I belong to to a great Macintosh user group & on occasion I browse the group’s forum. One member who happened to be a PC pro & a professor I had in college posted a rant about how Apple doesn’t get the business market. He said the iMac was a toy for the home user. I agreed and posted:
“I used to work in IT, doing support, upgrades, research, and evaluation of products. I also did Mac support in the same categories, and it was always difficult, from the hardware standpoint and in dealing with management.
The iMac is a toy- a nice toy designed to promote Apple’s margins in a short term stock market driven product cycle. Easy upgrades and hardware maintenance is key in business and for home enthusiasts. Remember the G5? Before Jobs returned to Apple I could buy a Mac at Sears, get in-home setup & service. Jobs torpedoed the well liked printer lines. And charging for OSX ‘upgrades’ as Apple has done would not last long in the business market.
I have 4 PC towers, 1 Toshiba laptop, 1 g3 iMac & 1 G4 tower. I can buy the nVidia Quadro series cards, at various prices and fit them in my PCs. Not so on the Macs, except the high end. If you do serious CAD, 3D CGI, medical research, engineering work on your computer you will need a Pro card at some point. nVidia has price points for entry level workstations )FX-370 and the FX-570 which are G80-class GPU cards. They will fit in lower spec PCs, but only top drawer Macs. What’s the point of an entry level card in a high end Mac you probably don’t need?
I don’t think most Mac users understand this. Hollywood has embraced Macs for video editing & some compositing work, but a large majority of 3D CGI & composting work is still done on PC workstations. Mac render farms I don’t know much of either. Few movie projects or game design projects are done strictly on one platform- you need a variety of tools and people and the platforms they are familiar with.
3dsMax is one of the premier apps in 3D and it does NOT run native on OSX. If you want to get hired, knowing this app helps. Maya is on both Mac & PC but targets a different area of 3D and I still see more job specs ask for 3dsMax.
What I need is a sub $1000 Mac tower with access to PCI slots, PCIe slots, upgradeable power supply ability, and support for the FULL range of nVidia Quadro series cards. Not for gaming, but for the range of 3D apps I mentioned before. Then Apple will have a winner… ”
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Now I AM a Mac fan, I’m not knocking Mac users, just Apple for not going after the business and enthusiast market.
Erika
Tags: Apple, Mac, Technology
