[Tim Wilson]

[Darren Roark] “[Andrew Kimery] “I can only imagine how long MC will keep going if it’s plug suddenly gets pulled.”

If it’s anything like how long people are keeping ScriptSync alive by not updating MC or their OS, probably quite a while. Yeesh.”

If the timetable is anything like FCP Legend, we can assume its post-plug-pulled life is >5 years.

Of course, there’s still a long, long way from an unspecified number of layoffs to the end of active MC development. I didn’t see anything in the snapshot linked even hinting that the cuts are overweighted in engineering.

On the contrary, Avid development is on a huge roll right now. Did you really check out Avid’s NAB stories? Hugely ambitious, with a scope all-but-unmatched in a year of largely incremental announcements elsewhere. As I wrote in my NAB summary, I’m a huge fan of increments, but I’ll add here that I’m also a fan of swinging for the fences. My summary included some very specific examples of Avid doing exactly that.

Again speaking only on the basis of a couple of paragraphs, I don’t see any evidence that, after going pedal to the metal for a very long time to bring those product lines to fruition, non-specified (and as yet unconfirmed??) layoffs suggest that Avid is suddenly slamming the brakes on development.

[Tim Wilson]

[Charlie Austin] “You can do better than that cheap straw man comeback Bill.”

Dammit, THAT’s what I should have renamed this forum. “Straw Man or Not: The Debate.”

[Bill Davis] “It’s official then. Elon Musk is nothing more than a crass copycat because Oxcarts had wheels in the 13th century.”

The “crass copycat” part would only be if Elon insisted that HE invented wheels for oxcarts. But of course, he never claimed anything of the sort.

Actually, I was just thinking about Elon the other day, as I tend to do, and realizing that, rather than the futurist that other people claim on his behalf, he’s an old-school industrialist. The heart of what he’s doing — cars, batteries, rocket ships — has been around since before any of us were born. Even geezers as old as us! LOL

Elon’s innovations are mostly along the lines of fit and finish, economies of scale, and business acumen profound enough to merit being called revolutionary — but an inventor? Not so far. Has he claimed that he is? Not that I can remember.

For that matter, he made his first fortune on a way for people to exchange money. Been going on since long before the 13th century. So was taking a slice for facilitating the transfer of funds.

Anyway, with every function that Walter notes above, he’s not refuting any of Apple’s claims. Apple didn’t make any claims about getting there first.

See also: multicam, MP3 players, phones, using phones for payment, watches, cars, streaming music, multimedia appliances, personal computers with graphic interfaces. Apple didn’t get there first with any of this, and didn’t claim to. Apple’s customers claim it, brandishing torches, pitchforks, and adrenaline in comments strings across the interwebs.

Not to say that Apple hasn’t iterated some stuff in such a way that honestly does deserve to be called revolutionary over the years. Of course they have. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Or of Apple.

[Tim Wilson]

However Jeremy, since you asked so nicely, we’ve added the function back to the forums page as it appeared you were requesting. Yes?

Thanks for continuing to bang on the new interface during our ongoing renovations!

Best,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “my guess is that the forward-thinking design planning at Apple is targeting the tablet+cloud as the primary platform.”

Makes sense to me, but I also think that there’s a lot of life left in iMacs.

You know what they need, though, is a touch screen. Mac people poo-poo this, but I’m tellin’ ya, after using one on a PC for the last couple of years, computing without a touch screen feels like computing without a mouse — it can be done, but the people actually doing it are mostly dour old men trying to prove a point. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

Cool link, thanks Craig!

I think that the first comment on that article gets it right though. If Apple’s solution was truly imminent, they might have at least waved a hand at it, like Timmy C did with the Mac Pro. Nothing super-specific, nothing with a firm date, but that general “stay tuned” message kept a lot of people waiting around for a long time. The parallel here could have been, “Hey, we’re working on something slick, but in the meantime, third party solutions abound”…but no.

