There used to be a discussion about MS Word and feature bloat where the point was that although people only used 20% of Word’s features, each person was using a different 20%, and so it was difficult to cut anything. It’s not as extreme here, but there are echoes of the same conversation with ‘professional,’ what exactly it means, and what Apple should prioritize.
[pedantic hat] a shallow learning curve is a long one; a steep learning curve is short [/pedantic hat]
These decisions fall to app makers. Apple provides developers with tools as well as a secure and easily available app platform to market and sell them with. Apple’s App Store paid over $60 billion to developers last year:
It is anticipated that this number will increase in 2022.
If its your own computer (or your own login on a shared computer), you can configure the trackpad’s scroll-direction on both macOS and Windows. So you can pick the direction you like and configure everything to work that way.
(In Windows, it’s not part of the default Trackpad control panel, but should be part of the device-specific control panel linked from it)
I am aware of the historic use of separately-rendered fonts for screen and printer and the fact that this this sometimes still done for professional typesetting. That’s not what I’m talking about.
Modern operating systems use the same TrueType font files for all output devices, but some fonts have been designed to look best on-screen and some have been designed to look best on paper. These aren’t different renderings of a single font, but separate distinct fonts, with distinct looks, that were designed, in part, to be easier to read on-screen and when printed at small point sizes.
The Max Studio at $2000 ($1800 with veteran’s discount) is right up my ally. When my 2018 mac mini slows down due to upgrades they put on us so that icloud works correctly, I might upgrade to that one. I just need a fast processor, 32 GB memory and 500 GB SSD along with ability to run my 4k 40" Samsung.
Apple apparently did see it exactly that way too.
Studio Display looks great. Way pricey of course, but finally a decent 5K screen.
Like I mentioned, a big %, and maybe still a majority, of professional imagesetters require PostScript fonts for printing. It’s an even bigger requirement for printing very small type, like the requirements for medical, food and cleaning packaging and labeling, as well as for very large stuff, like signage. It’s why it seems like there’s about a gazillions of variants of Helvetica, it doesn’t automatically scale and track readably in every size. And Helvetica is one of the fonts that work well in a big variety of instances.
You can run Android emulators directly on the Mac. Possibly faster in M1 Macs since they shouldn’t have to translate the instruction set (though I don’t know if they’ve been updated for this).
Hi there. Thank you for this tip. I will try it out. It definitely would help!
You’re right—I was reading too quickly and didn’t see a mention of USB-A. Fixing…
One thing did occur to me a bit later: an underrated way that Apple has continued to accommodate all kinds of professional (and consumers for that matter) is the ongoing determination to have full size keyboards and reasonable screen sizes on their laptops. They shrank a lot of things, maximizing thinness above all, but never really compromised on keyboard & screen size. This had to be a deliberate decision because they had done smaller things before, and I can’t imagine Jony Ive was too intimidated to reduce those sizes unless it was an absolute no-go.
I appreciate that I am joining this discussion rather late, but I have long thought that Apple has been ignoring many professions that deserve attention. As a retired physicist, I have suffered during my professional life from a lack of engineering, CAD and other scientific software for the Mac (and these things are almost completely absent from the iPad, which I have abandoned). Many years ago, Apple had a scitech group which catered to scientists and I have had many fruitful discussions with various members of this group. Apparently, this has been disbanded.
The new M1 Macs, with their computational and graphic prowess, should be ideal for scientists but the developers of scitech apps seem to get little or no support from Apple. The result is that one commonly used app (Igor Pro), which got its start on the Mac, is likely being discontinued for this platform (and the devs have no intention of porting it to Apple Silicon).
These apps are available on Windows, but I have absolutely no interest in using their products which I consider considerably inferior to the macOS and recent Mac hardware.
My thinking is that this is a “which comes first, the chicken or the egg” situation. I suspect that developers consider the Mac market for mechanical engineers is too small for it to be worthwhile to build and maintain Mac software. But hopefully, they might might take a look at how the specs for M1 Macs are knocking the socks off of Windows boxes. And I do think that it would be in Apple’s best interests to pursue mechanical engineers and engineering firms more aggressively.
But there are also price issues, and they also affect hardware choices in other scientific fields as well.
I would have conceded the point of about PC’s/Windows…until the M chips. Apple is now in a category of its own. No offense, you’re echoing the Intel CEO’s jibe about Apple being a “lifestyle company”. Yah, one that is kicking the stuffings out of Intel in its area of core competence. I’ll admit that my preference for the Apple ecosystem is decades (since 1984!) of acclimatization, but the M chips kind of change everything.
If/when Microsoft does a real Windows release on ARM, things could change. Until then, Macs and PCs are very different animals.
Scientists and engineers have been SO neglected by Apple. For example, a lot of scientific visualization is done with OpenGL, now “deprecated” by Apple. It would be fairly simple to build an OpenGL wrapper system that would call Metal, but Apple won’t do that.
I’m pretty sure that one of my favorite programs, Igor Pro, will never exist in Apple Silicon native form, because Apple just stopped supporting some of the building blocks. And Igor was once a Mac-only program!
