If you've ever been to an Apple Store you have seen a Mac Genius. These are the specialized employees of the Apple Store. See, there are regular Apple Store employees, who you'll recognize because they ask you about every 37 seconds if you need help, and then there are the Geniuses. According to Apple, if you "got a technical question" with your Mac, you can make an appointment with one of these super-humans to diagnose and fix the problem that you "got." It seems like a pretty good setup, but I can't really speak to that. I haven't used it because I don't got a Mac. So I can't got a technical question about a Mac if I don't got a Mac!
Well, not entirely true. Just the other day in fact, I was in an Apple Store browsing their freaking awesome products. I love the Apple Store, unless it's the weekend. The only thing good about the sheer number of people in the Apple Store on the weekend is that there are more obstacles between you and the nearest Apple employee. Anyway, I was browsing their awesome products the other day. I am tossing around the idea of buying a MacBook Pro. So when the 76th different Apple employee came to me and asked me if I had any questions, I knee-jerked with "no thanks" but then realized that I actually did.
I explained the situation to him. I am not a Mac user but I am thinking about getting one. "But," I explained, "I'm really comfortable with PCs. I can work very fast on them, I like to navigate with the keyboard, and I am used to all my shortcuts." I explained that if I was going to make the monumental leap of financial faith involved in buying a MacBook Pro, I needed to know I could do it all just the same as on my PC. I asked him what the Mac-equivalent of the Windows' ALT-TAB key combination would be. I know you can press Option-Tab or whatever on Mac, but this did not maximize any windows/apps that had been minimized earlier. So that is useless for me on the Mac. Anyway, he gave it a shot, trying different things, embarrassingly having to go into all these deep menus and system settings looking around for any possibility. He couldn't find it so he said he'd ask around. Five minutes later he came back and said nobody (that he asked) knew. I should have remembered the Geniuses. I should have had him ask one of them!
Happily continuing my playing, I overheard some pretty funny shit. I mean these Apple Store employees pull out the funniest lines when they're chatting up somebody who unfortunately doesn't know any better. There was a dad shopping for a laptop for his son to start college.
Dad: "This laptop is 2.5 gigahertz and this one is 2.4. Will I notice any difference there?"
Apple Guy: "Mmmm, not much."
Not much?!? Hahaha, that's awesome. "Not much" is a more appropriate answer for "Will my burger taste different with cheddar instead of American?" For some kid whose dad picks out his laptop, he will notice a difference between 2.4 ghz and 2.5 ghz about as much as he'll notice the Sun move if he faces it and blows at it really hard. But the next part (1 second later) was even better.
Apple Guy: "....well...unless of course he's using Final Cut Pro."
Dad: "............."
Dad: "............."
Apple Guy: "......."
Dad: "............."
Dad: "What's Final Cut Pro?"
Apple Guy: "Oh it's like your studio film editing software. It's basically what Pixar makes all their movies on."
Oh, yes, Apple Guy. I bet dad's son is definitely going to be running a film studio from his dorm room at Drunk University. As I told Leslie-Ann, it's more likely this laptop is going to have a Solo cup of Aristocrat and Sunny D spilled on it on August 29th while dad's son hangs up his new poster of Bob Marley smoking a spliff in his dorm room.
So aside from the funny lines they throw out at the Apple Store, I still want a MacBook Pro. For what? I don't know. Nothing that I couldn't accomplish on a $500 laptop with Linux (free) and all the software I could ask for (also free). As much as I love to get in Apple's grill for making their computers so beautiful, I'm being lured in by the same thing. At least the product you get after you're lured in is a good one.
Ok this post is OVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
2 comments:
When/if I get around to making a recording studio, I'd probably want a Mac to run ProTools on. It seems like a lot of the recording interfaces have issues with, or are unsupported by, anything more recent than XP pro. I mean, everything has problems with Vista, but apparently XP Media Center Edition (which is on my laptop) is very finicky about what devices and drivers it will let you use. (Then again, my MIDI keyboard, which was specifically listed as not supported by XP MCE, worked just fine.)
Interestingly, though they use them a little bit, Pixar doesn't edit their film on Final Cut Pro, but on Avid (which has been the industry standard for ten years or more).
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