| Tuesday, November 19, 2002 |
11:12 - The Numbers Game
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/11/Thedifferencegrows.shtml
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In reading this article, as with so many others like it, one gets the impression that there's nothing more to a Mac or to a PC than a column of numbers that add up to a grade. Slip in the Scantron sheet, count up the little pencilled-in ovals, and give the kid his score. A high enough score gets you into Stanford.
Indeed, if computers were really like that, this argument would have a lot of weight. Den Beste would be 100% right. The whole world should be using Wintel PCs, and anybody who consciously chooses to use a Mac is either heroically stupid, or just insane.
Well, computers are more than numbers. And while I hate to use the "Fifty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong" argument, I must point out that I can rattle off the names of eight to ten bloggers-- easy-- extremely high-profile bloggers at that, bloggers whose sites are read by tons of people, bloggers with very intelligent and educated readerships, bloggers whose opinions and judgments are respected and debated and talked about over the water cooler-- who all use Macs. Passionately, even.
I'm not prepared to dismiss their choices of computers and their opinions on technology as deluded lunacy from kool-aid drinkers who refuse to see the big picture. And I don't think most of their readers are either.
There is more to the Mac than numbers, and these guys all realize it.
This isn't necessarily a compelling case for existing Mac users to switch to the PC (though for some who are considering an upgrade anyway, it might be). That's not the point. The question is: why would any PC user in the professional graphics industry want to switch to the Mac? They'd pay more for a box which ran hotter, was substantially slower, was louder and provided fewer features. The only answer is a lame one: "Well, you'd be more productive using the Mac OS." I'm afraid you'll have a difficult time making that case. Ultimately, anyone can be productive on any system, and there comes a point where a 1.5:1 increase in compute speed affects productivity more than any esoteric issues about how pretty the buttons are on the screen.
Actually, there are two points to be made here. One is that compute speed is not the only reason why every DV and NLE house in the country is a Mac shop, standardized on FireWire paths and Apple software. Believe it or not, the user environment actually is important, as is build quality (my Dell server is popping components like a Yugo in summertime) and hardware lifetime (my three-year-old G4/450 is still eminently usable, but my PC at work-- which was built last year-- is already a pig) and vendor consolidation (who wants to play phone ping-pong between five different hardware and software vendors when trying to resolve a problem?). These are, granted, subjective issues to some degree. Statistics can be gathered for them, but it still tends to come down to taste.
The other point, however, is a very concrete one: ColorSync. It's the industry standard for color matching throughout the prepress and graphics industries. There's nothing like it in the PC world, and if it's not patently impossible because of the hardware variance or whatever, Microsoft has certainly not made any efforts to try. Some video card manufacturers have tools which try to sync your card to your monitor, but that's all these tools do. They should not be confused with ColorSync, which is a technology designed to be integrated throughout the production process. Color profiles for the output devices of the creator of an image are embedded into the image itself, and then when the image is opened on another person's Mac, the application-- all of which on the Mac are ColorSync-aware-- reads the profile, matches it against the recipient's own output devices' profiles, and displays the image with the same color characteristics as on the creator's machine. This integration is embedded throughout the output process, whether you're talking about printouts, lithography prep, or film. Professional graphics would be impossible without ColorSync. Printing houses charge extra if you bring in PC files for them to reproduce, because of the extra work they need to do in order to compensate for the lack of ColorSync data in the images.
And this is without even bringing up the Final Cut Pro argument. FCP has lots more features than Premiere and is a lot less expensive than Avid, and it's fast becoming the standard throughout the industry for those reasons alone. And here's the kicker: while all three of those major players in the professional DV editing market are available on the Mac, FCP-- the most popular-- is Mac-only. That might have something to do with it.
In other words, the reason why so many graphics professionals use Macs is that Apple caters specifically to graphics professionals.
Believe it or not, those graphics houses who know what the hell they're doing are aware that there is more to computing than whether you have a CPU that's twice as fast as last year's model or not. (These guys don't do a whole helluva lot of upgrades in any case; that's why, two years since OS X's release, FCP is still maintained synchronously for OS 9-- because so many professional studios don't upgrade, as a matter of policy as well as of expertise.) Without certain critical features-- among which can be counted such abstract concepts as "trainability", "consistency of interface", "stability", and "a single vendor", as well as such concrete examples as ColorSync and FireWire-- the work is impossible (or at least prohibitive) regardless of how fast your hardware is. Sure, do your DV editing on a PC if it's so much better for your productivity to do it on a 3.06 GHz processor than on a 2.4 GHz. But sooner or later, the process will have to pass through a Mac house, and then there'll have to be a price paid for breaking away from the established standard and taking the unnecessarily long and primitive way around, and you'll lose in days of overhead what you gained in minutes of saved rendering time.
There's a reason why journalists, like David Coursey, keep pulling stunts like "spending a month on a Mac" and then deciding at the end that they're not switching back. There's a reason why otherwise perfectly sane bloggers exhibit what must come across as complete irrationality by standing firmly by their Macs, dialing their iPods in bliss as they type out the columns that thousands of web-surfers read every day. And there's a reason why the "Switch" campaign says not one single word about speed and numbers. (Even in cases where the numbers would speak in favor of the Mac.)
That reason, as I've discussed before, is that anecdotes speak louder than numbers. And when a company has a vast grass-roots following that's determined to let the world know just how happy their Macs make them, let me tell you, it's not because the Scantron spit out a bubble sheet without any tick-marks in the margins.
It's because they know what's truly important in computing, and Apple fulfills it for them.
UPDATE: If you don't believe my second-hand observations on the nature of the video-editing community are valid, you can always try these first-hand observations instead:
You can't run a graphics house when every machine, even if they have the same brand and model of video hardware and display, will display colors and white balance differently. It's simply impossible to achieve reproducible results. Those who try and conclude that PC's are every bit as productive in the professional graphics industry are not in the professional graphics industry. They're little more than weekend warriors making uninformed decisions based on the fact that they can splack home videos together in Premiere.
Yeah.
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