According to most press sources out there, at least. I’ll tell you what, though, if it really turns out to be about an issue other than the iPhone 4′s antenna issues, I’ll laugh my goddamn ass off.
Anyway, it sort of relates to what I’m about to talk about now, as I wrap up the most cohesive rant I’ve ever made with a Part 3.
In part 1, I wrote about security, and how there seems to be a certain stigma attached to the Mac as being more secure than its rivals. In the sequel, I went on about its perceived ease of usage and how even a simple task, such as connecting to a windows server, required the Mac to go through a Terminal while Windows would have a GUI available for you to interact with (and yes, I know you can connect via Finder, but you’re still going to have to use Samba or some other interface to connect, and really, do you know my dad knows how to type smb://(ip goes here) in Finder?).
Like I said before, I could just go on and on forever about the Mac, but for now I’ll settle with making my final case against the Mac: efficiency.
I’m going to start out by declaring that while I’m someone who does tweak my Windows services and actively searches for ways to cut my RAM usage, I’m not like one of those users who will mess around with bash for hours on end to get Compiz working exactly the way they want it, right down to building their own applications from source to ensure optimal performance. I’m ok with having it run well, just with as little waste as possible without going through rings of fire.
Windows is, by default, horribly bloated. Even if you toss your OEM disk into the local incinerator and grab a clean windows ISO off the net, there’s a lot of bullshit that Microsoft decided to introduce for some unknown reason. A mild example would be the fucking search assistant puppy, and a more recent one would be Windows Flip 3D, which I have personally ranked #1 as the most, absolutely useless feature anyone could want of all time. At least, until Aero Peek came along.
OS X, then, seems like a clear winner when it comes to this sort of thing. Macs come with much less retarded daemons running in the background by default, Spotlight is generally snappy (and installing Quicksilver makes it far more delightful), and since Macintosh SKUs are strictly controlled, there are no retarded OEM distros of it flying around to piss us off.
Unfortunately though, and I really hate to say it, but even with the seemingly cleaner overall feel that the Mac provides (and I’m not talking about the look), it has so much absolute bullshit embedded by default that I absolutely cannot fathom why anyone would prefer it for efficiency.
Expose is nice, the dashboard is ok (certainly better than the Windows Sidebar by a fucking country mile), but for fuck’s sake, please let me disable these services with a goddamn GUI instead of (again) using a command prompt. I mean, let’s face it: this is an operating system that prides itself on being pretty as shit, and I have to perform such rituals through a command prompt. Notwithstanding the fact that it’s unintuitive, it’s also inefficient.
And that’s the problem: the Mac gives you a clean slate, but God forbid if you want to maybe polish the slate a little more. It all goes horribly wrong when you try to do so. From trying to remove mouse acceleration to getting information about a particular daemon, everything is designed to make your life just that little bit harder if you’re not doing whatever a normal, average Joe would want to do.
This is especially prevalent when doing production work. Example: While I was at Lucasfilm, I had to figure out Final Cut Pro more or less by myself (thank god I had worked a little with it in school for a week or so, because most of my prior NLE experience was with Premiere), and it was an absolute nightmare. To capture from our Panasonic camcorder and Lumix GH-1 (which is one of those new-fangled DSLRs that can shoot 720p video), I had to go through iMovie (which, incidentally, has the worst user interface of any video editor barring WMM) to capture individual clips from the camera. All because FCP cannot capture from anything other than a tape deck. For fuck’s sake, even Adobe Premiere can do that, and it sure as hell costs less.
Anyway, it didn’t stop there. People complain all the time to me about Adobe Premiere’s UI and say, “Oh, I wish it was more like Final Cut’s.” Having used both (and a lot more other NLEs besides), I have to agree that Premiere’s UI isn’t exactly good, hell, none of Adobe’s UIs are as good as people think they are, but who in their right mind would prefer FCP’s UI instead? It was so maddeningly annoying, from the stupid Mac limits of not being able to maximize windows to the maddeningly small icons that littered the interface. At least Premiere let me click on what I wanted to. Combined with the Mighty Mouse, working in FCP was like trying to perform eye surgery whilst having my hands encased in concrete.
And the coup de grace: the crashes. FCP was generally quite stable, right up until the point where I tried to import video from the GH-1 camera directly. Firstly, the Mac would not recognize the camera as a media device, no matter what I did. Thinking it was probably just drivers, I brought the GH-1 over to a windows rig, extracted the .mts files directly from it, used Mediacoder to reencode them in an AVI container so that FCP could actually bring it in onto the timeline.
At which point FCP crashed unceremoniously with the message “General Error.” No dump file, no error code, nothing else other than that laughable excuse for an exception. Who even writes error handling like this? They might as well have written “Fuck you” for all the good it did.
I tried using Compressor to reencode the movie with the Apple Intermediate Codec, and Compressor basically just hung. Then the whole Mac locked up, and even the vulcan key-combo (Control-Command-Power) failed to get it out of its frozen state. A cold boot was the only option.
At this point, having wasted a few hours trying to find the dump files for Compressor and FCP, I decided to just use Mediacoder on a Windows rig to convert the .mts files to fully uncompressed and place them in an AVI container. To my surprise, FCP actually managed to bring it in, but because the Mac rig was a 32-bit OS X, it quickly ran out of RAM/juice and FCP again stuttered when I scrubbed the timeline before crashing again, with the same error.
At this point, time was running short, so I tried re-converting them again, this time using h.264 with minimal compression. To my surprise, it worked, though FCP still handled the files a little sluggishly. Much later, I learned that the original files shot with the GH-1 were encoded in a highly compressed h.264 format, which FCP had trouble decoding, and Compressor couldn’t decode it at all. Additionally, FCP’s h.264 live decoding performance was apparently quite bad, which explained the lag I experienced when I finally got to editing the video.
Would this have happened if I had used an all-Windows workflow? Probably so, but at least I wouldn’t have had to waste a few hours fucking around and wondering what on earth I had done to get such a retarded exception message. And even though Mediacoder is third-party software, the fact remains that it could read and convert between formats comfortably, while the Mac couldn’t even mount the camera as a generic filesystem, let alone a media device.
And of course, if I had had access to an OpenSUSE rig right from the start along with maybe something like kdenlive or LiVES, everything would have been a lot clearer right from the start.
But after all this, what am I trying to get at? Well, look at how Apple treated its professional customers by killing off Shake and dumping a small subset of its features into Motion and FCP. Look at how Apple fucks over people with problems by writing such stupid exception messages. Look at the ongoing war with Flash, if you think I’m talking about things long past. Look at iTunes and its performance on the Mac compared to its performance on other operating systems. Hell, look at the problems now with the iPhone 4. All these show just how little respect Apple has for its educated customer base, and how much they’re shifting their focus to the admittedly probably more profitable pool of idiots out there who buy iPods without even considering alternatives.
You could say that I should vote with my wallet. (I do!) Maybe I’m just a whiner. But consider this: Windows Flip 3D was born out of the requests from idiots who had been accustomed to the Mac’s eye-candy, along with Sidebar and the more asinine Aero Peek. Premiere’s UI changes make it seem almost like an FCP clone these days, and there are more copies of the Mac’s scrollbars in downloadable themes these days then there are animated GIFs in webpages. What we’re witnessing is the pollution of our everyday applications, all thanks to the popularity of the Mac’s success, whether for better or for worse.
And I, for one, very much prefer that this behaviour stops at once before another application crashes with an even dumber exception message.
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