Apple changed the way we all use computers and made technology usable. Awesome I hear you say . . . and it is. In this technology driven world, we all need accessibility at some point. The first ‘real’ computer I used was a Macintosh SE, the first computer I bought myself for professional 3D work was a Power Mac 6300 with the new Power PC chip. But I used PC’s too, I had a PC at work, one of the new Pentium 100Mhz chips, I thought it was insanely fast! I started 3D modeling on a Mac with Vellum 3D software, then ArchiCAD, Form-Z and Presenter Professional. It was a great hardware platform, they had the OpenGL chip and high end software was being ported to it such as Maya. I remember being at the MacWorld show in 1995 looking at 3D renderings on a Power Mac 9500, this was the future! But then, strangely, something happened, something bad.
A few months after MacWorld later I was speaking with a 3D consultant, he had just returned from a reseller convention at Apple. I was talking about what was new and coming up, what could I look forward too. He looked down at the floor, paused and told me that Apple had just announced that 3D was not an industry they were aggressively pursuing anymore. The new Imac was dominating their sales and was putting them back in the leading position they had enjoyed a few years prior. This is where they saw their future.
Well we all know now that wasn’t a bad idea. The Imac, Ipod, Iphone, It wasn’t such a bad move. Apple changed who they were as a brand. They were now a lifestyle products company, not a techie computer firm anymore. Everything about them was engaging, approachable and simple and most of all fun! This is wonderful news if that’s how you like your tech that way. But a CG artist cannot rely on one piece of software out of the box, we don’t work that way. We want to pull it apart, rebuild it, customize it, do things differently; we don’t accept conformity because the real world is full of infinite variables that we have to simulate constantly. We survive or fail based upon an ever changing technology, literally every day something changes. And we rely on thousands of developers writing abstract pieces of script or code to give us an edge in our work that we can use immediately, not wait for a software update or patch. We want to be able to use all the options of hardware connectivity and start doing things with tech it wasn’t designed to do. You only have to see how much Linux is used in effects studios to recognize how much freedom they need. Well freedom comes with complexity, but that’s our world everyday. We are OK with that. Perhaps Apple realized that and made a sensible retreat. We didn’t fit their simple fun ideology.
Back in the day, SGI were legendary, movies proudly showed off an SGI compter, maybe an Onyx or an O2 sitting so cool on the table. They were a desktop dream. But then PC processing power started to climb, fast. SGI must have realized this as they hastily introduced SGI Pentium computers. I think it was a few years later they were pretty much gone and now filed for Bankruptcy. Apple chose to focus on what they were good at, making simple, effective computers not chase high end super computing, we were happy to work with the pace of Apple Mac and Intel, it was fast enough now.
I remember the first day my new employer sat me down in front of 3D Studio. First it was on a PC, weird, then it was all techie and unfriendly, weird. But slowly I realized that I wanted all that functionality, I needed it. Just like the first time you use Vray, you change a couple of settings and render, ignoring all the other numbers you can tweak. Well after a while all those values mean something, like speed, memory efficiency, saturation, burn control, data tree configurations, its endless. And the truth is, we need all that functionality. Its not plug and play but who wants that anyway, we want to do something that nobody has done yet.
With all this said, Apple are still there, they have the Apple halo, untouchable and always with an army of followers, but not the 3D hardware designers of the visualization industry they were and to be honest I think they did the right thing. They still have 3D followers and a large user base with many 3D products but their days of 3D leadership are long over. They instead have dominated and lead with ease in consumer products, graphics and video, they have stuck by the mantra they set over 10 years ago. Do what you’re good at and give the people, the masses, what they want.
Next: Part 5, The mistake of fastracking artists to management.
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