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Apple Mac Pro

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
So WildWest's Daddy had a Mac that he did not like and his wife had a MacAir that broke down so logic has it that Macs are not good. I am glad that is settled.

Hah.

I had an Apple II back in the day. iMac during the days of Vista. Alicia (wife) had a MacAir and then a MacBook. She had an iPhone that crapped out after 2 yrs (this was during the time when Verizon was going away from unlimited data and to be grandfathered in at the time, had to pay for the phone outright, wasn't subsidized).

Mom had a MacBook Pro that she just loved for 8 yrs.

The laptops of recent years have their engineering issues and the last 2 releases of their OS (High Sierra and Catalina) haven't had the best of launches. Now that is par for the course with anything of this nature, but it goes against the "it just works" mantra.

There are things that I do like about Mac OS though, and a lot of this is due to it's BSD and just in general UNIX-like roots. Permissions are handled much better then Windows and the drivers for everything are built into the kernel (of course, this very thing is what gives Windows the ability to work with so much more hardware, but it's also a con).

Everything else not so much.

Now, if one likes it and one likes to use it for their work, more power to you. That's great. But it does have it's concerns and for me, it's not getting any better. But then again, I may have different areas of concern that I look for then the next person.
 

Johnny Best

Active Member
Have had Macs since the MacPlus little machine and a lot of other Macs since, and have had multiple IPhones. Never liked Windows, probably because I cannot use one, but I am not concerned about that.
 

rjssigns

Active Member
CS5 still had 32 bit versions outside of Premier and After Effects, they were 64 bit only. Ps might have been 64 bit, I know it was 64 bit before Ai. I skipped CS5.5, so I can't remember if 5.5 was when there were changes or not. Went from CS5 to CS6.



Why go for all of that and yet get basic iMacs? What are the specs of the iMacs?

Basic iMac has been done everything I've needed. Students get along fine with them for graphic design.
When you go next door to video production that's where you see the fully built whoop a** Mac Pro stuff.
Sound studio/audio production has fully built rigs too.

Specs for 21.5" iMac at Costco.
  • 3.0GHz 6-core 8th-generation Intel Core i5 processor
  • Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz
  • 8GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory, configurable up to 32GB
  • 1TB Fusion Drive1
  • Radeon Pro 560X with 4GB of GDDR5 memory
  • Two Thunderbolt 3 ports
  • Retina 4K 4096-by-2304 P3 display
 

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
Never liked Windows, probably because I cannot use one, but I am not concerned about that.

I wouldn't be either if that was my concern with the Macs.


Sound studio/audio production has fully built rigs too.

Speaking of audio production. One thing that I never did like what Windows did is that during the days of Vista, they kept audio from being handled by the kernel. It had a layer of emulation between hardware and the kernel. Even if one had top of the line equipment, there was some degradation to the input due to this. I know MS was hocking audio improvement with Win 10, but don't know if they had made that emulation layer more efficient or did something else or if it is what it is.

That has always bothered me with Windows. I have one audio production rig that I use and I have a real time kernel on that and use Ardour for audio/sound effects that I generate for games and animations.
 

Bobby H

Arial Sucks.
WildWestDesigns said:
This whole rolling release model that Windows and Adobe CC is on is just has offensive and it may cause users to upgrade before they really need/want/afford to or they buy a bigger beast of a computer on the outset to hopefully future proof themselves for awhile.

I think that's an entirely different topic that what Apple is doing to strong-arm customers hopelessly locked into its hardware platform.

I'll agree that Adobe has a monopoly of sorts. My workplace is suffering a bit under it. We have 3 Adobe CC licenses we're paying about $53 per month each to maintain. Plus there's the plug-ins that are moving to subscription-only too. Astute Graphics' previous stuff that was compatible up to CC 2019 now conveniently no longer works under the newly released CC 2020 applications. Gotta move up to the new $119 per year program to keep that stuff going.

OTOH, that stuff is software. Nothing is holding back any of Adobe's rivals at releasing something better. So far none of them are doing it. None of them are bringing any kind of credible challenge to Adobe.

Corel is stumbling all over itself with its own stupid moves to a subscription-only setup and the half-baked misfires of CDR 2019 on both the Windows and Mac platforms. Lots and lots of user complaints with that wholly terrible release. I'm sure Vector Capital will find some kind of scapegoat for their own ill-advised decisions. That hedge fund company is doing more to drive Corel into its grave than build up as a formidable competitor to Adobe (like it was 20+ years ago).

