Talk to me about Macs

[Starglider]

Careful, Starglider, someone might read this thread and realize you're not actually an ultra-right-wing worshipper of globalized crony capitalism!

I have never been in favour of crony anything. If the obscenely bloated and overreaching US patent office didn't exist Apple wouldn't be able to force the entire industry to live in fear of its vast, jack-booted legal team. If the China had a free society with a floating currency the yuan would rapidly appreciate, cut the US trade deficit and reduce the price of imports for Chinese. Instead they have a totalitarian regieme that persues a zero-sum mercentalist policy; destroy US industrial base at the cost of holding down the standard of living for their workers.

[Terralthra]

Careful, Starglider, someone might read this thread and realize you're not actually an ultra-right-wing worshipper of globalized crony capitalism!

I have never been in favour of crony anything. If the obscenely bloated and overreaching US patent office didn't exist Apple wouldn't be able to force the entire industry to live in fear of its vast, jack-booted legal team. If the China had a free society with a floating currency the yuan would rapidly appreciate, cut the US trade deficit and reduce the price of imports for Chinese. Instead they have a totalitarian regieme that persues a zero-sum mercentalist policy; destroy US industrial base at the cost of holding down the standard of living for their workers.

I didn't think you were, but your ("ha ha only serious") satirical posts in N&P can make it hard to tell sometimes.

[Starglider]

I didn't think you were, but your ("ha ha only serious") satirical posts in N&P can make it hard to tell sometimes.

Firstly, many posters on this board have a hard time distinguishing between 'this is how it is' and 'this is the ethical ideal'. When I posted Ian Angell's piece about stratification into a globalised information worker elite with rising living standards and service workers with falling ones, that was 'this is how it is'. You can either adapt and benefit or rail against it and die in poverty. No one can do anything about the vast socioeconomic trends underlying the move so 'is this ethical' is almost irrelevant. In this case witholding your business from Apple unfortunately does effectively nothing to stop their abuses - although maybe a little more if you're in a position of being a trend setter (which we are when we help large companies refresh their grid technology base). However ordering 100 units from a tiny company that make bespoke liquid cooling solutions for 8-GPU workstations makes a very tangible difference (to that company).

Secondly, there is a distinction of mechanism and intent. I am in fact broadly in favour of off-shore tax havens, because on balance I consider giving hard working upper-middle-class individuals and small corporations a chance to escape oppressive taxation worth the cost in big corporations escaping all tax. For example in the UK and most countries it is impossible for a small company to build up a modest savings fund for future investment without oppressive levels of corporation tax being applied. Theoretically you can reclaim the tax many years later but it is tedious, expensive and absolutely no help when you want to fund work now. The result is a relentless drive towards debt over savings that is a major contributor to the current financial situation. If my company wasn't using international financial techniques our seed AI research fund would be significantly smaller. Tax havens are a win here because they are saving money from being wasted and squandered by government (not that they care; they'll just print/borrow more) and allowing capital accumulation for productive investment.

Apple on the other hand are hoarding truly vast amounts of money for no productive purpose at all. The cash pile is used to fund patent trolling, legal attacks and increasingly buying up potential competitors so that they can be dismantled and destroyed. Apple are in fact the same kind of giant invincible amorphous evil that Microsoft were (in the context of the IT industry) 10 to 15 years ago, and seem to be following the same trajectory (we can only hope).

[Covenant]

Well, as an artist, I never saw all that many Macs being used. They were fine but you really see a pretty broad spectrum with regard to what you use. For my job part-time doing HD Video Editing for a Comcast Sportsnet Chicago we use windows workstations and AVID decks with more modern PCs running the digital pipelines. For my work as an animator I use PCs exclusively because I've historically never liked how my favored applications (Autodesk and Adobe suites) were treated/ran on those systems, even if nowadays they're substantially better. Adobe still seems to get the short end of the stick but Autodesk appreciates the UNIX core set.

Basically, the old saw about Macs being the creative option is obsolete. There's a bit of consumer inertia, since they used to be quite common in many design sectors, and a handful of interesting products for Macs that drive that perception (Final Cut as a very notable 'killer app' for the purposes of distinguishing macs in the media community). Other than that it's pretty democratic and I don't see any professional difference from one to the other.

Just my experience from the art end, since I don't really think we're the buying bloc pushing Apple into prominence anymore.