Final Project : Essay

Macintosh Push the Boundaries of Creative Multimedia

The History

The Macintosh or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface. The company continued to have success through the second half of the 1980s, only to see it dissipate in the 1990s as the personal computer market shifted towards IBM PC compatible machines running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows.

Apple consolidated its multiple consumer-level desktop models years later into the 1998 iMac all-in-one. This proved to be a sales success and saw the Macintosh brand revitalized, albeit not to the market share level it once had. Current Mac systems are mainly targeted at the home, education, and creative professional markets. They are: the aforementioned (though upgraded and modified in various ways) iMac and the entry-level Mac mini desktop models, the Mac Pro tower graphics workstation, the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops. The Xserve server will be discontinued in early 2011.

The Relationship with Creative Multimedia

With the convergence of electronics, computing, and telecommunications, the demand for content globally will be unprecedented. Propelling this will be the availability of newer and faster delivery platforms and devices through which information and entertainment will be distributed and broadcasted. Everyone from filmgoers to Internet users and educationists, student, engineers, and businessman will generate this demand for content. Content that will be required for a variety of daily needs - from information, learning, skills development, entertainment, telecommunications, edutainment to news. Convergence has resulted in not only a greater demand for creative content, but requires it to sustain commercial viability.

Macintosh has long recognized the importance of creative multimedia, content as value adding components that cut across entire industries. With more and more companies already involved in a wide range of content creation activities to meet demand, it makes perfect business sense to focus on these high growth areas. To catalyze the growth of the Creative Multimedia Industry using Mac, they produce Mac OS X as an operating system that combines a stable core with advanced technologies to help you deliver world-class products. The technologies in Mac OS X help you do everything from manage data to display a high-resolution graphics and multimedia content, all while delivering the consistency and ease of use that are hallmarks of the Macintosh experience. Knowing how to use these technologies can help streamline your own development process, while providing you access to key Mac OS X features.

Multimedia in Macintosh

Typography - Mac's support of typography is a result of years and year’s involvement with the pre-press industry. Type-styles rendered with a Mac just plain transfer better when submitted to a service bureau. You get what you saw. If you're into pre-press Mac is the clear winner here.

Video Subsystem - Mac, though PCI, has a severely bottle-necked video subsystem so if you're into advanced 3-D rendering, Composite and S-video output is supported directly from the logic board. This allows the Centris 660AV, Quadra 660AV and Quadra 840AV to connect directly to presentation equipment, televisions, or a VCR.

Postscript Support - Mac natively supports both postscript and PDF formats. If you're into pre-press, Mac makes a lot of sense.

Color Matching - Apple is the only OS and hardware which supports Colorsync™, the industry standard for "what you see is what you get" color matching. If you want your advertising copy of an egg to come out of the press with the same yellow you saw on the screen, Mac is for you. OS X on the Mac introduced an amazingly powerful Color Picker, and it's only improved since then. Since it's the default System Color picker in most applications, like Mail or TextEdit, it's what pops up when you call for a different color. For some, like Adobe Photoshop, you have to specify that you want to use the System Color Picker in the Prefs for the program.

Ease of Use - Noted for its ease of use and its cooperative multitasking, it was criticized for its very limited memory management, lack of protected memory, and susceptibility to conflicts among operating system "extensions" that provide additional functionality (such as networking) or support for a particular device. Some extensions may not work properly together, or work only when loaded in a particular order. Troubleshooting Mac OS extensions could be a time-consuming process of trial and error. By using nearly draconian measures and monopolistic threats, Apple has been able to maintain tight control over makers of third party hardware. What this means to you is an easier to use system, but with much less choice in add-ons.

Software Availability - Though many might argue that anything you might need is available for Mac, and though almost all generic task software is industry specific software is not. For example, if you own say a lawnmower repair shop, you might want software written exclusively to run lawn mower repair shops.