Outside of Corel what other choice do users have other than Adobe? Nothing. That's what. The advertising industry circulates mostly Adobe-centric files. It's not about anything "open source." In some other markets an upstart has managed to challenge a strongly established software titan. Look at what SideFX has been doing lately competing with Autodesk. Their Houdini application is drawing users away from Maya and Studio 3D Max. It's going to take credible competition like that in the markets Adobe serves for anyone to mount any kind of credible challenge to Adobe. Right now it's just crickets. Nothing is happening.
 

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
I think that's an entirely different topic that what Apple is doing to strong-arm customers hopelessly locked into its hardware platform.

Hardware and software are linked. Can't have one without the other. In Apple's case, both platforms are a little bit more tightly integrated then others.

And there is vendor lock in with software.

I'll agree that Adobe has a monopoly of sorts.

Nothing illegal in this country about a monopoly directly. That's not what got MS back in the 90s and it's not what has Google in the bind right now. Not technically anyway.

None of them are bringing any kind of credible challenge to Adobe.

Oddly enough those that did or maybe had some features better then Adobe counterparts were gobbled up and killed off by Adobe. And they leave the rest floundering around so that way people have choice. Which is the key thing.

The advertising industry circulates mostly Adobe-centric files. It's not about anything "open source."

Amazingly, I stayed away from Open Source this entire conversation. I talked about Mac, Windows and Hackintosh. Nothing about Open Source. Now, when I was showing the specs of my rig, I even clipped the part of it that showed the distro that I was using. One could get a little bit of it with the reference to Gnome, but that was it.

Advertising, at least around here, is also all about Macs (is it really all about Macs in this day and age or is there at least one other OS platform that can do the job?). It seems like a decision that they made x amount of yrs ago is still good today and it may or may not be. Or they don't want to have to upset their workflow that they already have, which I totally get, I really do.

One thing that I have learned as well, through my switch is that some features (not all) is usually a function of a different workflow. It may suck when trying to learn a new workflow, but quite a few of the features that I thought were missing were just implemented in a different way (and it's that way with DRAW v Ai (I rarely use Ps, so everything that I think of Adobe is going to be more about Ai (I used Premier, Audition/Soundbooth and other programs, but in terms of the 2 big ones around here, it's always been Ai to me)).

Don't underestimate too the value of marketing that they have behind their respective brands. Even if they are competitors out there that can what is needed, both companies have that behind them and that is powerful stuff. Especially if it has been proven well in the past. Maybe not so much in recent years, but if it has been true more often then not, powerful stuff.

There was a user on there that always stated that you couldn't be successful in this industry if you didn't have a Mac (quite a few would probably translate that to Adobe as well, couldn't be successful without Adobe). That isn't always the case. He also had quite the ironic siggy, especially when applied to that conversation.

Now, in terms of Ai v. Inkscape. Inkscape will never be able to take over Ai with regard to print (unless don't mind using an extension or a separate program such as Scribus to help) and that can be seen with just Inkscape's choice of file format, SVG. Mainly designed for web work, still a vector, but more for the web. JS interactivity with a file coming from Inkscape compared to any other vector program out there that I've tried is second to none, but until Inkscape comes up with it's own file format, it's going to have some shortcomings with print without some work around. That has always been it's biggest issue (with me anyway, can be work around, but it is a different workflow and takes time to get used to it).

In some other markets an upstart has managed to challenge a strongly established software titan. Look at what SideFX has been doing lately competing with Autodesk. Their Houdini application is drawing users away from Maya and Studio 3D Max. It's going to take credible competition like that in the markets Adobe serves for anyone to mount any kind of credible challenge to Adobe. Right now it's just crickets. Nothing is happening.

Since you mentioned open source, I have to mention Blender in this, especially with the above topic at hand. I would say that Autodesk is worried about Blender given that really bad comparison blog.

A.) They missed a few (more then a few) key features that set Blender apart with it's latest release. Just didn't mention them.

and

B.) The mere fact of them doing something like gives Blender a huge boost in "legitimizing" it as a serious contender (Autodesk obviously thinks something of it to even waste their time with that comparison).


To the OP: Sorry about this. I tried to avoid open source in this discussion as I knew that this would happen.
 
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