Hollin Jones
Macs are perfect for making music and even affordable ones have plenty of grunt, but is Apple missing a trick in the entry-level music market?
When Apple began the transition to Intel processors, it became clear that the old Mac/PC divide was, from a technical point of view at least, going to get an awful lot less clear cut. The architecture of the processors that would be inside Macs would now be the same as those that ran most flavours of Windows.
This presented an inevitable target for hackers – to get Windows running on Mac hardware. In a pre-emptive move, which at the time seemed almost sacrilegious to many in the Mac community, Apple created Boot Camp to head off the majority of the hacking that would surely have followed. Boot Camp, of course, allows Windows to be run natively on an Intel Mac.
Of course, it’s useful to have the option of running both operating systems on the same hardware, potentially for many uses. From an audio point of view, there are sometimes plug-ins or older applications that don’t exist for the Mac, but that you want to use for a specific task such as processing some audio, mastering or using a virtual instrument to generate sound. This is easy to do, but I do wonder how many people making music really do switch back and forth between the two with any regularity. In reality, the majority of audio software from the past decade or so exists for both platforms. Where it doesn’t, there’s a Mac equivalent for the PC version. With the demise of Gigasampler, one of the few Windows-only apps that many Mac-based composers kept a PC on hand to run, there’s not much reason for Mac people to keep PCs around any more, especially with Boot Camp on offer.
There’s another stratum of musicians for whom the choice isn’t so clear, though. Although the pro audio world is Mac-based, the majority of home users still use Windows for music, possibly because they already own a PC, because the purchase price is lower or (elephant in the room alert) because pirated and cracked music software is fairly easy to obtain for Windows. I’m perhaps unusual among Mac enthusiasts in that I have a good deal of experience of using Windows in various music-making contexts and, in all honesty, it’s a pain. There are many things it may be good at – gaming, running library catalogues, maintaining databases, anything that doesn’t involve creativity – but it isn’t very good at not getting in the way as you try to create. Even Windows 7 has only fairly rudimentary features geared towards musicians built into the system.
Although OMS for Mac OS 9 was a bolt-on way of dealing with audio and Midi, Mac OS X has had Core Audio and Core Midi for years. This has been a significant contributor to the fact that audio peripherals, whose stability and efficiency is so vital to a good music setup, generally work flawlessly on the Mac. On Windows, they seem to be regarded mainly as a nuisance and a trigger for irritating pop-up windows.
I’ve watched people use Windows to make music and it seems to be an endless series of clicking to get rid of error messages or annoying notifications, and unexplained crashes with very little information about what happened or why. And that garish Windows user interface that doesn’t seem to be making very good use of the whacking great graphics cards fitted to many desktop PCs. All of this carried out with an air of resignation that this is just the way things are. But it really doesn’t have to be.
Macs are more than just nice, shiny boxes. The Intel transition makes a mockery of the tired and inaccurate old claim that people just buy Macs for the way they look. Actually, when the internal hardware isn’t too different in spec from a decent PC, it’s the operating system that people grow to love. For a while, a few years ago, you could have probably argued with some justification that the average Mac spec was even slightly lower than the equivalently priced PC, but no longer. Yes, the cases are really nice, but if Macs were a nightmare to use, would the looks really be enough? Doubtful. So why are many home users, many of whom probably own iPods and iPhones, and so have had a form of introduction to the Mac OS whether they realise it or not, still using Windows to make music? More importantly, how can Apple win them over and do what it loves doing most of all – sell them a Mac?
Price, or the perception of price, is an important factor. For years, Macs were too expensive for most home users and non-professionals. This is no longer the case, with MacBooks and Mac minis pretty affordable for many people. Apple has made great inroads with ‘democratising’ the Mac (read: selling more hardware) even if, in my opinion, it’s chasing the average consumer too hard at the expense of its professional customers, pushing iPads and iPods while neglecting top-end Macs for too long.
Education is another issue. The average musician, asking in a shop, may well still be pointed towards a PC, because the shop sells them at a hefty markup, whereas they make very little margin on Macs, relying instead on bundling extras with them. I’ve seen this happen more than once. Unbelievably, some people still confidently claim that Macs ‘can’t do’ everything a PC can do. Far from being accurate, the opposite is actually true. Can a PC easily and legally run Mac OS X? Nope.
The other crucial factor in winning over entry-level musicians is image. It’s not that Apple as a whole has an image problem, and it’s certainly a very widely recognised brand. The issue is with the way it portrays itself to musicians at the kind of level we’re talking about. Pro users don’t need convincing: they know the benefits of using a Mac in a serious, commercial music environment. But a lot of the music used in demos, adverts, publicity and at Apple events is distinctly MOR, which won’t appeal to the kids.
It’s the same for iPhoto, iWeb and iMovie, of course – lots of beautifully produced and totally inoffensive media soundtracked by sickly ballads – and I’m not suggesting they go too far in the other direction. Steve Jobs is entering middle age, after all. It may sound like a small thing, but Apple more than most knows the importance of image. Maybe a separate campaign that younger musicians can relate to, without Apple’s standard slick, homogenised branding? Something that’s cool in a way that a Californian billionaire might not immediately recognise? I have been covering Apple long enough to know that this is fairly unlikely to happen.
It’s not one of these issues on its own – it’s all of them working together that will keep amateur musicians in the Windows world rather than switching to the Mac.
I’ve completely lost count of the number of people I’ve turned on to the Mac, starting over a decade ago. Yes, many of them are creative types, but just as many are average users. A number of them have even become music producers as a result. Some ex-PC people have taken quite a bit of convincing, starting off running mainly Windows in Boot Camp, but then gradually spending more and more time in Mac OS X and eventually abandoning Windows altogether.
They may exist, but I’ve honestly never met or heard of a person who has gone the other way, from Mac to PC. Apple is very good at holding on to musicians – it just needs to convert a few more as they begin their journeys in the world of audio production.
