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Dell vs Apple
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[Walter Soyka] “n my experience, most issues people have are either educational issues or purely software issues (bugs/bad documentation), not “integration of software and peripherals.” These kinds of issues should be solved by the developer’s support team (ha).”
Walter,
But, which “developer’s support team” are you referring to?
Users who have as you put it, “educational issues,” typically don’t have a clue what is at the root of their issues – due to their lack of knowledge they tend get bounced back and forth between developers. You have software developers pointing at the hard are developers, and vice versa. This is precisely the shortcoming of DIY troubleshooting and DIY support, and we see that here on the Cow all day, everyday.
As I’ve said before, if you have more time than money, do it all yourself – you’ll lose creative time, but you will save money.
On the other hand, if efficiency and creativity are your goals, get to work and leave he integration and troubleshooting to the pros.
[Walter Soyka] “Let’s understand what VARs do a little better. What kinds of problems can you call your VAR with and get immediate help? What kinds of problems will they be unable to assist with?”
Any VAR worth his/her weight in salt, who sells a turnkey solution, should be able to fix just about an issue remotely, other than a hardware board or card failure, which of course requires replacement of the bad hardware. They simply remote in to a workstation or server to troubleshoot from anywhere over the Internet, and because they assembled all the components and software, they are much better at troubleshooting systems than end users or the developers who supply individual components of a system.
Do you understand this now?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Andrew,
You are lucky in that you have a 2009. The 2009 Mac Pros are basically
identical to the 2010-2012 Mac Pro’s…..the newer ones just have different
firmware. After you ‘flash’ the firmware as detailed in my blog, you not only
can install CPU’s that the 2010-2012 Mac Pros use, but also use the faster
1333Mhz RAM instead of 1066Mhz RAM. Unfortunately, the same isn’t
true for 2008 and earlier Mac Pro’s.Gabe Strong
G-Force Productions
http://www.gforcevideo.com -
While I’m a CC subscriber and past Premiere user/supporter, I’ve been underwhelmed by Adobe and PPro over the past year and CC2015 is not as good as I had hoped. But yeah, if I moved to PC full time I’d always have CC as an option. Though if Resolve 12 is not-ready-for-primetime I’d just stick with Mac/FCPX which I prefer to PPro.
It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.
Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1 -
[David Roth Weiss] “because they assembled all the components and software, they are much better at troubleshooting systems than end users or the developers who supply individual components of a system.”
I agree with you here.
I’ll take this a step further and point out that VARs will be delivering thoroughly tested and vetted configurations. You can ask a guy on the Internet like me what computer to buy for After Effects, and I can tell you what computers we use here; you ask a VAR, and they can describe their own tested Ae performance over a much larger range of hardware.
But my question is this: isn’t there an entire class of problems a VAR can’t solve? Do you really feel that more users are stopped by conflicts between their hardware and their software, or by pure software bugs that can only be solved by the developer?
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “But my question is this: isn’t there an entire class of problems a VAR can’t solve?”
Walter, you seem to be missing one VERY important point, VARs have to support what they sell, and that can be terribly expensive if the VAR is not on top of every detail. So, no good VAR sells untested configurations, because they would be shooting themselves in the foot, because customer support ties up personnel, cash, and resources.
Unlike DIYers and even manufacturers, VARs who specialize in media & entertainment have vetted their turnkey systems and ALL software and hardware before it’s delivered, because they simply can’t afford to support untested solutions and the enormous risk and cost of possibly having them returned.
[Walter Soyka] “Do you really feel that more users are stopped by conflicts between their hardware and their software, or by pure software bugs that can only be solved by the developer?”
Software bugs are always going to happen, and of course those can ONLY be fixed by the developer. No one, VAR or DIYer, can fix bugs, so I’m not sure what that’s really part of the discussion.
However, just as there are some people here who nearly always seem to know what to get and what to avoid, VARs stick with known working OSs, software versions, and hardware, and are very conservative about switching, for the reasons I mentioned above… i.e. – they can’t afford to sell experimental configs unless a customer demands it, and then a good VAR will have the customer waive the responsibility for the untested components.
FYI, there are many companies out there selling all kinds of overclocked systems for gaming and even VFX, but those systems tend to fail in professional editing environments, because they can’t standup to the intensive pressures of full-time post-production. These types companies are NOT the types VARs I’m referring to, and they are not those who tend to advertise here on the Cow either.
