Proprietary elegance good enough? (Was: Re: OT: notebook shopping)

[Kurt Granroth]

Craig White wrote:
> never missing an opportunity to pile on...
[snip]
> I honestly think that the reason Apple has customers is because the
> people who buy Apple think the only alternative is Windows.

Which is why so many Linux people I know also have Macs.... wait, that 
doesn't follow at all.

Apple has so many customers being OS X on a Mac works so incredibly well 
for what it was designed to do.  It is unparalleled as a consumer or 
desktop OS.  More than any other OS, it Just Works(tm).

Alas, it often does so in a very MS-like proprietary manner.  The iLife 
suite, for instance, works together wonderfully.  It's almost worth 
buying a Mac just for iLife, if that's what you do with computers.  But 
it does so in a completely and totally locked down fashion.  All files 
are sucked in, converted to the iLife formats, and good luck ever trying 
to get them out again.  It can be maddening if you use media files in a 
multitude of players and editors spanning multiple OSes.

It goes back to Alan's question (paraphrased) on whether one can justify 
being proprietary if the end result is elegant enough.  In the case of 
Macs and (in particular) iLife, the answer for a lot of people is "yes".

Personally, I do all of my video editing in iMovie.  I capture my video 
and store it on my Linux server, managed mostly by digikam (which I 
really wish had better video support... c'est la vie).  I then mirror 
the files to an external drive formatted in NTFS (going down the rabbit 
hole already) which I bring over to my iMac.  I then import the entire 
tree into iPhoto and it does it's proprietary magic.  At this point, 
when I pull up iMovie, it can "see" and use any of my videos.  I then 
export the result into a variety of formats when I'm done (some more 
proprietary than others).

So for me, as long as my original files are "free", then I'm willing to 
bend any absolute principals to get the level of elegance that only a 
Mac can (or does) give.

Kurt

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