Dell vs Apple

[Charlie Austin]

[Oliver Peters] “Since things have been quiet on the debate front and Tim needs the page views ;-)”

lol. I’m sure the Dell is just fine, but that article was classic FUD. X is iMovie pro? 2012 wants it’s meme back… 😉

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[David Mathis]

Windows belong on a house, not a computer! 😉

[David Roth weiss]

Hey Oliver,

Having converted many Mac users to Windows in the last few years in my positions in sales and consulting, I’ve seen Dell make such attempts before. As you may recall, Mr. Biscardi wrote a review about a Dell workstation he was given a few years ago when FCP X left him underwhelmed with Apple and its software and hardware.

In a nutshell, Dell makes good workstations, however, the company is very large, and because they are business centric and not at all video centric, they can prove to be very difficult for post pros to deal with from a support standpoint.

FYI, one could easily argue that Apple and HP also suffer from the same issues, and that video professionals who don’t buy through an integrator are all left on their own, because all manufacturers are basically ignorant of the needs of those in the video biz. And, they would be correct – this is precisely why value added resellers exist, and why many facilities are willing to pay a bit extra for the value of that support.

Now, back to Dell specifically, if you know Windows inside and out, or if you have a dedicated IT team at your facility who do, then Dell machines are as good as any other, but short of that, I’d say buyer be beware, unless you have loads of time to wait in Dell’s support cue, which ultimately still may not pay off.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Noah Kadner]

Just finished building my own Windows PC for fun. Lemme tell you it wasn’t.

Haven’t touched Windows much in the past decade but was surprised/dismayed to find much of what was bad about it then is still around now. You haven’t really lived until you’ve chased cryptic DLL’s…

I salute those folks who have made Dells work where Macs once did. The accounting department is surely happy as heck. But from the user perspective I’ll bet it feels like moving from Elysium to Cairo.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training

[Shawn Miller]

[David Mathis] “Windows belong on a house, not a computer! ;-)”

Unless you want run a machine with two CPUs as well as multiple GPUs.. 🙂

Shawn

[Bill Davis]

And on the other end of the spectrum, I ordered a fully loaded but totally stock MacBook Pro last month and it runs FCP X like butter.

The 1TB SSD inside it is wicked fast – like this fast:

Which just means the experienced FCP X editor does not have AS great a need for customized and esoteric hardware. Of course, better hardware means a more fluid and better creative experience for the content creator, always has and always will, particularly with the chase for larger rasters still going strong. But it’s hard to argue against the fact that a stock Mac combined with the regular App store FCP X is anything but a very powerful production system, directly off the shelf.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Charlie Austin]

[Noah Kadner] “Haven’t touched Windows much in the past decade but was surprised/dismayed to find much of what was bad about it then is still around now”

Didn’t you read the “article”? Shoulda just bought a Dell.

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~ My FCPX Babbling blog ~
~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[Richard Herd]

Crazy. I was just looking up some stuff after last week’s project proved weak sauce on my Mac Tube AMD Fire Pro D300 CS6.

Having said that, I am considering a big move to something like this

https://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-fx-chassis/pd

or

https://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd

Is this too much?

[Tim Wilson]

I dunno, I was one of “those” Apple guys from the late 70s. I took delivery of my first Mac in February 1984. (My father was in charge of manufacturing, sales and distribution for Apple at the time.) I built my business 100% on Macs.

I was also on the board of my local Mac user group, and led the monthly meetings. Macmacmacamac, all day every day.

And I’ve never understood why Mac users have the first problem with Windows. I really truly don’t get it. I find that using Windows after 30 years on Mac to be easier than trying to navigate the differences in the Netflix interface on my phone, TV, and Blu-ray player.

Since all you guys are smarter than me, maybe I’m just too inexperienced or dull-witted to understand how miserable I should be. I’m just not.

WARNING: CAR SIMILE

I mean, sometimes I kick myself for forgetting which of the family cars has the gas on the right and which on the left, or have to think about where the AC controls are in this one or that one, but I have much better things to be annoyed by, eg, almost everything. LOL

Unless you’re complaining that Windows isn’t as pretty, in which case, fine. LOL But otherwise, c’mon. The absolute quintessence of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt imo.

