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With Great Sadness……
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Apple is showing the world what it means to beta test.”
Wrong. Beta software is free!
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[MIke Guidotti] ”
Wrong. Beta software is free!”I’m not saying this is a conventional “beta test”. Not all betas are free.
But the state of this software is certainly beta.
That’s all. Apple will improve it through feedback and crash reports, just like any other non public beta test. It is quite obvious their internal testing has been extremely limited.
I’m not talking about missing features and functionality, I am talking about reliability.
Jeremy
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[MIke Guidotti] “Wrong. Beta software is free!”
Used to be perhaps, but it’s getting to be the norm these days.
David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com
http://www.ProMax.com
Sales | Integration | SupportDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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[David Lawrence] “True that. And one could argue their design focus is getting soft in the UI department as well.
“I agree with this, I hate the iCal/notes UI thing, if they spread that to FCPX then even I’m moving to Adobe!
Steve Connor
“FCPX Agitator”
Adrenalin Television -
[Jeremy Garchow] “You don’t have Apple without the hardware. Sorry.”
I agree with that.
But likewise, you don’t have Apple without the software. That’s why I think calling them a hardware company is overly reductive.
Look at this thread, the E5 thread, the HP thread, and the licensing thread. Most folks here don’t care about the Mac Pro hardware itself. Who’s buying a Mac Pro to run Linux or Windows on it? Everyone here cares about the software you can only get on the Mac platform. Most of the posters in this thread who are considering Mac Pros are also considering cross-platform software like Premiere Pro or Media Composer, but they’re still interested in Mac Pros for OS X or ProRes encode.
Apple measures their sales in units of hardware, but Apple doesn’t compete on hardware. They compete with their total systems on user experience. Without Apple software, Macs are just well-designed commodity PCs, iPhones are just well-designed commodity smartphones, and iPads are just well-designed commodity tablets. Without Apple software, Apple really would be a hardware company.
I measure my sales in units of time. My clients are paying for time because that’s how my fee is calculated, but they’re buying media production, or the application of my expertise and skills. My value proposition is more than a ticking clock.
Likewise, Apple’s software AND hardware — together — are key to Apple’s value proposition, which is the thing that Apple customers buy.
As we move to the post-PC era (and I almost can’t stand myself for using this phrase so often), Apple is making services like the iTunes Store, the App Store, and iCloud another key component of their value prop.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[David Lawrence] “Hardware is a piece of it. Software is a piece of it. But in the end, both are focused with laser-like intention on delivering the best possible user experience. Period.”
I hear you, but remove the hardware from the equation, and you have no Apple.
Remove iWork and other Apple products, you still have Apple.
Apple is recently (and when I say recently, I am tailing about iTunes forward) back in the software game. I am also separating the OS from “software”, even though it’s software. So, perhaps it’s not fair.
I agree that they have developed a platform, and it’s something other companies are sort of trying to achieve or mock or stay away from, but no hardware, no Apple.
They have developed a system that relies solely on their hardware. We can dance around what Apple actually does, but they push hardware through user experince.
Jeremy
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[Walter Soyka] “Everyone here cares about the software you can only get on the Mac platform”
For us, it’s about the OS. I guess that’s software, but it’s really how the computer operates.
With PCs, the OS is pretty much constant, you then choose a manufacturer based on certain box features or price.
I don’t buy Macs for iTunes I buy them for OSX.
If I do end up switching NLEs to something that’s cross platform, I will probably stay with OSX.
I say probably, you never know in this crazy world. I am sure all the answers will be obvious soon enough.
[Walter Soyka] “Without Apple software, Apple really would be a hardware company.”
Again, you mean without the Apple OS. Most of the apps on my computers and handhelds are not from Apple, just like on the one (very important) windows machine that we have in the office, the software is not from Microsoft.
[Walter Soyka] “As we move to the post-PC era (and I almost can’t stand myself for using this phrase so often), Apple is making services like the iTunes Store, the App Store, and iCloud another key component of their value prop.”
…to buy hardware. You cannot purchase those services separately and reap the benefits without an Apple hardware ecosystem from your desktop, to your office, to your tv, to your pocket.
