Two Sides of the Same Screen.
Disgruntled 5Kers: Fine, what’s your idea of an iMacs probable daily duties.
Happy 5kers: A bit like a healthy diet I guess, everything in moderation. I edit and produce promotional material for various companies, I’m also a freelance photographer so I bought mine mainly for work. My PC was puffing and rasping with a bunch of apps active at once, it was painfully clunky, particularly when trimming images and applying filters in Photoshop, or previewing stuff in Premier.
I rely on numerous third party plugins, for sound and video, and projects that had several streams with keying and mastering effects or fancy transitions needed more re-rendering than a British B road. Literally every few seconds for really dense sequences. Handling raw footage was horrendous because I have to deal with multiple codecs, high and low compression.
Disgruntled 5Kers: H.264?
Happy 5kers: Yes, mainly, but also MPEG 2, Cinepack, Canopus HQX, MJpeg and other AVI derivatives. I used a Blackmagic card to preview and navigating the timeline was a drag, literally. Different clips would place differing demands on the processor and hard drive, so scrubbing was smooth for some and sluggish for others. The only compromise would have been to export and re-import the whole lot in a lossless AVI but that would have taken a ton of space.
Disgruntled 5Kers: How many drives were you working with. Did you have a RAID.
Happy 5kers: Yep. It was a pretty smart system. Put it together myself in 2012 and added memory later. Asus Maximus Gene-IV, the Gen 3 model. A Sandy-Bridge processor, 2600 I think, and a couple of Seagate Barracudas, a terabyte a piece.
Disgruntled 5Kers: Sounds like you didn’t give it the wherewithal to shine. It’s advisable to keep your media and OS on separate drives, that way you can assign dedicated scratch disks and avoid a lot of overhead from applications and TSRs.
Happy 5kers: True, but I was already shifting 300 megabytes a second which was on a par with equivalent arrays, so I don’t think it would have improved things enough. The SSD in this iMac more than doubles the throughput by itself according to HD tune, and it sure feels that way. And don’t forget the a cornucopia of connectivity, least of all Thunderbolt 2. Even Thunderbolt 1 is faster than SATA 3 and not far behind SATA Express and Thunderbolt 2 is twice as fast as that. 20 gigabits per second. I’ll probably grab an external enclosure like the Promise Pegasus M4 and sling in some Samsung spiceness.
Disgruntled 5Kers: Don’t they come pre-configured?
Happy 5kers: Not sure, One early review claimed to be using a quad terabyte config, whereas Promise says it comes supplied with two. This recent article on Pro Video Coalition stated they were working with the standard array and also that it topped a gig a second in their tests.
Disgruntled 5Kers: GigaBit or byte.
Happy 5kers: Byte, obviously!
Disgruntled 5kers: So less than half of bus’s total bandwidth?
Happy 5kers: Yeah, but still mighty quick. It’s actually targeted at videographers wanting to store, manipulate or edit HD and ultra HD material consisting of mixed formats and in multiple streams, one firing line I’m delighted to be in.
Disgruntled 5kers: I’m beginning to pine for my PC. From the day my foremost build was baptised – by me when I pressed the power switch – I vowed to treasure it and all its descendant as trusted friends, as well as instruments of prosperity and pleasure.
Happy 5kers: Bit tricky to trust a home brew hybrid that’s been cobbled together from individually sourced parts, none of which has been collectively tested and is tenuously tethered to its host by drivers flakier than filo pastry in a scrap metal shredder, all unified by a software infrastructure less secure than a government approved pension scheme.
Disgruntled 5kers: Cardboard bank would have been funnier.
Happy 5kers: OK. Let’s try, less secure than a paper houseboat, a talent show winner’s recording contract, or a wireless network at a wiki-leaks convention.
Disgruntled 5kers: Or iTunes updates? Apple’s interface policy?
Happy 5kers: Don’t be a lousy sport, iTunes runs like a sloth in Windows because it was conceived, engineered or optimized for OSX. As for interfaces? I assume you mean the blue lightning blow up? That was an era ago and did it honestly merit such disgust and outrage? God! A neater connector that plugs in both ways. How offensive. I’m appalled . Give me back my old 30 pin pal so I can again relish fumbling around in frustration, trying to get both latches to click into place before realising it’s upside-down. That was one of my daily highlights throughout seven years of charitable patronage and now its gone forever. Think of the time I’ll save, I can’t bare it.
Disgruntled 5kers: It would have bothered me less were it not for the extra £40 I had to donate for yet another HDMI adaptor, which has ceased working with eight of the ten free to air film and television apps I used to depend on. But returning to my original point. My PCs weren’t disposable assets, they were precious companions and the streak of uncertainty embodied in their creation makes for greater excitement.
Being personally responsible for envisaging, assembling and enabling your transistor toting pride and joy forges a tighter bond and a more profound and meaningful relationship. You know it won’t last a lifetime, upgrades and replacements are inevitable, but a defining element may survive generations. A case for instance, can be like a bicycle, or a desk, or a pair of hiking boots. A possession that you characterize and retains a whisper of your spirit, even when you’re far away.
