and by the time it comes out iPad 4 will be only a few months away. The ‘Pro’ (x86 processor) version of their tablet has a nicer screen (1080p), but is basically a MacBook Air without the keyboard — it’s chunky by tablet standards (a full two pounds), battery life (which they carefully didn’t discuss) isn’t going to be great, and it’s certainly going to provide a compromised experience when running desktop apps.
On the PC side, users — particularly users like us — are going to be stuck primarily using the traditional desktop interface for years, as apps like Photoshop and Media Composer are not going to get ported to Metro anytime soon. The whole dual-mode UI, switching back and forth between Metro apps and desktop apps, seems like it could be a bit frustrating. And really, one could construct the same sort ‘X doesn’t care about pro users’ narrative about Microsoft that has been constructed about Apple. In some ways, that narrative works even better for Microsoft. Apple is talking about how they see the Mac and the iPad as being different, and requiring different approaches with respect to their operating systems. Microsoft seems to be trying to move both tablets and desktops to Metro, which is clearly more oriented around consumer tablets than pro workstations.
The computer industry is in a state of flux right now, undergoing change of a sort of hasn’t seen in 20 years. Our industry is clearly going to have to change with it. But there’s no particularly clear direction to jump in, and we may well be headed for a real multi-platform future, very unlike the last couple of decades of Microsoft dominance + Apple holding down some important niches. There’s no reason to think one platform will be all things to any given user. With all of this uncertainly, the best approach right now is to buy the products that serve immediate practical needs, and keep workflows and skillets as flexible as possible so that future options are left open.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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I’m happy to be corrected (I’m used to it by now) but no equivalent to trashing preferences, which I say only because it has never come up for me. Ditto repairing permissions, which I’ve done a bunch of times on Macs over the years…including last night to empty the trash of one recalcitrant file. I can’t think if anything like it in Windows, because it hasn’t come up. I can empty all the files in the trash just fine. LOL
Of course not that Windows has no issues, just that I was reminded how glad I am not to deal with prefs and permissions anymore.
re the switch to Windows, it has been beyond wonderful for me, restoring a joy in computing that I realized had been sucked out of me by Macs…but really, I can’t recommend anybody switching unless it solves a problem other than Apple. You’ve gotta draw a lot of polygons to offset the productivity drain of infrastructure transition.
It HAS to be about software first, not platform. Unless you see an APPLICATION experience that excites you, stay put.
but once you see a potentially cross-platform future, it’s at THAT point that I’d want to have a heart to heart with you about Windows. LOL
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou -
[Tim Wilson] “I’m happy to be corrected (I’m used to it by now) but no equivalent to trashing preferences, which I say only because it has never come up for me. Ditto repairing permissions, which I’ve done a bunch of times on Macs over the years…including last night to empty the trash of one recalcitrant file. I can’t think if anything like it in Windows, because it hasn’t come up. I can empty all the files in the trash just fine. LOL”
Actually and totally ironically, this was one of the first things I could not figure out how to do in Windows. There were files, they would not delete. Had to empty the trash in ‘admin’ mode (this was trying Terminal, and whatever the windows equivalent command prompt is). It took three different phone calls to tech support to figure that one out.
[Tim Wilson] “It HAS to be about software first, not platform. Unless you see an APPLICATION experience that excites you, stay put.
but once you see a potentially cross-platform future, it’s at THAT point that I’d want to have a heart to heart with you about Windows. LOL”
I hear you and I’ll need it by then.
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It was in an email from Tim Cook himself, that MacPro is coming “later next year”. Definitely not EOL. Not yet anyway…
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I don’t think this forum would exist if anyone was super excited about jumping to Windows. The fact is, I think most of us really like Mac OS and we all loved FCP. Hence, all the frustration in having to decide future workflows. Mac Pro isn’t end of line, but Apple is definitely moving towards smaller, lighter, faster. To me that means the next Mac Pro (yes, there will be one in 2013) will look very different than the bulky tower of today. Also, what about the next imac? Would Ivy Bridge quad processor, SSD and thunderbolt be fast enough for you?
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I’ve owned several Windows Machines. You haven’t missed much. (Except a few viruses maybe).
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