First off, if you don’t already subscribe to The Pipeline, you should, hosted by Dan Benjamin of the 5by5 network they’ve had some amazing guests including Craig Hockenberry and Joshua Topolsky, and the interview with Horace Dediu was no exception. Horace has worked at Nokia and is a genius writer at his site asymco and I love reading all of his pieces, his piece on ‘The Billion Dollar Smart Cover’ made math interesting.
On The Pipeline he gives an amazing insight into his opinions on the term ‘Post-PC’. If you don’t listen to the whole thing, at least listen to that part from 23:50 to 27:00 though the whole interview is really riveting and great to listen to.
This weeks episode of The Talk Show was pretty great, namely because John was relatively talkative for the first time in a while on there, why I really liked the show though was because it got me thinking - why do Apple make Final Cut? They have obviously taken on a lot with this total re-write of the application, so why to they still do it?
Dan Benjamin made a good point in that Final Cut, Aperture and Logic all make getting a Mac Pro or a MacBook Pro a valid purchase. I think it just comes down to wanting to be relevant though. Clearly the Mac’s aren’t Apple’s biggest source of revenue, but they think they still have their place, and although the Final Cut users might not constitute a massive chunk of Apples Mac user base, everybody knows they’re there. When I first wanted to get a Mac, the obvious quotable positives are that “they’re good for creatives” and “they’re virus free”.
If Apple had announced yesterday that Final Cut was dead, and that if you wanted to edit video on a Mac to just use iMovie, Apple would obviously lose a large chunk of the Final Cut user base of professional video editors who would have to start using PC’s, but they would also lose some of their relevance as the media would throw up a shitstorm screaming “Apple is abandoning the pro market”, and that kind of stuff does eventually trickle down to become the average consumers perception, and then, what would OS X have over Windows? It would be virus free, yes. Which from a Windows users standpoint is impressive, but it really shouldn’t be.
In the same way that Windows has always been considered good for the enterprise, because you can do a spreadsheet on it, Mac’s are bundled with the preconception that they’re good for creatives, and if they abandoned that, they would stop being relevant to a lot of people. From the average persons perspective, they’d just be Windows, but a little bit different.