Surrender to a Mac, and you are merely a passenger. One of the militantly synchronized crowd and a terminal victim of premeditated obsolescence. It’s all about that fleeting honeymoon between customer and component, and keeping the former distracted just as long as it takes for divorce papers to be served by the very same priest who joined you in fallacious faith. Wholesome and rewarding romance binding constructor to computer is like a marriage. Commitment, effort, obedience, empathy and unconditional birthday presents must each be mutual, and nothing taken for granted until the senses are perfectly aligned. To anticipate a modern fairytale invites a grim fate.
Happy 5kers: Oh dear me. worse than Rumpelstiltskin?
Disgruntled 5kers: Is that a euphemism
Happy 5kers: No, I always felt sorry for him. Films and literature besides the original text have him invariably portrayed as an incorrigible and demonic entity. He wasn’t that bad, not nearly as heartless and greedy as the King or that spoilt, deceitful Miller’s daughter. He aided her in the best spirit by slavishly spinning spinning all that straw into gold, three nights running. What was she expecting, a loyalty card a free platinum wedding dress?
Disgruntled 5kers: He wanted her first born child.
Happy 5kers: Yeah, and? Did he once say or imply he’d doing anything other than cherish it as though it were his own, it’s not as if he could have had children, well, we don’t know for sure but I think we can assume so. She could have haggled, come to a dignified arrangement, visited twice a week perhaps? He was offering escape from a future of unrelenting poverty and misery. Her emancipation in return for a baby who’d likely be spending most of its time at grandma’s house as soon as cushy Queenly duties took over, so basically a win win deal, and she’s not even inclined to negotiate. Instead, how does she thank him? By pretending to accept his modest request, selfishly erasing it from her list of post-freedom priorities and marrying the very man who almost sealed her doom. A violent, villainous, money grabbing dictator and probable genocidal manic. Not only did he get her out of jail, he was her ticket to the throne, he made her a monarch and that spoilt fat-headed harlot spared him not a solitary thought.
Disgruntled 5kers: But once she has borne her baby and he returns, doesn’t she recognise him?
Happy 5kers: That’s right, and does he collect what was rightfully his, what had apparently been promised him? Not a bit of it. When confronted by her grief, out of sympathy, he a suggests supremely sporting compromise. Guess his name before three nights pass and she can keep her baby, she readily agrees. But then, worst of all, she doesn’t even play by the rules. She calls on hoards of servants to do her dirty bidding, search every corner of land and drawing up censuses, while she idles around in her palace sleeping till one o clock and fretting over a bad hair days and dresses that are too tight.
Disgruntled 5kers: I don’t recall that part.
Happy 5kers: Ok, slight exaggeration, but this isn’t. When one scout finally locates our charitable imp’s humble dwelling, he covertly acquires the information, relays it to lady muck. Then, when our poor diddy do gooder returns one final time, having commendably held up his part of the bargain, her lying, cheating majesty “guesses” correctly and wins the challenge under disgustingly false pretences.
Disgruntled 5kers: I can’t quite remember how things end, what happens?
Happy 5kers: He throws a bit of a tragic wobbly. He jumps up and down extremely hard, one of his legs falls through the floor and when he tries to extract it, he divides himself in half. And the two heinous highnesses live “happily” ever after. She should have abdicated and begged Rumpole to marry her. He’d have made an infinitely better husband. He was a genuine hero and her infallible aid in a situation of dire duress. He’d have treated her with dignity and respect, and the same kind hands that had willingly woven her redemptive destiny. Bleak winter evenings would have whirled by in whimsical splendour. Picture it.
“Mummy, mummy, I’m bored, can’t I go out and play in the snow?”
“No darling, its too late and icy cold. I can’t have you wandering in the heart of the woods after dark, you’re sure to get lost, besides, your cute little head should be on a soft feathered pillow.
Disgruntled 5kers: Was the word “cute” commonly spoken in 14th century medieval Europe?
Happy 5kers: Don’t defile this beautiful Scene with pointless pedantry.
“But I’m not tired, mummy and the wind makes scary wailing noises right outside my window”
“That’s not the wind my dear and delightful, it’s the howling of a big bad wolf hunting for small boys who have not heeded their parent’s sagely advice and strayed into the forest’s deepest, gloomiest, deadliest dells.
“But mummy, isn’t he meant to be chasing after pigs and girls in floppy red hats, he’s not in my favourite story, the one you always tell me, about how you and Daddy met, now I’m really scared.
“I’ll tell you what, if you promise to be a good boy and snuggle down in that lovely soft bed adorned in fresh lavender laundered linen, I’ll tell you the most exciting and enthralling tale those tiny tingly ears of yours have ever pricked up to and in the morning, Daddy will show you his amazing alchemy skills again. He doesn’t only do the straw trick you know.” He can grind grain into garnet, boil rice into rubies, roll oats into emeralds and prove dough into diamonds. Did you know, he knitted the silver pyjamas I’m wearing entirely from cobwebs?
Disgruntled 5kers: Cry me a torrent. Your revisionism is as odious as your bias. I wonder if old Rumpole of the hay-bails could spin silicone into a semi-decent Mac.
Happy 5kers: Well it was you that said marriages were’t fairy stories. I think I’ve now demonstrated that marriages in fairy stories aren’t fairy stories either. If everybody spent as much of their existence as you dithering and agonizing over the functionality of inanimate aluminium spouses, they’d rob themselves of the chance to savour the magic of a real relationship, or even a real virtual relationship! So how could they begin to learn any of the virtues you’re preaching? Which should take precedence, chicks or chips?
Disgruntled 5kers: We have no choice, Apples.