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orTofønChiLd
Everything is crazy
Registered: Feb 2008
Location: Miami
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Nov-02-2011 11:57
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DJ RANN
Supreme tranceaddict
Registered: May 2001
Location: Hollywood....
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quote: | Originally posted by Looney4Clooney
Anyways, fuck mac. I will be switching to PC once they unveil their new turds. |
Got money troubles, have we?
I don't buy it - I reckon we'll see a new revision of the mac pros early next year.
The problem for apple is that they cost a lot to make, they sell a fraction of the unit numbers compared to their other lines and mac pros have a longer replacement life than than other products.
Most studios I know get at least 4-5 years out of a mac pro, whereas most people replace their laptops every 3-4 years.
The other issue is that the production environment (and I'm talking about design/video/music/printing/media/etc) has drastically changed, in the same way pro audio has - you now have people knocking out professional standard works on laptops and imacs.
For instance, one of my close buddies is head designer at Sketchers and they just use the large imacs, where in previous years they had to use mac pros. A big part of that is the increased processing power that is available in "consumer" grade products such as the imacs and macbooks.
10 years ago, having a studio capable of producing a professional sounding track all from your laptop was not viable, and now I know at least a dozen producers who just have a MBP, a good audio interface and a pair of headphones (albeit getting docked with studio monitors and outboard when the get back home).
Now having said this, mac pro's are the defacto standard for protools, and every pro studio runs protools. Now that PTHD has gone native, people wanting to set up a pro studio for less, can do so if they have enough host CPU processing power, which the new Mac Pros will evidently deliver.
For applications where you need huge multiple drives (samples for composing, HD video compositing, etc), the Mac Pro has it's place bought and paid for.
It's not just wank factor that production houses have mac pros - it's because of stability. Sure our macs have crashed from time to time but it's a 30 second restart, to get it back on track and time is big money in a pro studio. I once watched one of the top score engineers walk out of a studio and take the rental somewhere else, due to stability issues taking his support engineers more than an hour to resolve. That two week rental cost the studio over $35,000 in lost business.
It's also the fact you can plug a drive in and not even think twice about getting a virus, or further, have to worry about keeping virus database definitions up to date, or that antivirus program sucking some of your available CPU power.
Bottom line, Mac Pros have their place until Apple can achieve the same goal with other products, which even though they are getting close, it's not quite there, especially in terms of storage and performance.
The new Mac Pros, will however be blisteringly fast - the new sandy bridges are benching ridiculous figures, and thunderbolt is like adding a turbo to the whole data bus architecture.
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Nov-02-2011 17:56
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DJ RANN
Supreme tranceaddict
Registered: May 2001
Location: Hollywood....
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quote: | Originally posted by tehlord
I think the fact is that a cheap PC is most likely more than almost any home producer would ever need, which means that a Mac Pro is almost impossible to sell outside a professional studio. And that's a shrinking market for sure.
I specced a Pro last year without looking at the cost, just picking what i'd want for a kickass home DAW and it came to a ridiculous £11k. An almost identical spec (component for component) from a very reputable (ie expensive) specialised DAW builder was £4.5k. I really don't see why the Mac's are so expensive. They even charge at least double the norm for hard drives, memory etc. It's stupid. |
But this is the old mac vs PC price comparison which doesn't work as you're paying partly for the OS features with mac - if you were just going to run windows on both, then you'd have an argument, but even then there's the point that macs are designed far better in terms both of form and function than top spec PC parts.
I mean just open up a mac pro and look at the quality of the materials and even how fucking advanced just the case is. Now try to buy a PC case that matches that and you're parting with serious money. In fact all the expensive PC cases I've ever seen are all those LED laden gamer cases that look like souped up honda civics (i.e. lame).
With mac, and especially the mac pros, you're not getting great value in terms of processing, but if your criteria is in terms of design, stability, never having to worry about the thing again; then mac pros are excellent value.
For instance - we have at least a dozen Mac Pros at work. Not one of them has had a major issue in three years of constant (24h) use, except some weird video issue that turned out to be a faulty video card.
So when a studio room rents for $3k per day, that top spec mac pro pays for itself in three days of saved downtime.
Now calculate the saved time not having to do maintenance (at least 100 hours per year between the machines) that we would have to do with PC's, and then calculate the time saved when we need to go to a new OS (2-3 hours per machine for all software opposed to a day for a similar PC with all the win updates/patches/sotfware/drivers/etc). Now calculate up those man hours spent not fucking about and the mac pros are cheap.
For home use, forget it, but if you're a pro, making money from production with limited time, they pay for themselves.
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Nov-02-2011 19:39
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