Sir, ROI has nothing to do with "fiscal anything".
I'm not sure where ROI came into this. I was responding to the comment about their fiscal year success seemingly being an indicator of good product (or "good enough"). I don't care about it when it is not earned through quality product. To me, it's a bunch of whining when shareholders complain that their value is not good enough, or when a board of directors complains about profits not perpetually increasing. These are unsustainable and fantastical desires. They can manipulate product, consumers, and calculation to make the numbers increase to their satisfaction, and they often ruin the product, abuse the consumers, and lie with numbers to meet the ridiculous goals. Therefore, again: I don't care about fiscal numbers as a declaration of a product's quality.
I don't care about the pleasure you derive from the user experience or how miserable it makes you.
I didn't ask you to.
Sorry that your girlfriend is not good at buying hardware.
Mine isn't either, to be honest.
She's fine at buying hardware. She's bad at letting the companies build garbage. Oh wait, that's not her fault in the least.
Her options are extremely limited because of her needs (she splurged this last time just to get a backlit keyboard; for the first time in ages, she didn't buy a Dell because they didn't provide this option either at all or at her price range) and her ability to spend (small non-profit organizations generally don't have lots of money to play with). Her partner spends more on his machines because he works a lot faster/harder/longer and does a lot of travel, yet he is still replacing his more expensive machines due to premature hardware failure (which has gotten him to buy into Dell's service program, which is great for them and marginally protects him a little bit from downtime when his machines prematurely die). This is not acceptable business practice, but everyone just shrugs and normalizes it.
Or... you know, other people just somehow manage to get work done without being annoyed.
On PCs and with Windows? Yeah, I suppose they do. Me? Not any more. I'd have to be in Photoshop and Bridge for hours to not be driven mad for hours spent in Windows. My mouse and Wacom are good on the PC (unlike the horrific trackpad experience I've had on EVERY Windows laptop I've used in the last 8 years). The last straw was my current/last PC build (which turned into two builds and countless replacement parts and spending beyond the initial build's budget, and I did NOT buy cheap garbage, and I DID know what I was doing, thank you very much).
After decades of being a support person, I got sick of it. Especially when doing it for my own computers that I'm trying to use as tools. I experience much less annoyance using a Mac and my response to discovering this was to abandon Windows. Actually, I had originally partially left Windows for BeOS, before Mac OS became as nice as it was with Snow Leopard. But BeOS ... Sad story. Anyway, my tolerance for Windows got smaller the longer I was using something else (i also found that my tolerance for Linux was never going to start). Once I got used to using Mac OS on a daily basis, I couldn't go back to Windows. If your experience varies, so be it.
You should really fire your IT people.
PM me for a quotation
You mean fire myself? I live in poverty, so I won't be hiring anyone. But I would LOVE to make it someone else's job responsibility to ensure my computers do the **** they're supposed to do, when they're supposed to. I'd love to threaten to fire arrogant tech geeks when they fail in their task (no, I'm kidding about that; that's just cruel, seeing as I know the facts about the business). Having been an IT person for many years, I am well aware that IT people, by and large, can't fix things. They can only work around problems and replace parts that are obviously bad. IT people are there to get people going again when things inevitably go wrong; they aren't there to make people's lives easier (that's what better design should be doing and was doing between 2007 and 2013). Some of them are there to inform users on how to most effectively do work with this horrible technology (education; that was my favorite job; most rewarding and happiest clients).
I am an amateur musician and I totally agree about ASIO and the state of... anything that is not Logic + Mainstage, including Ableton or Forte.
You're right.
You are totally right about that.
I'm happy we can see eye-to-eye on this.
Are you on KVR?
However, DAWs are a niche market - an important niche, but you can't call all brands other than Apple "crap" based on how well they fill one niche.
I'm not judging based on one niche. I'm calling all the other brands crap because, in comparison, every computing activity I have experience with has been less frustrating and less rife with problems on the Mac, compared to the PC (Adobe was just about balanced between the two platforms; it was mostly how Windows got in the way that impacted me there). Web browsing, word processing, file management, software installation/removal, listening to music and playing back video, startup/shutdown/sleep and updating... All the basics, plus the narrow niches like audio production have been better experiences for me on Mac OS and Mac hardware. (I'm saying better; not perfect)
The exception is 3D modeling and rendering. What an effing disaster that has been on the Mac. Lightwave? Crap on Mac OS (I gave up at 9.6.1, so if it has dramatically improved, it's too late for me). Modo? Crap on Mac OS (and I loath the shader tree, so no loss there). Carrara? Notably worse on Mac than Windows, but overall horrible on both. ZBrush? Well, that's just a horrible piece of software designed by crackheads and used by the self-abusive or the insane, so it's horrible always, everywhere. but seriously, while I acknowledge its capabilities, it saved corrupted documents on my Mac on several occasions while I was fighting and struggling to LEARN to use it as the developers intend; the data corruption cured me of my desire to become comfortable with the GUI, and I did not work as much with it on my PC as I had already begun my transition away from PC, so I can't tell if file corruption was a universal thing or a platform issue).
The biggest issue is that 3D packages are effing garbage in terms of usability and reliability, but they're even less reliable on Mac OS (or they were 4-6 years ago). In music software, my only cross platform experience where the Mac experienced a deficit was Cubase 4.x. I haven't touched it since, because it was a crash-prone, cluttered POS (and I hate dongles).
In the above examples, it was not the Mac or the OS at fault for the lesser experience. It was the individual software and its developers doing almost zero QA on Mac before selling their bug-ridden products.
I would be happy to go back to BeOS, if it were modern and had any software. That was my favorite OS experience (somewhat colored with geek sunglasses). Mac OS is my best choice at abandoning Windows because of despising its user experience. It's been a very long time in coming. Hah, but I'm not even using a Mac most days because I'm fed up waiting for Apple to sell a damned professional machine to replace my obsolete MacBook Pro 5,5. I do very little music or photography as a result of the small, low-resolution screen. I'm on an iPad Pro most days for consumption and writing/communications. Retina text for the win. I've even been making some music with it (which I sometimes port to Logic on my MacBook, if I like what I've made enough to do the work).
Blah blah blah... Thanks for the metal stimulation (though I'm mostly just repeating myself on this topic).
