At the International Lisp Conference 2002, 2003, and 2005, a surprisingly lange number of programmers were walking around with Mac portables. Granted, this community is small, however, it is indicative of the sort of attention Apple are getting from the hacker/tech community. The same has been observed at O’Reily conferences, sci/tech conferences, academic conferences, etc. Apple’s OS X operating system, being Mach/FreeBSD-based, leverages the Unix code base quite effectively, which seems to also translate into increased sales to member of these commmunities. Added together, these can represent a significant increase of Apple’s user-base.

Despite their aspirations and pretensions, most architects have among the least creative jobs on the planet. They spend their time arranging floor joists and bathroom fixtures in pedestrian buildings so as to conform to various building codes.

“Well, who knows what the reality is.” [?]

Glad you asked, Robin. Not to come off as pretentious, but I do. And believe me, it’s not easy being the only person in my part of the world that does. It’s a load, big burden, my “cross to bear,” etc., but I do the best I can if you can imagine what I mean.

As to the Golden Gate’s Machine versus the Wozjob, it’s all about Third-world bus ridership versus Martha’s Vinyard Popsicle sails.

In short, we need more accurate info before chiming in (irrevocably), on this critical issue, don’t you think?

I use a Wacom tablet, Adobe Illustrator (inspired by your friend ET), Acrobat, and InDesign on a 17″ Dell laptop to take notes in medical school. At least one other classmate with a Mac has switched to the same method. I’m in the Navy, have been since age 18, and race bicycles. He’s a 32 yr old music major who spent several years as a pro kayaker.

The answer to your rhetorical question is this Philip: As long as it is the mainstream alternative operating system. If the Mac were to say, garner 80% desktop OS market share, something else would become the creative operating system. It has been my experience that people pay for an image. Sure, the Mac does a handful of thing better than Windows.. Color Management is seemingly easier, for instance.. however for the most part it is a matter of preferences and the pocketbook which combined project an image of the consumer.

It seems that Philip’s original provocative post had two problems: (a) sample size, and (b) definition of “creative.” One thing I’m seeing here, and also see in more general terms, is that if you consider leading-edge “Web 2.0″ programmers and pundits to be “creative,” they use a lot of Macs too. Now, Philip may argue whether these are creative types, but it’s another demographic for whom Macs seem attractive.

Now, in many cases, the majority (or significant minority) of people in a particular field may still use Windows. But the percentage of Macs may be significantly higher than the overall population average. And these people are probably not just long-time zombies seduced by Apple’s marketing campaigns: there are reasons they continue to do their work on machines that are still (in some cases in reality, in some cases merely in reputation) more expensive and harder to come by than commodity Wintel machines.

In any case, it seems clear that Macs aren’t disappearing among creative types of some sorts. That doesn’t mean Windows is useless for those pursuits, or even that some people don’t prefer it, but Mac OS X remains interesting to many, which is probably to the general benefit of the industry.

Gary, totally agree regarding enterprise use, but I don’t think the software is there yet for Linux, nor is it friendly enough.

If I had 5000 seats to support, I’d mostly want something like the Sun Ray thin clients and everything running on the server, you’d easily save millions. In reality, when I look at the bank I am now working, that is hard to accomplish. There are just tons and tons of complex Excel sheets traders and backoffice alike use, many using 3rd party plugins. (Reuters, Bloomberg, etc.) Traders have a lot of power, they tend to get what they want. On top of that, so many in-house MS apps are running; a switch is too risky and expensive; an extra 50 floor support monkeys is cheaper than re-writing it all. Could use Citrix, but I have nothing but bad experiences with that and foolishly, most companies that employ it run the client on a full windows PC, which takes away the whole point!

As a programmer, I am one of those “Power Users”, thankfully they do trust me with Admin rights. But even without those, you’d be amazed how many “locked down features” like IE security settings are user registry entries. They tried to stop people from running “FixIE.reg” by not giving non-admins the rights to run regedit.exe. So you simply email yourself the version from your home PC and run it from “My Documents”. There is no such thing as a locked down Windows install.

If I were to start a company/office now, I’d simply go 100% Mac, not even using MS Office, people will just have to deal with it, there is no business reason for it.

Last year I got to spend some time in a recording studio in Hollywood where a little indy band was making their latest album. The band members are mostly typical LA types–a couple former child actors, star of a current prime time episodic, soundtrack composer, and database programmer. All said, among the 5 band members, the producer, and a few visiting friends, there were 3 iBooks, 2 PowerBooks and a G5 running ProTools doing the actual recording. There actually was a PC in the studio, hooked up to the mixing board for fader automation, but it wasn’t in use.

I took pictures of the recording session, had them digitized and brought them back to my Mac where I did the CD cover. Delivered InDesign (and backup PDF) files to DiscMakers, and I’m lead to believe that the output to the printing press came direct from a Mac. (Or at least, from a Mac “Print” button into their RIP for the press)

All evidence I see shows that the Mac is still going strong among creative professionals.

Bas,
When I look at my workplace, I mainly see linux as a server. Oddly enough, we use quite a bit of SCO on laptops and have not considered replacing it with linux, yet…

When I look at the problems that our enterprise faces with windows on desktops, I see opportunities to use a linux desktop.

Our main windows problem is too much software, there is a ton of ‘unoffical’ software that our users are prone to download and install. Each piece of additional software adds the risk of malware, not to mention unntentional downloads and the malware associated with them.

I believe that there is a postential for an enterprise to select a set of linux services and applications that meet business requirements and can be delivered to a desktop in a lock-down configuration.

This model would be pretty close to a modern citrix configuration, or even remote desktop services on osx for that matter. Whatever the case, I think that an enterprise would benefit by having the least functionality available on the desktop as possible.

heh, just try explaining that to Power Users

Gary: there is one distinct different between market growth of Mac and Linux: Mac grows on the desktop, Linux is a server OS. Only geeks use it for a desktop. And even this geek – however much I like it for my servers – won’t go near it with a barge pole; every time I tried I was deeply dissapointed. Nice for sysadmins, useless for office or “creative” task.

But I agree with that Mac OS pre-X wasn’t very nice at playing with others. Good to see that is sorted now.