Though I hate to mention names, Alienware (now a Dell owned company) is the classic example of the kind of company I am referring to. Companies like this sell a lot of hype, while editors need rock solid performance, reliability, and knowledgable video-centric support.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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[Walter Soyka] “isn’t there an entire class of problems a VAR can’t solve? Do you really feel that more users are stopped by conflicts between their hardware and their software, or by pure software bugs that can only be solved by the developer?”
There’s an entire class of problems a VAR can’t solve AND pure software bugs that can only be solved by the developer.
If you think of it as a Venn diagram, there’s a part of Creative COW that exists within each of those circles, and a significant part outside them.
For example, both the VAR and the vendor assume specific configurations that a user might change, for a variety of reasons. A software update from the previously installed version, an OS update, an untested use case (say, new camera formats, or multiple formats that hadn’t been mixed in QA), firmware updates for video cards, as well as the “bugs” in the VAR’s configurations exposed by new scenarios, or bugs in the software that might be exposed by a VAR’s optimizations based on THEIR OWN testing.
There’s also the issue of who’s going to address any of those, or even ferret out the source of the problem. That too is the realm the COW lives in. Thousands of use cases pass through here on a daily basis, and we as a collective know more than any VAR or vendor possibly can. Not through lack of diligence on their part, but from lack of scale.
That too is why we live beyond R TFM. There are no manuals to address the reasons that led to the COW’s existence and that fuel her continued growth.
So really, our experience from 20 years of this (20 years in June in fact) suggests that no vendor and no VAR can address every problem, especially the ones that they never imagined would exist.
In general, I’m still going to place my confidence more in computer vendors who aggressively develop for this market with a tremendous amount of customer input, rather than vendors who wave a hand over us to focus their development nearly anywhere else while we hope we can opportunistically, nearly accidentally, benefit from it ourselves.
That certainly played out with Apple’s development of the new Mac Pro, which, based on reports in forums across the COW, may have benefitted HP almost as Apple as people here found their needs more directly addressed there.
By no means a universal experience of course, and off the beam of the topic of Dell vs. Apple. I think it generally points to the reasons why IT departments and company management frequently favor Dell, though. The needs of this market are generally not part of their evaluation process, and it’s not like some people here aren’t doing just fine with Dell…and indeed, doing just fine with Apple and their at best marginal eye on our market. It just happens to be a margin that quite a few folks heartily embrace when forced to consider alternatives.
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Don’t know about others, but when I arrive at a stable system with the software I am using at the time, I clone it to not one but at least two drives, and shelve them. Have since 10.6.8 and FCP7. Now up to Yosemite and associated software. It is then a very simple matter to replace the internal drive if necessary and apply the clone or reestablish the SSD boot. As I have said before, I have 4 systems on my 2012 Mac Pro Tower with double and triple backups on HD’s. No trips to the Genius store needed. There isn’t one here anyway. But a good Apple authorized service provider that does free on site for my two Pros under Applecare is twenty minutes from here. Needed a power supply a couple of times over the last 10 years for the towers. No motherboards yet. BTW, I was an Apple authorized VAR for 10 years with Avid and Media 100. I certainly don’t deprecate the value of a good VAR.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.1, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC, 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500, Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD, Multiple OWC Thunderbay 4 TB2 and eSATA QX2 RAID 5 HD systems -
[David Roth Weiss] “Walter, you seem to be missing one VERY important point, VARs have to support what they sell, and that can be terribly expensive if the VAR is not on top of every detail. So, no good VAR sells untested configurations, because they would be shooting themselves in the foot, because customer support ties up personnel, cash, and resources.”
David, in the very post you’re responding to, I wrote an entire paragraph about how VARs thoroughly test the configurations they sell.
Also, some software developers qualify off-the-shelf systems (such as those from Apple, HP and Dell) with specific software versions.
[David Roth Weiss] “Software bugs are always going to happen, and of course those can ONLY be fixed by the developer. No one, VAR or DIYer, can fix bugs, so I’m not sure what that’s really part of the discussion.”
I’m suggesting that a great many of problems people here face right here on the COW are pure software issues, not hardware/software integration issues, that a VAR cannot solve.
We should be very clear about what a VAR does do and what a VAR cannot do.
And we should demand better support from our developers, but that’s a separate topic.
[David Roth Weiss] “FYI, there are many companies out there selling all kinds of overclocked systems for gaming and even VFX, but those systems tend to fail in professional editing environments, because they can’t standup to the intensive pressures of full-time post-production. “
I assume you’re referring to BOXX on the VFX side, but I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at here. VFX is vastly more demanding on a workstation than editorial is.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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