I guess it’s semantics, but all of the “user experience” is centered around the hardware, where they make their money. You have to buy an Apple device to get the cool stuff.
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I think it’s simplistic to say you could remove either the hardware or the software side of Apple and have it be the same company. Apple doesn’t have to manufacture hardware. To that point Foxconn would be the hardware company, not Apple. It’s the design and engineering that’s important. You have to understand how to build a machine that’s optimized to do the things you are asking of it via the OS or applications. For Apple it’s an integrated endeavor. That’s why Flash is banned and on-board SDI or CUDA is ignored. The Mac Pro are not a generic box in the same way as an HP or Dell.
That being said, HP (and IBM in the past) makes some really fine desktop machines and I think you could easily run a licensed version of OSX on an HP and have great results. I think the legal, European hackintoshes have already proven that. Although I really appreciate Apple’s hardware designs, I buy their products for the user experience that’s largely based on the OS. I’m less inclined to care about their applications. In fact “improvements” like “versions” are forcing extra steps and workarounds in my workflow. So it’s a mixed bag – hardware, software, design, engineering, etc.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Jeremy Garchow] “I don’t buy Macs for iTunes I buy them for OSX. If I do end up switching NLEs to something that’s cross platform, I will probably stay with OSX.”
Right. You aren’t buying your Macs for the Apple hardware itself. You’ve told me here about how Apple rarely has the latest and greatest hardware anyway. You are making your purchase decisions based on the software (OS X) because you like its user experience. (Very good reason to buy Apple products!)
With Apple, the hardware and software come in a bundle. With other vendors, they can be separated.
Software like OS X is made by Apple, and only available to run on Apple hardware. That’s why I can’t see how Apple is just a hardware company.
I brought up Samsung before. Consider them. They sell tablets, just like Apple, but they use Android. There’s nothing in the user experience to differentiate them from HTC, Motorola, or whoever else decides to sell an Android tablet.
Apple is different from the pure hardware vendors. They sell a whole system that is uniquely theirs. They buy from hardware vendors. They don’t even actually manufacture the hardware they design.
The existence of Hackintoshes — and the hoops people are willing to jump through to get OS X running on non-Apple hardware — speak to the value of Apple’s user experience outside of their hardware.
[Jeremy Garchow] “I guess it’s semantics, but all of the “user experience” is centered around the hardware, where they make their money. You have to buy an Apple device to get the cool stuff.”
My hardware sits under my desk or in the other room. I don’t even look at it all that often. I spend hours every day in the software.
Apple’s industrial design is elegant. The hardware can be differentiated on that basis. However, when I think Mac, I don’t think of the box — I think of what’s on the screen.
I do agree with you that Apple sells hardware, so I see why you say they’re a hardware company.
However, couldn’t you agree that Apple customers are buying something more than hardware alone? Couldn’t you consider that calling Apple a hardware company might be dismissive of the critical contributions of their software design?
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Jeremy Garchow] “…to buy hardware. You cannot purchase those services separately and reap the benefits without an Apple hardware ecosystem from your desktop, to your office, to your tv, to your pocket.
“That ecosystem is being moved away from the desktop. The whole point of iCloud is to dethrone the desktop as a hub and turn it into a satellite node. Apple’s ideal is now for you to buy a thin client device–modified, certainly, since it can also store apps locally–and use their centralized server as market place and storage. Yes, you buy hardware, but you also buy apps and content, and you subscribe to storage space. No one in this thread is even remotely suggesting that Apple does not make the vast majority of their money through sales of physical appliances; what they are saying is that things have gotten far too complicated for the “hardware/software dichotomy” model to be of much use in describing Apple.
So, a) yes, they make most of their money through hardware sales, but b) their services have grown substantial enough that they could fuel a very large corporation on its own, and c) the way that services and hardware are intertwined creates a unique synergy that is neither one nor the other, but something more.
At the end of the day, its a silly thing to argue about. It’s probably some subconscious flaw of mine, in that I seldom meet a maxim that I don’t try to take an axe to.
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