Anyway,

Here’s why I’d always opt for HP over Dell — HP is the only major computer company that has a large division devoted to developing computers specifically for the Media & Entertainment sector.

(There are a number of smaller whitebox developers who develop exclusively for this market of course. They often do stellar work. I’m not talking about them.)

You may not LIKE HP’s stuff, or may not like that it can only run Windows, but I know a bunch of people there whose resumes looks a lot like yours and mine, and product managers who came from key companies in this space, brought to HP specifically BECAUSE the come from this specific space.

At other companies, including Apple, their domain expertise as end-users or developers of key products for this industry might not matter for their development or management work. At HP it does.

It’s how they wind up with a product like Dreamcolor. They spent months at Dreamworks learning what a reference monitor in a film workflow needs to do, and worked with them on every iteration. Again, you may not like the outcome, but they understand what customer focus means.

Whereas Jobs famously, and relentlessly over the full sweep of his career, mocked customer focus as the domain of the soulless and moronic. His most insulting characterization of his competitors’ computers is that they were designed by focus groups.

So he had contempt for customers, even more contempt for companies who catered to customers, and made stuff you like better. Go figure.

(I do think that this is changing under Tim Cook, who has reversed virtually every one of Jobs’ approaches, and has doubled revenue and tripled profit while making Apple a better company.)

Anyway, I also love HP’s support. Need a replacement part overnight? No problem. Not that I’ve ever needed a replacement part for a computer made by anyone. You probably haven’t either. But you can find reports in the COW from guys who were shooting on location, far from home, and had FedEx on site with a new part the next morning.

My one story about Dell came from QA at a company you may have heard of. There was a lot of pressure to qualify Dell workstations for customers who felt that both HP and Apple were too expensive.

The problem at the time (and may still be, but I don’t know) is that Dell components were so commoditized that you really couldn’t know for a fact what you were testing. For one round, the GLUE on the FANS was failing, so the fans were winding up in the bottom of the case pointing in some random direction, and computers were overheating and crashing.

So in the scheme of things, I’d rather pay a little more and get more, just as Apple has trained me to. LOL

But that’s the thing. Jobs-run Apple had open, repeatedly and publicly expressed contempt for customers, and made stuff that you prefer to the results of the passionate devotion to media & entertainment customers, so really, why NOT go with Dell, who neither hates customers nor has any particular interest in this market.

[Walter Soyka]

[Noah Kadner] “Just finished building my own Windows PC for fun. Lemme tell you it wasn’t. “

I hear you. That’s why I wouldn’t build a PC any more than I’d build a Hackintosh. I think it’s worth paying a company like Apple or Dell or HP in my case to do what they do.

[Noah Kadner] “Haven’t touched Windows much in the past decade but was surprised/dismayed to find much of what was bad about it then is still around now. You haven’t really lived until you’ve chased cryptic DLL’s… “

I’ve been using Windows workstations as my daily drivers for almost four years now. In all that full-time usage, I have chased exactly as many cryptic DLLs on my PCs as I have cryptic .kexts on my Macs (which I do still have and use, too) — which is to say none.

[Noah Kadner] “I salute those folks who have made Dells work where Macs once did. The accounting department is surely happy as heck. But from the user perspective I’ll bet it feels like moving from Elysium to Cairo.”

An HP Z840 actually costs (and weighs) more than a comparably equipped nMP. A tricked-out Z840 gets you a lot more and costs a lot more. It’s been my experience over the last four years that Windows on good hardware “just works” exactly as much as Macs do.

There’s actually quite a bit about Windows that I’ve come to appreciate more than Mac OS. I think it’s pretty telling that El Capitan is borrowing window management functionality that’s been in Windows for the last decade. (Cupertino, start your photocopiers?) From this user’s perspective, a lot of the current Windows-hate from “creatives” is misplaced and largely prejudicial.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive   |   RenderBreak [blog]   |   Profile [LinkedIn]