Designer here. This is true, but they are also have a seriously good trackpad and good energy use (finally). They work well for design, video and audio, but they are also really nice to operate. It’s a bit like driving a very nice car (which I can’t afford, but have borrowed from a client). Once you get accustomed to it, every other computer—especially laptops—feel like 1980s GM econoboxes.
as someone who switched from a macbook to a g14 with fedora, the trackpad experience is actually surprisingly close on some laptops, I had few issues moving over.
energy efficiency is more something you notice to be better on macs (in most cases) like you pointed out.
for me efficiency is not bad, but macs are clearly ahead
That’s good, how is the support in apps though? I live and die by pinch zooming and quick easy accurate scrolling/panning/rotating in Fusion and most of my graphics apps.
Side note, there are some really nice Mac only or Mac centric graphics apps that are affordable and not shitty subscriptions like the adobe suite. Pixelmator and Sketch are big for my photo retouching and UI designs.
MacOS owns the rich space*
And a lot of rich people are art dilletants or are able to afford putting their children through expensive art programs with no need to have it pay off. And of course they all buy the “top of the line” (which of course is obviously the most expensive right?) brands.
Don’t get me wrong, Apple plays into it so the cycle is recursive.
The lack of non proprietary art tools is a big reason I didn’t go into digital art / graphic design. GIMP just cannot keep pace and I did not want to shell out $500 a year or more in subscriptions just to be able to do a job with no security that pays pennies.
Its also a big part of why I’m “pro” AI art (I’m actually pretty neutral, I’m not liking that they’re burning down the Amazon to make shitty ads with). I think it’s gonna be a decent tool for artists to automate repetitive tasks like cutting backgrounds out of photos for collages, upscaling / enlarging images, adding background textures to landscapes, touching up acne in portraits, and animating repetitive shots like walking. but right now we’re unethically sourcing the training data and shoving it into anything and everything with 0 regard for how many resources it’s costing to make content that’s shitty anyway.
The other half of my argument “in favor” is that the only thing worse than AI existing is AI only existing in the hands of the bourgeoisie and is plebs not even knowing how it works in addition to them using it to gain an unfair advantage over us. I think we have an opportunity to make sure that the open source tools are decent to begin with instead of letting them have complete control over even more of the creative world.
AI art won’t do shit except boot people out of jobs that would require a real artist but won’t have too many people complaining if it is obvious goo.
As for open-source art tools, krita is fantastic and gets used by a lot of professionals.
I believe you, but so far I can spot AI art from a mile away. When I do, I just hit the back button. It’s not interesting. It’s okay when it’s used as a joke for memes. Maybe it’s going to look different in the real world on an advertisement or something. But, really, if I can spot it in the real world, I’ll think the product is fake. I’m definitely the type of person who wont buy if I think that. I’m sure that’s not everybody but, if it is a good percentage is, I’d say companies are going to want to pay real artists. Interesting to see where it all goes.
But it would be a stretch to say that support is the result of current macOS. The Mac has always been popular with creatives, since way before it was UNIX-based.
I’d argue the popularity with creatives is largely from being marketed to creatives since its earliest days.
I don’t think it’s just marketing, the early Macs got a lot of performance out of their graphics routines, and then Mac OS had tight integrations with postscript which made it good for graphical design.
I think these days yes a powerful graphics card will get you very far, but overall macOS feels much less hostile to me than windows. I think Linux is kind of a mess for graphics stuff, there are a few good open source tools, but the major design suites aren’t well supported.
but overall macOS feels much less hostile to me than windows.
Sure, but this is a purely subjective measure. Same with Linux.
And the fact is, the Mac has been consistently marketed to creatives since its inception. It is, at the very least, difficult to see how it would have fared without that approach.
I would concur. You can record high quality encoded audio on your iPhone, audio design on your iPad with your other samples, and add the mixed soundscape into your film on iMac.
I literally know someone in the media industry who’s whole effortless workflow is what makes him a go-to guy for quick and flexible turnaround for audio mastery for films. He works exclusively on apple devices for this exact reason.
I’m not saying it’s impossible another way, but he really likes the ecosystem.
At this point I’d call it more of a legacy approach - they definitely still control the space, but the workflow is quite easily accomplished on other systems.
I’d also add many (SO MANY) of the pro audio and video systems out there are also running Linux, so even with sa mac-focused workflow, many of the pros out there are using Linux (often without any clue that they are).
So to me its similar to Windows on the desktop - its not necessarily the best option in all cases, but its often the path of least resistance. As a result, pretty much all of them buy into an Apple ecosystem from the get-go.
15 years ago you would get laughed out of art school if you didn’t have a Mac. At least that’s the gist I get from my artistic friends.
The problem is that the hardware is fairly underpowered to effectively use for any kind of demanding visuals.
Like if I were rendering out a big 3d scene, I’d want something with a fairly beefy GPU to crunch through the renders relatively quickly.
Everything that is professionally rendered is offloaded to purpose built hardware. This part of the workflow would not be any different no matter what the creative is using for their workstation.
Sure, in a big 3d animation team, I’m basically a solo animator working with the tools I have immediately on hand. If I had a 5000 GPU Render Farm, then yeah, a Mac as a work station might work, but I’d still rather have a beefier customizable workstation than a Mac.
