ReekingArchvile said:
Only if someone could explain me why ive seen a Mac at every goddamn studio ive visited, i dont even use Pro Tools
In the professional markets its for the same reason that Windows still has nearly 90% market share in the OS market. Back in the old days Mac's were indeed good instead of being over hyped to be good. Some companies like my own, Adobe, and some others popularized Apple computers (from before the time of Mac's) for professional Desktop publishing and some other areas with their software apps. People bought Mac's for the sole purpose of using those apps as they were not available on any other platform including windows. This continued for a considerable time and then apple made some mistakes and landed in a dire situation. Steve Jobs got back inside Apple and changed a lot of things for Apple to get is back on track to success.
Apple started focusing more on marketing and external aesthetics of products than on the internals. They started finding new customers for mediocre products on the strength of the brand name that they built earlier. Professionals who were earlier using Mac's cannot change to other platforms in a hurry. Many don't even realize that they are better of with the Windows version of their favorite apps now. For one, The Font management has become terrible on Mac OS from what has once been the pioneer and platform of choice for professional typography.
When Customers face problems because of a buggy OS, they think its the developers of the apps who are to blame for the problems. Check out forums of any major pro app developer to see what I am talking about. in 99% of the cases stability issues (crashes, performance) that get reported after a new OS release (or dot release) to such developers are almost always found out be something from apples side. Apple fixes such bugs on their own whim's and wishes and often times its left to the developers to find ugly hacks and workarounds for apple problems. Enter a new build/patch of the OS and something else is broken and the cycle continues. Every time apple comes up with an update of the OS (some times with even the dot releases) most of the large apps get broken and require patches from either apple (which don't happen quickly enough for professional customers) or from the developer himself who either finds a word around or writes his own code to simulate OS API that gets broken. (An interesting thing is note here is that Apple even provides a framework to patch their own API's. i.e when you call an Apple's API, you can get your own code executed in place of apples own version. Its like a proclamation from their side that you never have the guarantee that their SDK's will work properly).
Even those customers who realized the degradation in apple's support, could not move to totally different platforms just like that when millions of dollars of work is dependent on the production systems they have established. But with the kind of neglect apple is showing, businesses have started moving their work flows. Apple still has the free lance professional market along with the casual market, but then freelance market wouldn't last either if this continues If the large fish move their production systems to Windows, app developers wouldn't find it worthwhile investing in a market that isn't bringing money .
Also for people who think there there are only a few bugs in Mac OS and apple takes care of all of them, you need a reality check. Just Google with a few CoreText and Font Management API's and you will find tonnes of crash reports, most of them deep inside Apples code. And no apple don't fix them all. Lots of them are left un touched. Just recently I happened to get two defects logged againist Snow Leopard via an ADC account with a gap of a couple of days and the difference in the bug ids came to a staggering 57 thousand and odd. I am not sure how apple generates its defect id's and whether the defect id range is unique for each products, but most companies have it in a sequential manner. So I sure hope that the defect ids are either random or at least the the defects logged within the two days comprise the entire list of products that Apple has. Just because causal users are not facing problems doesn't mean that no one is facing problems. Many professional desktop publishing customers have incurred considerable losses when their production work flows came to a stand still after upgrading to Snow Leopard, they are now back to Tiger and Leopard to get their work flows running again till the time apple cleans up their act.
