firelock

It’s still Android. Last year I began managing an app for our company and I had to buy Android test devices and learn the OS. I’ve always been an Apple person and honestly I assumed that Android was probably about as good as iOS, but boy was I wrong. The UX of Android is horrible, and it is different on each device made by different manufacturers. The much-heralded better “customization” of Android is really just a cover for a lack of basic features. And talk about a nightmare for development. I’ll give you a good example: video.

On iOS, all I have to do is make sure our video works on the latest and last version of iOS and I’m good to go. That is because iOS has a built-in video player that can be used natively by all apps. Seamless. Not so on Android. There is no video player native to the operating system. Therefore each manufacturer, in conjunction with your carrier, bundles a different video player with each device. Usually this is some cheap video player that has problems with all manner of video encoding. We have four testing devices and when we first tested video in our app, it played fine on one device, audio didn’t play on another, video played on another but no audio, and on the last the video didn’t work at all. No, not a joke, really. We then downloaded another third-party video player (VLC, considered to be best in class) onto each device and, yes, video worked on all at that point.

This is the much ballyhooed “customization,” you get to/have to download different third party apps to do basic functions like play video. What a nightmare for developers! This causes so many problems you wouldn’t believe it. Even if you have a good player downloaded, when the video plays it jumps out to the different app to play, and then back to your app if everything works properly, which of course it frequently doesn’t. Our app has 4.8 stars on iOS, but just 3.8 on Android mostly because of the video playback issues. I’d say 90% of our help desk tickets on the app are for Android, and probably 50% of those are for video playback problems, of which most are entirely related to the cheap player that they have installed or some unknown bug that is preventing the video player from performing correctly. I could go on but you get the idea.

dig48109 said:

A new upgradable Mac Pro is too late. Many professionals have given up on Apple's pro line, as the company focused more and more on consumers and prosumers. 

Death of Pro products 
- xserve  (killing this, harmed the 1U render farm) . I used to run a render farm using these 1Us . 
   Also another VFX company with 500 artists used 1U supermicros with PCoIP cards to display their linux/Windows workstations to Vancouver. 
   Not having a 1U also hampered the ability for PCoIP options for VFX houses. 
- xsan 
- xraid  
- MacPro , upgradable graphics card  silver chassis with 4 bays  
- MacOSX server 
- Aperture (killing this was fine and ceding this market to Adobe) 
- The debacle from FCP 3 to FCPX (they didn't listen to their pro customers when removing features in the first iterations). Many move to 
   Avid or Adobe because of this. 
- Apple Cinema Display.  Not replacing it with a Pro display that can use a Thunderbolt3 bus, have 10/1 gigabit ethernet (pseudo-docking station) 
  Not having a matte display option for professionals. Lack of fine control (RGB sliders) on the hardware monitor to color calibrate, not just in software. 

Speaking from experience from an all Apple VFX shop in 2010-2012. After that it was hard to convince ANY VFX shop to be all Apple. It was nearly impossible. 

All that is true, but many professionals are also sticking with Apple. I run the creative production department at a major corporation and we are upgrading all of our 5K iMacs to iMac Pros for our video studio. They are working out great and I know our editors will love having some 6K monitors to work Davinci Resolve and Premier. I’m not saying that what we do is on par with the VFX companies that you worked at, but there are a lot of professional studios where these products are going to be a great fit. We also work with a lot of outside vendors and they all carry MacBook Pros to run the video trucks and edit on the go. I’ve yet to see anyone carrying anything but a MacBook at a prepro. That said, Apple got off its a** just in time, as even we were contemplating moving to PC recently given the disaster of the trash can Mac Pro and the inexcusable stagnation of the Mac line in general until the last couple of years.

leftoverbacon said:

The screen also limits the need for the “Pro” features. The pencil is less useful, a weaker processor and graphics processor can drive a smaller screen, etc. 

Pencil support would be a dream come true. I'd be able to finally ditch the A5 notebooks that I've always carried since high school.

I’m a heavy iPad Pro user with Pencil for note taking. I frequently have the Apple Pencil in my hand and start to try to navigate or take notes on my iPhone before I suddenly remember that the Pencil won’t work with them. Apple should offer Pencil support on all of its mobile devices in my opinion.

I have Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. I originally got Prime for the included shipping, (I refuse to call anything “free” that I am paying for, it is included) but I have come to use their video service a lot now that they have an Apple TV app. With all three of these services the bill is creeping into cable TV rates, but it was never the total cost of cable that bothered me, it was the fact I paid so much for so little value and a terrible user experience. With streaming services I can watch what I want, when I want, and the selection is much more tailored to what I like. I tried the Direct TV service on Apple TV recently and it while it worked fine, I could never go back to watching shows on channels with specific start times for shows. It’s crazy and unnecessary in an age of streaming. The only shows that should have scheduled start times should be live events.

I’m stunned if this is real. Surely Apple and United have a MNDCA (Mutual Non-disclosure and Confidentiality Agreement) in place.