carstenw
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 Re: I think i'm going to buy a windows 8 tablet | |
Tariq Gibran wrote:
Yep, iPad mini. Exactly my point. Meanwhile, the base that once defined Apple and made them what they are - the designers, photographers, film makers, music producers and so on- are being ignored more and more for these silly consumer toys. As an example, look at the state of the aging MacPro. No USB3, No Thunderbolt...it\'s been in dire need of a major update for quite a while as it\'s basic design dates back, amazingly, to 2006! It\'s practically an antique. It really wouldn\'t surprise me at all if Apple completely ditched their higher end pro Macs.
Agreed, and this makes me sad. My first Mac was a dual-chip PowerMac with the 30\" screen, and it was an awesome machine. Fast like blazes and rock-solid. It came with Panther but I soon moved to Tiger, and then Leopard, and these OSs were very stable and almost glitch-free in operation. Snow Leopard started a slight downward slide, and since Lion and Mountain Lion I am seeing so many more problems than I used to, freezes and weird behaviour. I have moved to a MacBook Air, then MacBook Pro 15\" (gave the Air to my girlfriend), and now a Mac mini server, fully loaded with 16GB RAM and SSD + hard drive. All great machines, but not as problem-free as the old PowerMac.
And as you say, Apple has started moving away from the artists and the pros. The development pace of Aperture has slowed to a crawl, to the point that I switched to the (IMO) inferior Lightroom. I feel that Apple does less and less for me with their Mac strategy. That they have neglected the Mac Pro pains me, although I can understand that they don\'t want to update every time Intel releases some minor variation. But it is definitely overdue for an overhaul at this point. To their credit, I think they realise that ditching the Mac Pro would lose their connection to the high-end, which would be an iffy move, strategically, even if it isn\'t their focus. I expect/hope for a replacement for the Mac Pro at some point which is smaller and less expandable, but still a serious machine, not an iMac.
But one thing I disagree vehemently with you about. I am a programmer with a deep interest in photography, and all this work has to be done on a computer, no question. But in fact perhaps more than half my time spent with a computer is with music playback, video playback, and internet usage, and the iPad is awesome for this, in some ways better than a real computer. This is not a toy, but a device which can offload media playback, communication and browsing completely. I visit many, many sites each day, and none use Flash, which tends to be used by artists for presentation of their websites. HTML5 will take this over, and even Adobe is moving in that direction. So the iPad is a great thing. The iPhone too, the best phone I have ever used, and a revelation in use. I have a NEXUS-7, and while it is quite nice, it isn\'t anywhere near as good as the iPad. I am all for competition, but my bets are on Microsoft, not Android.
About your friend and the OS update, I think Apple did the right thing. They set a date, publicised it, and stuck to it. Your friend should have been more careful about when she bought, sorry.
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