how many times must I see the spinning ball before I see the light

[Bill Davis]

Thanks for asking.
Yes.
We’ve sold SEN in to customers in more than 10 countries.

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[Robert D’alexis]

Thank you very much indeed for your speedy response.
A brilliant concept, by the way.
Needless to say, I am sold.:-)

[Michael Gissing]

[Bill Davis]”The coders creating our NLEs have to keep an eye on being backwards compatible, but at some point, that just hobbles them.”

Too kind to the mentality behind Apple’s NLE software. Backwards compatibility is not what they want at all. Breaking backwards compatibility has been the hallmark of each version of FCP. New project version can’t be opened by older versions. Messy XML translations were required.

Breaking backwards compatibility is the key to selling hardware on an increasing cycle. The plan to release new OS on a yearly cycle is designed to accelerate the hardware cycle. Another reason why I am moving back to Win hardware & OS. Much easier to pop the hood and upgrade peripherals like GPU and RAM without needing a soldering iron.

True backwards compatibility means I can install a four year old version of my Fairlight software and open a project created with todays beta software. That’s true backwards compatibility written by coders who actually consider backwards compatibility important. And no it hasn’t hobbled them at all.

[Rafael Amador]

[Bill Davis] “The pace of hardware evolution is such that if your core tech is more than a couple of years old, it just can’t run the most modern software efficiently enough to get the performance gains that make a difference.”
This can work in the USA where credit, energy and hardware are cheap, where you have industrial and educational discounts., but this pace won’t be fallowed by the industry in the rest of the world, believe me.
Apple will be able to make people change the phone every year, but won’t be able to make the industry to trash all the hardware every two or three years. Is all about money. In a world where the man power price is going down, investing lot of money on cutting wages makes no sense. People will invest in “faster”, only if “faster” pay back. There is a worth floating around: sustainability.
Rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Oliver Peters]

[Rafael Amador] “[Bill Davis] “The pace of hardware evolution is such that if your core tech is more than a couple of years old, it just can’t run the most modern software efficiently enough to get the performance gains that make a difference.”
This can work in the USA where credit, energy and hardware are cheap, where you have industrial and educational discounts., but this pace won’t be fallowed by the industry in the rest of the world, believe me.”

This statement – that you constantly need to upgrade hardware – simply isn’t true. It’s merely a design decision Apple chooses to follow. Planned obsolescence. Other software is no less “modern” than FCP X and it runs perfectly fine on older MPs for example.

The nature of a tower – which Apple (apparently) chooses to walk away from – is expandability and the ability to upgrade internal components. Things like extra or different GPUs or replacing CPUs with newer processor models. All of these things that PC users enjoy, simply aren’t in Apple’s DNA. Their reasoning is simply to control the user experience in ways that lets users avoid the geekiness that the other approach necessitates (Sonnet G3 cards in an 840 a/v anyone?).

Rather than generalize that hardware is obsolete in 2 years, it’s more accurate to say that Apple has decided to engineer hardware and software to a narrow set of criteria based on its own decisions of which newer, optimized hardware to embrace.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Bill Davis]

[Oliver Peters] “This statement – that you constantly need to upgrade hardware – simply isn’t true. It’s merely a design decision Apple chooses to follow. Planned obsolescence. Other software is no less “modern” than FCP X and it runs perfectly fine on older MPs for example.
“

Oliver, I think we disagree here.

A case in point is that X requires an Open CL compatible (and therefore pretty modern) graphics card to launch the FCP-X installer

That’s a clear sign that they’ve designed the hardware with specific processing requirements in mind and only certify their software to properly run in the presence of same.

Having both a MacPro of an older generation and a laptop of a more modern era, I can attest to the major difference modern hardware makes in X’s operation.

I honestly don’t think it’s about “designed obsolescence to sell hardware.” That’s only effective if you have something that’s actually BETTER to replace what’s currently being used, and to imagine that a company isn’t using what they honestly think is the best tech available is to believe they’ll willingly make themselves vulnerable to any competitor who would.

I think it’s much more about giving their engineers the freedom to design for not just where hardware is today – or will be just next year, but also for where the insiders at Apple know it will be in the years to come given their position at the core of one of the most successful technology manufacturing operations on the planet.

My view, anyway.

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