After several months of deliberation I’ve decided not to invest my money in the Mac platform although my little PowerMac G4’s a neat little machine. I’ve always used Cakewalk’s SONAR (at least since it’s been out) and before then Pro Audio (from version 7 or 8–I can’t remember–cocaine’s a helluva drug, heh) and I think that the learning curve, the fact that I already have fantastic hardware and the advertised new Audio engine performance improvement and the workflow changes make an upgrade from 5 to 8 a very, very tempting offer. So tempting I ordered my upgrade today.
I think the only thing I’ll miss is the choir AU from Logic Express/Garage Band, but I’m sure I’ll find an equivalent DX or VST synth equivalent in time. Once I have the box in my old hands I’ll go ahead and order the Rapture virtual synth upgrade from Cakewalk as well since SONAR 8 comes with Rapture LE their upgrade price is only $129.
Between that and the formal piano lessions I started to take last month I foresee some creative boosts in the future!
I have several reasons I’m against the Mac platform:
- It’s a developer unfriendly environment (e.g. NDA insanity and some App Store Shenanigans
- It’s a closed system. I’m no hardware geek but I get by. I’d prefer to be able to build a tower to MY specifications instead of having to spend more than double on a machine that I won’t use to full effectiveness daily.
- The most of the cross-platform software I use (mainly Lightwave) seems to be a few months or a year behind in development maturity compared to the Windows platform. Even Adobe has 64 bit versions of their products for Windows while this version doesn’t have 64 bit for a allegedly ‘more mature and elegant’ 64 bit system. This goes back to point #1. Apple refuses to back-port libraries that professional developers are using and forcing them into Cocoa (although it’s very nice).
- One doesn’t have much choice with software with Apple. You can purchase 1st party apps such as Logic or Final Cut which is quite mature and seem to be industry standard, but other than those choices they’re bleeding the market by pricing it to the point it’s difficult for a 3rd party to compete against them. Yes, the end-user seems to win, but choice is more important to me than price alone. With the Windows platform I have dozens of choices of Video editing platforms while on a Mac there really is only one (ask anyone what they edit video with on a modern Mac it’ll be Final Cut Express or Pro–even the old Avid guys either jumped ship to PC or switch to FCP).
Now don’t get me wrong. For a consumer Apple is very enticing and easy to use, and I’d love to have a MacBook or MacBook pro to replace my aging Acer (mainly to boot to Windows), but the desktop selection is far out of my league or not enough cowbell for my needs. Id’ still suggest a Mac to a new-to-computers person since Vista although is stable and usable, still has some complexity issues for a new customer (although a new customer in a 1st world country is very rare these days).
I despise the Control Panel layout in Vista it’s WAAAY too busy. Microsoft needs to take a look at the MacOS control panel for some ideas. UAC is great, but I’d like to see an ‘always run as administrator’ option in the shortcut options where it UAC prompts you once but never prompts you again unless the executable’s checksum changes. A modern program shouldn’t need to prompt you for UAC every time it launches, but there are a few legacy apps & games that I launch occasionally that required it.