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     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Thursday, August 1, 2002
17:35 - Digital hub? Pshaw!
http://lowendmac.com/maclife/02/0801.html

(top) link
Some Mac columnists fail to "get it" even worse than the PC-centric tech pundits. Like Jason Walsh of Low End Mac.

The digital hub always struck me as a ropey idea. It's not that I object in principle to people connecting digital cameras and camcorders to their Macs, it's just that I don't want to be forced to sit through the dross that they subsequently create.

The Apple propaganda machine has been going full tilt for the last while, informing us of the wonderful free iApps that come with every Mac. So what? I like to think that for an investment of over ¤1,000 I'd get something other than an operating system thrown into the box.

When Jobs announced iPhoto, I dutifully went to the Apple site and downloaded it. I looked at it -- and erased it. Yes, it's very nice, but I'm not going to give up Photoshop any time soon.

iMovie? Sorry, my Adobe Premier habit is too ingrained.

Where do I begin? This reads more like a troll than a serious opinion piece. How far removed is this guy from modern computing reality? For him to dismiss the value of the iApps, just because they don't appeal to him and his needs, and particularly on the basis of faulty assumptions about what the iApps are for, is just clueless arrogance.

Who ever said, for instance, that iPhoto was supposed to be an alternative to Photoshop? If that was the assumption under which he downloaded it, he was apparently reading his LCD monitor through polarized glasses at 90° angles to the polarity of the screen, because one doesn't have to look too far to find clear descriptions of what it is for. iPhoto is supposed to work in tandem with Photoshop. Photoshop is a high-end image manipulation and compositing application. iPhoto is a digital camera manager. The two have a very limited function set overlap. iPhoto provides the most rudimentary of editing features, like red-eye removal and cropping and rotating, but for more complex stuff-- well, that's what Photoshop is for. But can Photoshop automatically read in all the photos on your digital camera into a named and dated "film roll", and browse through them all visually or search by assignable and user-definable parameters? Does Photoshop let you order prints online or design and order a hardbound book of your pictures?

I use Photoshop all the time. I also use iPhoto all the time. I don't have to be some kind of computing genius to realize that they are designed for different purposes. Adobe GoLive isn't intended as a replacement for Microsoft Word, for Frith's sake.

And, okay, it's great that you use Premiere. Fine. I'm glad you do such in-depth work that you require the features it provides for a paltry $600. But, again, Premiere and iMovie are not intended for the same purposes. Premiere is widely used as a professional video-editing tool for creating finished contract work in many high-end studios. (Well, except for most of them, which use either Final Cut Pro or Avid.)

But iMovie isn't for that. It's intended to allow Mr. Husband to make home movies, and iDVD is intended to allow him to send them to Grandma. What do you think all those low-end camcorders are intended for, that have sold so well since the mid-80s? What about all those little film cameras that people used in the 50s and 60s? They're for home users who fancy themselves amateur filmmakers-- people who want to capture their families' memories, to immortalize the moments of their lives.

iMovie does that bloody well. And it's free.

What exactly is the cognitive dissonance coming from? Apple provides consumer-level applications for doing genuinely useful, in-demand things, for free, on all their machines. And this guy is bitching about it? Look, just because you've apparently never used a digital camera doesn't mean you get to ruin it for the rest of us.

If Apple want to impress me, then they'd better write a HyperCard style iMedia and Homepage style iWeb tout suite.

... Excuse me? I'm sure this comes as just as much of a surprise to Apple as it does to me.

Totally leaving aside arguments like Final Cut Pro and all the high-end audio/video companies that Apple has been buying up left and right, and their outright ownership of much of that industry, where does this kind of demand fit into Apple's business plan? He's demanding that Cisco build a tractor, or Microsoft get into the lava-lamp business. (Well, maybe the latter isn't so far-fetched.)

The problem with the iApps is this -- they're not powerful enough. Okay, you say, but they're not aimed at commercial users. This is absolutely correct, and it's also the nub of my argument. I am genuinely concerned that Apple is beginning to neglect its core professional user base in the graphics and media industries. If Adobe ever pulls Photoshop, then the party's over. Macs will be stone dead as far as designers go, and mine will go out the window. Literally.

People talk about the "empowering" potential of the iApps, but having tools available to edit photos and video does not a professional make. The effect is more likely to be similar to that of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint -- where people like me were once paid embarrassingly small amounts of money to produce professional presentations and stationery, offices are now awash with printouts and presentations made by people who think that combining double underlining, bold, and italics is a good thing.

Ahh, here we see the problem. The guy is bitter about creative technology being given into the hands of the plebs. He thinks the functionality in iMovie and iPhoto should be enhanced and brought up to a "professional" product level, and sold at a high price. (Kinda like they're already doing. Except he wants that to be the only sales point.) He once had the kind of expertise that would have earned him a high salary, and now Apple is giving away what used to cost him thousands of dollars and lots of education time-- for free, with every Mac. This makes him fume.

Look, man, I feel for you. I really do. I understand your mindset. I know what it's like to have your bailiwick become democratized. How do you think I felt about the obviation of knowing how to write bare HTML, in the presence of WYSIWYG web-page editors? How do you think I felt when AOL users got access to USENET, or when the ISP I worked for had to stop requiring people to have at least six months' experience working with computers before we would allow them to sign up for Internet accounts? How do you think car tweakers from the 60s felt when cars became something as reliable as the phone company, something you didn't have to install new starters into every three weeks or spend every weekend under the hood tinkering? Why do you think PC users throughout the world were so disdainful of the Mac when it first came out? Because what was once to them a secret, esoteric art-- "using a computer"-- was now something that was accessible to the common man. That can play hell with a guy's insecurities.

These very same arguments were made back when Apple introduced the first WYSIWYG text editor, MacWrite. Look at all those damn fonts! Look-- you can do underlines, italics, shadows, outlines-- gawd damn! My next English paper's gonna look like a ransom note! And many did.

But jealously guarding a piece of technology from getting into the hands of people who might be able to use it well and tastefully-- especially as the market comes to mature-- is elitist and arrogant in the extreme. It's empire-building. It's backwards-facing banana-republic power-hoarding. And it's exceedingly distasteful.

Apple made a conscious decision when they decided to bring out the iApps and support the digital hub strategy: they wanted to turn the home computer into an extension of the geek toys that every male person in the 18-55 age bracket buys. They're not ignoring the pro market-- far from it; one has to look no further than FCP, DVD Studio Pro, and Cinema Tools to see that (and if Walsh thinks iPhoto is intended as some kind of land-grab from Photoshop, that Adobe might take offense at and leave the Mac platform in a huff, he's simply not done his research). But Apple's core market, the one where they make all their money, and the one where they stand to present an attractive value proposition to potential converts from Windows PCs, is in the home consumer-- the guy with a digital camera, a DV camcorder, and two kids on a tricycle and a dog to wash and a vacation to Disney World coming up in the summer. This is where Apple saw an opportunity to make people happy.

That is what Apple is all about.

And if that happiness comes at the expense of grumblings from a few bitter techno-trolls who see their mystique slipping away into oblivion, then-- frankly-- so much the better.

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© Brian Tiemann