Originally posted by TimeMist:
The point is that Apple is truly moving itself into battle by going into the belly of the beast. Others have tried it too, so be careful of making the logical leap that people will flock to OSX because it is better. While it is true that OSX is better, the market has yet to prove itself willing to follow.
All true indeed, however, one must keep in mind the following.............
Apple was by far at one time, the standard for the art community and PC where left to lowly data base, spreadsheet and word processing.
However, with the onslaught of gaming, CDR, DVD +and-R. and multimedia, AMD came out with a chip that trumphed the P3 and P4 series of chips. This got the Apple users attention, especially with Gigastudio which is still the x86 kernel.
Then, in a rare move, Apple shot itself in the foot as by purchasing Emagic (Logic) and coming up with Final Cut (cutting into Adobe product line) these two huge company's (Adobe and Avid), where for some words, ticked off. Adobe even went so far as releasing their latest version of Premiere as PC only. This is why your seeing companys like Avid buy M-Audio and slowy releasing FPU (native) products or why Adobe acquired Macromedia, Fireworks and Dreamweaver are huge cash cows.
The bottom line is, things like TDM are soon to be over, while one can not argue that a Digi board Digidesign ICON is a good thing for Pro Tools, why would this be needed if a nice Sony Digital (or Mackie) board would do with Hardware that cost 1/4th the price, including MOTU, Appogee, etc, with newer Dual Cores and Double Dual Core motherboards on the way.
These newer systems (as one mentioned Sun, Solaris), even Sun sells Opteron workstations that are used for feature films...and many others such as Star Wars:
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~89153,00.html?redir=CPJF01
I recall a time when in a Avid Edit bay, we would have to wait hours upon hours for a 1/2 segment to render which now, using NON AVID products takes 1/10 the time and costs about 1/100th of an Avid workstation, (non MAC).
PC Audio sales probably out weigh MAC audio sales 100 to 1, probably even higher, but you see, it's not that there are many anti-mac people, it's more like the PC gets the job done faster, and by a quick margin I might add, in fact, AMD leads the way with rendering now, much faster than Intel, and MAC as it stands right now, for every 1 product that SJ has, PC or rather x86 in winDozE has 100, which translates to fierce competition and reduced cost to the end user, plus more $$ for future development.
This said, there are many users that I know that would rather use LOGIC or DP as the front end to a MOTU piece or FIREFACE, or Appogee, etc, but use the PC (or link it anyway) with a MAC as they have committed larger dollars to huge sample libraries in various formats. While this window of sampling is shrinking, Gigastudio still has the best sounding engine, and nothing quite comes close to the warmth and real feel as giga, which of course is a PC only product.
Then of course, on the windows side, many HATE windows, but love the applications (programs), so it's a double edged sword that one must live with.
It's up to Steve to seize the moment, set a standard for hardware, perhaps even a small licensing fee, allow and certify vendors (I also garner that AMD will be the better solution in the end with Apple/ATI/Nvdia) and sell the OS. 20% of the market by 2009, especially if vendors/oems see a trend back toward a growing market (Apple/AMD) and need only to develop one set of drivers.
Just my few cents, again.