At least Mathematica is good on Apple Silicon.
Taking the engineering/manufacturing community together, I don’t think the market is small. Apple has never made much of an attempt to be a player in these areas, but with the excellent graphics capability alone of the M-series Macs, I would think that developers might want to port CAD apps to the Mac. Just about every machine shop makes heavy use of CAD and adding in other engineering areas (electrical, mechanical, etc.) there should be a large market for an extremely fast and quiet workstation for a modest amount of money (I am thinking the introductory Studio).
When I see videos of NASA facilities, I notice large numbers of Macs. This is one place where Macs are in heavy use despite the lack of scientific and engineering programs. It would be nice if Apple pursued the developers of these apps more aggressively.
Apple had a number of major problems with faulty Nvidia chips, and Nvidia happens to be the Lord High Muckety Muck of OpenGL. There’s a good history about Apple vs. Nvidia here, and it’s a very interesting read even if, like me, you are not anything resembling a developer or scientist:
My cousin is a NASA scientist, astrophysics professor and Mac and Apple products lover. NASA is a highly visually oriented organization. It’s a different type of visualization than necessary for building video games, engineering bridges, architectural renderings, etc.
I could write a long and bitter book about Apple and vertical markets. To sum up, Apple has always had their heads firmly entrenched up their behinds when it comes to most vertical markets, and I don’t see any hope that that state of affairs will ever change.
Apple has a playbook for vertical markets. That playbook worked at one time for one or more vertical markets. Unfortunately it fails miserably for most other vertical markets, and Apple refuses to re-think their tactics. Apple has attacked several vertical markets, sometimes more than once, each time making the same exact mistakes, each time they failed miserably, and as a result they just blamed the market and give up on it.
It’s a shame, really, because several vertical markets are low-hanging fruit. With products at their disposal such as Filemaker Pro, Apple could even whip together a dedicated application for each vertical market, and offer a turn-key system specifically designed for each vertical market. Users in those markets would eat them up.
I’ve tried to help Apple with the law office market several times. As a rule, Apple gets Mac enthusiasts such as myself who work in, and are influential, in vertical markets to work for free as consultants. We all generally are stupid enough to volunteer to help Apple just to be able to rub shoulders with Apple. Then… they don’t listen AT ALL, while abusing their free consultants. It’s a cycle that they haven’t learned from.
There ARE a lot of attorneys who use the Macintosh. But that’s despite Apple, not due to Apple’s efforts. Many attorneys had Macs at home, loved them, and decided to try and use them at work too. Or they had iPhones and liked them, so they decided to try a Mac. But Apple has been worthless at helping attorneys get past huge hurtles such as courts not allowing Macs to access online systems for filing briefs with the court. Without minimal help from Apple, some vertical markets hit a wall that keeps them from growing.
I remember sitting with Phill Schiller and telling him that his own in-house attorneys couldn’t file Apple’s patents with the USPTO on a Mac. He called me a liar! (His own attorneys told him it was true the next day.)
And, OMG, when small third party developers have stepped up to help service vertical markets, Apple has been notorious for stringing them along and then F’ing them in the A! I could tell you stories about leading edge products that existed only for the Mac, and then they fled for Windows, never to return to the Mac, because Apple did the opposite of nurture them.
Steve Jobs personally asked me to write a book about using Macs in law offices. He said that he would see to it that they were sold in every Apple brick and mortar store. I wasted a year writing the book. To my knowledge not a single one ever saw the inside of an Apple Store. (They immediately sold out the few other places that they were sold.)
Apple, at some point, decided that the Mac would be a general purpose personal computer, aimed at home users and a few business markets in which Apple had traditionally had success. I can’t say that plan was a bad one. Apple makes a lot of money from selling Macs. But it’s ironic that such a huge and successful company has been so blazingly incompetent marketing the Macintosh to various professionals, many of whom would be overjoyed to use Macs. It makes one wonder if the Mac could have been the same sort of monster sales success that the iPhone is in the smart phone market?
My personal feeling is that Word is an excellent program, and that if you overcome your fear and take a good course on how to use Word to its potential, that you will find that Word is actually a very easy to use program, with a lot of cool features designed to make writing a lot easier.
That said, Word is far from the only word processor for the Macintosh, and it’s not even the best one. However, Apple hasn’t made it easy to find alternatives. Many of the alternatives both read and write to the Word file format natively. Here is a list of a bunch of them:
Macintosh Word Processors
http://www.macattorney.com/wp.html
They all exist in abundance for the Macintosh. It’s just that Apple’s Mac App Store is an S-show that really doesn’t make it easier to find what you want. Here is a nice list of accounting programs. If you can’t find one that you like in the list, you are likely impossible to please:
Macintosh Accounting Software
http://www.macattorney.com/accounting.html
Both of the above Web sites will be updated in the next week or two. There are lots of choices to add!
Might I recommend joining a good Macintosh discussion list? Doing so will help you find all of the software that you are looking for. I’d be happy to help with both via private e-mail.
CAD and CAM are well supported by AutoDesk Fusion 360.
I haven’t had to run Windows (under Parallels) for a couple years now.