Bernard Newnham
Forum Replies Created
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There seem to be some strange ideas on this forum about the differences between a Mac and a generic PC . There’s great play with words like “workstation”, and the HPZ400 is held up as a shining example of what to buy.
One lone voice a few threads down said something about building PCs and pointed out the completely modular nature of the machine – any machine, including Z400s. I thought I’d try to offer some clarification.
First – Macs and PCs are extremely similar. In fact a Mac is little more than a operating system, and most of that is a close cousin of Linux. A Mac uses an EFI to start instead of a BIOS – a little ahead of the PC game, but not hughly important. All the rest is pure Intel based PC, with motherboards made by Foxconn.
“Workstation” is marketing speak for an expensive PC. What’s in a workstation varies from week to week, probably from day to day, as all the components are commodities. Today we buy ten thousand memory chips from Crucial, tomorrow 500 from Kingston – or some Taiwan company you haven’t heard of. The word workstation is just a guarantee that you paid too much.
I don’t know much about HP, apart from seeing the website, but in the UK Acer sell a range called Aspire. They’ve done so for years, but the clue that the guts of the things are endlessly changing is in the numbers after the name. Today – Sept 7th – they’re advertising the M3870-L, M3400 and others. Next week the numbers will be different, but Aspire will still be there to comfort the punters – “my friend bought an Acer Aspire, he says they’re good”. But the Aspire the punter buys after the recommendation will be completely different inside the box.
Macs are a little different, as Apple tend to more or less freeze the design, and sell that version for ages. There’s lots of discussion here about what the next model will contain, because there isn’t the endless incremental change that there is in the PC world.
It’s rather limiting really.
It isn’t actually difficult at all to build a Mac with the latest bits and pieces, hardly more difficult than building a PC. See https://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/04/iboot-multibeast-install-mac-os-x-on.html . I don’t know about use with Lion, as I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that to many people Lion is about as attractive as FCPX.
After people write this sort of stuff, someone always pops up and talks about maintenance. “Use HPZ400s, because that’s the machine the engineers test on…” Which HPZ400 – this week’s, last week’s? PCs are all different, even in the same product line, and all the same. And if there’s a problem – some major failing, it’s easy to just replace the individual parts at no great time or cost. When I needed to replace my G4 a while back, I was horrified at the cost of a new Mac, as I’ve built lots of PCs and know what they normally cost. So I built my own.
Bernie
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I rather expect there won’t be any sign at all of Apple
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bernie
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I wonder what they sell?
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They took it off the shelves, and presumably chucked all the discs into the fiery furnace. The only place FCS3 can be found now is in the murkier areas of the internet, or presumably any market stall in many Asian cities.
I love this from the Apple forum next door – “The most difficult times are those when the sun shines right into your face. You don’t see any more.”
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bernie
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“You spend one day and you decide it’s junk? Nice. Very thorough evaluation I’m sure.”
I’ve had a lot of experience in evaluating, most of it for the BBC.
Think of it in another context. You want to buy a new car, so you do some test drives. Most have the accelerator pedal on the right, and the manual gears are laid out in an H pattern with first top left. Some company decides it can do better. Their engine is more efficient, the sat nav more up to date – but they’ve also decided to “re-imagime” the car. They tell you that lights (or Flash) are a thing of the past, so they left them out. The accelerator is on the left foot, and the brake is operated by leaning backwards. Oh, and they didn’t bother to put tyres on the wheels, as third parties will supply later. Going to buy that one? Thought not.
It’s true that Apple doesn’t need the money of a handful of professionals, but I think they very much need their goodwill. The Apple reputation is build on innovation and class, so much so that it’s almost a religion for some people. Now a group of devoted and high profile followers have been badly let down, and are shouting loudly. Don’t underestimate their influence. If you were a “prosumer” rather than a professional, would you leap in and buy the software that the people you would like to emulate have trashed. Not a chance.
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When I was a producer at the BBC, I did some work for a department called Digilab. As a technically aware producer, my task was to try equipment to see if I thought it was suitable for production staff to use without a crew. Along with cameras and stuff, I went through a good number of editing systems, with the odd trip to IBC and NAB to get the cutting edge.
The famous Randy visited us at one point and we were suitably impressed. We got hold of an FCP beta from Apple UK, about 0.8 or something, and were again very impressed. This was the system we had been looking for. I went out and shot some material – kids doing bike safety – and knocked together a short programme, with opening titles, all built in FCP. It crashed a few times, but in my view it was a winner. When I left the BBC and went freelance I bought a G4 and FCP and edited on it from then till now. Along the way I’ve continued to test out and use other systems, because people still ask my opinion.
Yesterday was my first try at FCPX.
Oh God it’s junk. That’s a highly technical value judgement based on years of comparative testing.
B
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I expect to to see the numbers up on the P2P “steal an app” pages
They never learn
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I thought what I said at the top was pretty clear. The uni has lots of PCs. If you want to run FCP you have to have Macs. They can’t afford that. PPro doesn’t have the image and class of (old) FCP. They would have liked to have used FCP, but it was too expensive. Now all that’s irrelevant. They were pleased.
Hope that clear that up.
Personally, although I know that PPro in its latest form has more functionality than FCP7, the screen is irritatingly cluttered with stuff you don’t need. More difficult to train on.
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bernie
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If I was a “prosumer” – presumably an amateur who has aspirations to be like a professional, someone who buys a Sony Z5 or EX3 for home movies – I certainly wouldn’t want to be seen buying something that the professionals had rejected.
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bernie
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The only reason I have a Mac is to run FCP, and that’s true in parts of the BBC, the university where I work, and probably many more large facilities. You can save a lot of money not running Macs – they’re a significantly more expensive investment than a PC. So if the software isn’t there you don’t need the hardware. You could add that to your statistics
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