I dunno. I’m not making any predictions, but it really wouldn’t shock me to see them get as completely out of the standalone display business as they did the printer business. Focus their energy on supporting the product lines that are of interest to the largest part of their customer base, and making Apple the most money: integrated displays for devices AND computers.

[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “the power-supply-i/o-dongle that came with the Apple cinema display was perhaps the worst designed, least ergonomic piece of hardware to be created by a company not immediately going into bankruptcy in modern history. Maybe this is for the best.”

My brother-in-law worked for Apple for a dozen-ish years — the SJ interregnum through just past the turn of the century. Bright fella, with razor-sharp business discipline, so when product lines were underperforming, he went to analyze them, and more often than not, kill ’em. He became known as The Angel of Death.

I know there were a bunch of ’em, but the lines I can remember him axing off the top of my head are the digital camera (terrible), scanners (terrible), printers (the early ones were terrific, by the end of the road, not so much), and CRT-era monitors.

Those last CRT monitors were hideous. Do you remember the 17AV? I was doing video production, the core market for that monitor, right?, hence the AV, so he sent me one to test. I brushed past it one day and it shot an ARC out of it — a 2-inch bolt that hit me so hard I fell over and for a moment, I couldn’t even see. I knew my wiring wasn’t the culprit, so I got a little closer while seated in my rolling chair, and BANG! It was only a half-inch arc this time because I was closer…

….so I got on the phone and politely, quietly, and with no profanity (HAHAHAHAHA) asked what’s the haps. He said, “Yeah, I was afraid of that. It kept happening here in house, so I wanted to check it in the field.” Thanks for the warning, man.

But there’s not one of those products that didn’t need to die. They ALL needed to die, and the world is better for it.

The last thing my boy axed (that I remember) before he left was slots in Mac towers. He was a direct report to Steve, who somewhere around the turn of the century (one of you will surely remember when) tasked him with finding out how many slots were in use by the average Mac customer. He determined the number to be 1.1. Steve said fine, we round it up to 1.5, double it, so 3 slots it is, and no need to worry about supporting third-party external chassis anymore.

Anyway, this doesn’t feel like a big deal to me. In an iMac/laptop world, Apple actually could have done this a few years ago and it wouldn’t have really mattered to them, or most of their customers. My guess is that they made this decision a good long while ago, and only announced it when stockpiles grew so low that there was no longer any reason not to announce it. Blow out the last ones to people who want to get ’em while they can.

[Tim Wilson]

Joe, I encourage you to click on the Vimeo Pro banner in the upper right sidebar here. At the other end of your journey, you’ll find a plethora of options for selling your work. You get to keep 90% of the dough.

You can choose whether to rent or sell, choose which countries it’s available in as your rights management needs dictate — you can even decide whether it’s viewable on Vimeo or whether you want to handle display and distribution through your own domain.

So follow that ad to a world of wonders. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Francois Blawat] “I have emailed the webmaster twice and have not received any responses. “

Francois, I apologize! I haven’t received anything at my direct address, and our email system doesn’t show anything having arrived via our contact@ address, or in our Letters to the COW Team forum.

I also apologize for not coming to this thread earlier! I have no idea why, but my subscription to this forum (one of my favorite reads in my 10 years here, even if I don’t know enough about it to post here often) has somehow come unglued too.

In any case, additional apologies for losing the particleIllusion forum (and a handful of others) along the way in the renovations currently underway. I’ve turned it back on.

As for the Basics forums, we’ve merged ALL of the Basics forums back into their main forums.

To be honest, the only reason we even considered Basics forums is because some of the cranky old-timers were in a constant of quivering outrage over the scourge of beginners daring to post in THEIR forums.

Fortunately, most of those cranky old-timers have quivered themselves into oblivion, or at least someplace outside the COW, which is good enough for me. Now, we’re chock-a-block full of good cheer, and moving ever upward in our role as the industry’s most generous and helpful community — thanks of course entirely to folks like you.

