The Great Escape

One of the wonderful things about the holidays is that often you get a chance to catch with friends and family you haven’t heard from in years.

In doing so with one of my friends somehow in the dreaded A word came up. The A word as in Apple Computers and to his surprise I told him I was witness protection since my escape from The Cult of Apple.

Yes, me being Apple free is quite shocking even to myself. Now I didn’t want to be here, but I needed to be here.

You see like many Mac users that were around before Apple became a status symbol what brought me into in the (cult) I mean the Apple brand was my creative endeavors. Those were really the days recording video in the day and editing all night on Final Cut Pro.

I mean we were really the Misfits, the Outcasts, and Rebels and we were quick to fling our Apple pride in your face.

I was armed with a collection of firewire hard drives each loaded with whatever was the current version of the MacOS and each drive was basically a virtual studio. One for audio. Another for video. While other drives were dedicated to photography and VFX.

With my mighty MacBook Pro and hard drives, I was a one-man studio.

Over time the weird glances and odd stares of being an Apple user faded as more embrace the brand.

iPods, iPhones and iPads our family was growing and unlike most Apple users from that time I welcomed our new brothers and sisters after all it good for all of us. However, it was not.
You see somewhere down the line many of us so-called Apple Outcast forgot that Apple was a corporation and corporations like most people go where the money is.

For Apple that wasn't PCs. In fact, Apple loses money on the MacPro which is probably why they are so reluctant to release a new one. 

So ever so slowly Apple stripped away Pro feature after pro feature from not only its hardware but its software. Logic Pro was becoming Garage Band. Aperture was becoming iPhoto and my beloved Final Cut Pro was becoming iMovie.

Reading the tea leaves, I saw a scary future coming but could do little about it for leaving the cult of Apple is dangerous. But I still was looking for an escape and saw a few signs of hope.

Mainly because of the explosion of Final Cut Pro, Avid was forced to bring Media Composer into the future and Adobe was starting to flex its muscle with Premiere and After Effects. But the hardware side of things was a little cloudy so many Windows PCs to choose from some ran on Intel others AMD who, what, when where?

Added to my hesitation was that so many of my friends were buying Apple products it was just easier to remain in the compound.

So, there I stayed until early 2009 when Apple in their infinite wisdom killed off DVI/mini-DVI connectors for the mini display Port connector which at that time was only made by Apple. Which you needed if you planned on connecting your Mac to an external display.

And this decision quickly reared its ugly head for me. In 2010 I was working on a documentary in India and though we were armed with three mini display Port connectors they all wore out in a matter of days, so we were unable to view our footage on an external display and it wasn’t like we could walk around the corner to an Apple Store.

So, three brand new MacBook Pros totaling $7200 together were practically rendered useless.

So how did were eventually get our footage onto an external display? A $300 notebook computer that belongs to our guide’s younger brother. How embarrassing.

For me that was it when I returned home Operation Escape Apple was underway.