Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Chris Jacek] “Of course there is. There is absolutely no way an additional dedicated graphics card can fit into that form factor.”
Err… huh? You realize laptops with dedicated graphics don’t typically have separate “cards”, right? It’s just an extra chip on the motherboard. Take a look at the internal layout of a current 15″ MBP.
Look at the silly amount of space occupied by the HDD and, especially, the optical drive. Eliminating the optical drive, and moving to an Air-style SSD module, would easily let you rearrange the battery layout to maintain the same battery life, without shrinking the motherboard at all.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Honestly, I know some people are now absolutely determined to view everything Apple does through the lens of “Apple doesn’t care about pro users”, but I’m not sure how standardizing on SSDs 3-4x as fast as typical notebook HDDs, and (probably) dropping ExpressCard now that we’ve got Thunderbolt (which is 4x as fast) is supposed to represent Apple somehow shifting things toward “consumers”.
If Apple drops serious dedicated graphics options or quad core processor options from MBPs maybe I’ll buy this interpretation, but there is not the slightest indication this will occur.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but trying to force a long-running technology trend like increasing miniaturization to become evidence for the theory that Apple is abandoning pro users is a flawless example of just how weak the actual evidence that supports such an interpretation really is.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Walter Soyka] “FCP’s timeline was totally open and didn’t have an opinion on how editing was to be done — “forensically absolute, intellectually disinterested.” You simply placed time-based media at specific points in absolute time, with immense (and occasionally dangerous) freedom over their arrangement and re-arrangement.
FCPX is a far more specialized tool. Craig Seeman has made the good point a few times that Apple has likely studied how people used editorial UIs for FCPX — I think we’re taking that idea a step further here. Apple has studied how people edit, and then incorporated the most common methodology directly into FCPX’s design. It’s even there in the language: primary storyline, secondary storyline, clip connections.”
That, right there, is the history of computing. In ye olden days, the process of using a computer was the process of programming a computer… and programming meant telling the machine precisely which hardware-implemented instructions to execute. As time passed, more abstraction was added. Higher-level programming languages were created, in which you no longer directly interacted with the hardware. Operating system vendors began to create extensive libraries of code with nice APIs, providing developers access to lots of pre-packaged functionality that didn’t require them to write their own code. Standard software was distributed, which performed simple tasks without requiring the user to write software at all. These tools could be used together to perform fairly complex operations. Later, ‘application software’ was invented — large software packages that provided all-in-one solutions for specific tasks.
And Application software itself has continued to evolve to provide more support for the way people use it. Consider iTunes vs. the previous approach of managing your music collection in the file manager, and using three different apps for playback, ripping, and burning. Consider the sharing features iPhoto has — they don’t do anything you couldn’t do yourself by exporting images and uploading them somewhere, but they save a bunch of steps. Consider the layout of the OS X file system, which is structured in a much more standardized way than the classic Mac OS file system.
Complaints about the introduction of higher-level tools, on the part of people conformable with lower-level approaches, have followed nearly every one of these historical developments, and the rhetoric is always remarkably similar — “I have less control”, “Things are too easy now and amateurs are going to show up and ruin everything”, “My skills are being devalued”, etc.
Yet despite these objections, the trend toward higher-level tools in computing has been relentless for, literally, five or six decades at this point. It’s not going to stop. At any rate, not until computers function at the same level of abstraction as human brains, and software natively understands mental concepts.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “That’s a pretty story. Is it true?”
I provided several examples. I think so.
[Franz Bieberkopf] “Also, and correct me if I’m wrong, I assume you’re casting Apple as an ‘outsider’, posed rebelliously against ‘elites’. Am I correct?”
I was referring to ‘outsider’ vs. ‘elite’ users. But, yes, what Apple is doing with FCP X is a classic outsider attempt to introduce disruptive change into a market. It’s unusual because it’s coming from a company that was very much on this inside in this market… but Apple is a little crazy like that sometimes.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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Apple TV and MobileMe sort of demonstrate my point. They haven’t been very large successes (by the standards of a company Apple’s size), and Apple itself seems to have a realistic view of these products. This runs contrary to the theory that Apple can ship bad products and make them hugely successful via marketing. The current Apple TV isn’t even all that bad, it’s just sort of “meh”… and it has sales to match.
Apple’s really big successes are driven by outstanding products. Apple’s marketing, while effective, isn’t mind control, and in fact most of Apple’s marketing material just explains/shows how the products work — if that marketing is so effective, it’s because of the products, not because of some trickery.
It is also true that Apple is a fairly “hip” brand these days, but they got there by valuing design in a way that was alien to the rest of the industry (think back to 1998, when the first iMac shipped; prior to that the big new design trend in computing was that you could now buy a tower in black rather than beige), not running ads telling people they were hip.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[TImothy Auld] “OK, my selective quote from that same article “But the iPad can’t maintain that vast a lead forever. Android will likely narrow the gap in tablet activations just as it did for smartphones before…””
Um… the argument was something like “Apple products aren’t used much by business”. Now it’s “the iPad can’t maintain that vast a lead forever”. Backpedaling much?
[TImothy Auld] “Plus, we are not talking all about the iPad. Craig’s quote was “In every case their products have creeped into professional use.”
Note the pointed use of “In every case…” That’s what I’m looking for backup on.”
Obviously it’s not literally true if you include, say, the Apple TV. But the point was clear. iPhones are also widely used by business now (do I really have to provide a citation for this?) and the Mac’s corporate market share keeps creeping up, having recently passed 10%.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Joseph W. Bourke] “It seems, that Apple is quite successfully in the business of selling whatever sells, and has proven it in the market. Good product…bad product…is it selling? OK. At this point in time, they could put a lightup Apple logo on a turd and sell millions of them.”
Please name some of these “bad products” that have been highly successful because of Apple’s magical marketing.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[TImothy Auld] “First you provide no link to the article you selectively quote so that one might actually read it in context and in whole, and you fail to mention that this comes from a business website that has, shall we say, a dog in the fight. Not exactly from Consumer Reports. And who is Paczkowski?”
I did provide a link.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Andrew Richards] “Apple may not focus on the tech roots in there marketing, but Lion is one of, if not the most significant updates to OS X’s underpinnings in some time. It is a long read, but John Siracusa’s exhaustive review at Ars Technica gets into it all.”
Some of what he mentions about Core Storage has particularly interesting implications for video pros in the long run, though so far it looks like Apple is just doing preliminary groundwork.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[TImothy Auld] “Back that up. “
Try here.
“According to Good Technology, which provides mobile device management services to 49 of the Fortune 100 and 182 of the Fortune 500, 27 percent of the mobile devices activated by its enterprise customers during the second quarter of 2011 were tablets,” Paczkowski reports. “And most of those were iPads. Paczkowski reports, “More than 95 percent, actually”
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.