Our dust is settling here as renovations are almost complete. If you see anything else amiss, please do head on over to the Letters to the COW Team forum. I’ve also resubscribed to this forum, so hopefully we’ll be all set.

Many thanks again to all of you!

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Please pardon our dust while we’re under construction to serve you better. 🙂

It’ll be back molto pronto.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Cloud processing is already working just fine for devices. The computing power for Siri, Google Now, Alexa (which is what Amazon SHOULD have called its voice assistant, and what I’ll call her forever) and the like lives in the cloud, and nobody blinks. Fantastic article here, pointing out that voice search requires 168% more computing resources than a standard web search. In round numbers, I guess. LOL

Yeah, Apple’ll add it to macOS, but I don’t think for a minute that they’ll be rewiring their architecture to offload Siri processing onto the desktop. Why bother?

I also don’t think that any of this is an especially major step. I mean, I’ll still be paying Dropbox when the sun goes nova. I trust them with my data more than I trust any number of drives that I can hold in my hand. And it’s just files. Nothing even vaguely important as what I load onto Facebook.

(Speaking rhetorically. Facebook’s not for me, not because I care about I’m shy about the idea of sharing my information with Facebook, but because I want people from my past to have to work harder to find me. LOL)

So yeah, Dropbox or its successor has my subscription forever. So does Spotify or some later Spotify-like service. (Not Apple music any time soon. Just not good enough, and I don’t see it happening from the wwdc reveal.) The hundreds of playlists I’ve labored over, some for months, are useless outside that service, but why would I consider getting out of it. Any of you Netflixers planning to cut out any time soon? I’ve been on Gmail pretty much since it opened in 2004 (hence my Gmail address being my actual name, no punctuation or nuthin’), and as much as it’s nowhere near what I want it to be, but it’s never crossed my mind to consider any other alternative besides better front ends.

(Apple and Android mail are barely better, and in some ways worse, but any Android user should drop what they’re doing and grab Aquamail, by far the best email front end on any platform, mobile or nay.)

In other words, pretty much everything I’m using, I’m conceptually locked into forever. I CAN step away, and any of the specific services are fungible (I could go from Dropbox to Box easily enough) but I have better things to do with my time. Like labor over Spotify playlists or my tumblr. LOL

And any of my applications, desktop or mobile, that work better for ME by offloading processing into the cloud are more than welcome to it.

Plenty of people are already paying to do it. Atomic Fiction is the VFX company that did the heavy lifting for The Walk, and they used the cloud to scale from zero processors to 15,000 simultaneous processors in seconds, and back to zero. Instead of paying for processors that sit sleeping in boxes most of the year, they paid for only the minutes of processing they needed. When the project was finished, so was their expenditure. Nothing to amortize but the handful of workstations that they used for visualizing the effects.

The story here is hella cool, but only barely hints at the extent of it. I did a follow-up interview, because I think these guys are just living the future today — they’re a couple of years ahead of that. But it is in fact here, it’s real, and it costs less than buying local processing. A lot less.

You probably don’t need that much processing of course. Maybe you never will. But if, like Siri, you could have 168 times more processing than your most tricked out Mac just by keeping your data in iCloud, you’d be crazy not to.

Or you could buy a PC to get more processing power than the most tricked out Macs. LOL But that might ultimately mean wasting more money, because sizzlecore PCs cost a lot more than topped-off Macs, faced off against processing on demand.

So my only disinclination to use the word “conspiracy” is that it implies secrecy. I don’t see how any of these guys could possibly be more obvious. They all want to be your best boyfriend ever. They want to carry your books, massage your feet, and make you soup when you feel bad. You’ll hesitate because you’ve been hurt before, but in the end, you’ll want to give them everything because they give you back even more. They make you feel pretty.

It’s nice to be loved.