Expensive compared to what? Because to do the things you can do with a $1000 PC, you needed $100,000 or more before depending on the field.
Your personal typesetting engine? 128-channel audio recording? With effects? Video editing? Bitmap editing? CAD?
Those are all things that existed only for high end workstations or specialized devices before the personal PC, and the Mac played a huge role in the development of this (it will take years for Windows to catch up.
Democratisation doesn't mean it also magically broke poverty barries.
Macs helped artists be artists, but they weren't 'truly worldwide democratisation' for creativity, not by a long shot. That title in tech goes to digital cameras. The one prolific form of creativity that spreads throughout the wider public is due to the CCD, not Garage Band (the proportion of the public who are musicians has declined over the past century). Digital photography is the democratisation of creativity, if anything is.
Also, 128-channel audio recording postdated the personal PC. And the $100k pricetag is absolute rubbish. 8-track recorders weren't 6-figure investments, not to mention that machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs. And your own personal typsetting engine? Seriously? The content of a well-written letter takes a backseat in value to being able to put a crappy starburst on a bake-sale flyer? Even crappy teen angst poetry is more creative than the way the general public used those personal typsetting engines.
As for CAD, sure, you got me there. But the subtext of the conversation has been artistic creativity, not engineering craft skills. And CAD is far from the domain of Macs, the item being lionised in the video - for example, AutoCad has been on Windows for 28 years, and took an 18-year hiatus on the Mac during this time. I mean, if the argument is "Macs were the original personal computer", then that's wrong too - PCs had been around for years before Macs came along. Macs have been something special, but democratision isn't a strong point - indeed, for a goodly portion of their life, the Mac has been used as a status symbol; hard to do for something that is supposedly democratised.
Democratisation doesn't mean it also magically broke poverty barries.
Actually, it does. Democratisation means "everyone gets a go", not "the elites get more power". When a minority gains the right to vote, that's democratisation. When an elite social group gathers more professional power, that's something else.
That's not a relevant question. It depends on what you want to do. If you want to play acoustic guitar on the streets, sure, you don't need much. That doesn't meant that everybody wanted to be creative in that way.
Some people (milions) wanted to make records like the Beatles or Kraftwerk, or Led Zepellin etc. Some even wanted to write orchestral scores like they heard from John Williams.
That you can write a song on a $20 ukelele doesn't mean that wanting to write a 5-piece band with reverbs, compressors, clean sounds and 24 channels is not a valid artistic endeavour.
That you could buy an 4-track and record some demo-quality material doesn't mean that the PC hasn't lowered to barried to entry, to the point that someone can produce in his garage/bedroom songs that could only be produced with tens of thousands of dollars of studio time.
The same with movie/video production. At best you had access to (expensive) 8 or 16mm film and mighty expensive specialist tools. Now you can have a full blown editing suite, and HD or even 4K cameras for a few thousand dollars.
>Also, 128-channel audio recording postdated the personal PC.
Postdated and made possible by the personal PC. I didn't say it appeared instantly along the PC. First there was cheap MIDI and sequencers, something that helped tens of thousands of electronic musicians.
>And the $100k pricetag is absolute rubbish. 8-track recorders weren't 6-figure investments, not to mention that machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs.
This is dense. Of course "machines that could record good quality audio in the 80s were categorically not $1k PCs". NOW THEY ARE. That's my point.
Again you somehow assume that I said that all those things were made possible the very moment the PC was available -- whereas what I said is that were made possible BY the PC.
The $100,000 price tag is the equivalent of what you get, in sound mangling capacity, with a $2000 PC and a $500 DAW -- recording, reverbs, etc.
Actually, there were synths, like the Fairlight that only ultra rich artists could afford, people like Gabriel, and that costed $25,000 to buy. Now you can get the same exact specs as an $10 iPad app.
>As for CAD, sure, you got me there. But the subtext of the conversation has been artistic creativity, not engineering craft skills.
Perhaps you've been confused. Artist creativity in the sense of what options artists have to create things. Artists including industrial designers and such. Not in the sense of "how creative an artist is", e.g the quality of his output.
This is about how enmpowering the PC has been for lots of artistic endeavours. E.g not if Bach is better than Depeche Mode, but that Depeche Mode could get the sounds they wanted in the first place.
>Actually, it does. Democratisation means "everyone gets a go", not "the elites get more power".
Not really, it just means "more people than before get a go".
If something was available to X and now is available to 1000*X, that's democratization.
May I remind you that ancient Athenian democracy, one of the fullest and most direct examples of democracy in how the election body operated, excluded women and slaves?
Your rebuttals on the other hand, seem to have retreated into a defence of personal computers in general. I didn't make a comment on that. I said that the -Mac- is not a -truly- -worldwide- -democratisation- when it came to enabling creativity. Those were the words used in the video, in the context of what the video was talking about.
The Macintosh is largely irrelevant as a platform for CAD. It pretty much always has been.
In the early days this was because it lacked a reasonable facility for floating point hardware. In the middle years it was a combination of small market share, price performance ratios, and limited hardware options leading to many vendors ignoring or abandoning (in the case of AutoDesk) the platform. Things got so bad that even Mac specific software companies such as Diehl Graphisoft and ArchiCad suffered the pain of going dual platform for the sake of survival. Bentley Systems simply dropped Mac.
Today, the Mac version of AutoCAD is gimped, Dessault's big boy toy Catia wants real Unix and their low end Draftsite is still in beta. Here's the Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CAD_software
Reality doesn't really match the images created via product placement.
Apple ripped all of the features you describe straight from the Amiga. It could barely do sound because Apple Corps kept suing them for trademark infringement.
It's nice to look back at the Macintosh's history with rose-colored glasses. Unfortunately, it isn't true, nor is it even remotely indicative of the technology at the time.
I see comments sneering about the "democratization" claim, and while I wouldn't have chosen that word, it's worth keeping in mind that Pagemaker and Photoshop enabled Macs to rival $25K+ dedicated, single-task workstations of the day. They really did revolutionize industries. And they both started their lives as Mac exclusives.
I liked the Amiga, too, and it really was ahead of its time in certain respects, most notably video processing. And it kicked the Mac's ass for years in anything relating to multitasking. And it really did revolutionize video production the same way the Mac revolutionized DTP and image processing. But let's not go overboard and claim that everything the Mac was doing by 1986-87 was somehow "ripped off" from the Amiga. The Amiga certainly got capable layout and image software, but that software wasn't creating markets the way the Toaster was -- or the way Pagemaker and Photoshop did.
(As for sound, well. There's no one hardware/software combination that strikes me as a real paradigm shift in the music sequencing or recording field, certainly not in that era; cheap MIDI interfaces drove that across all platforms. Apple didn't make sound software back then but that certainly didn't mean the Mac wasn't used extensively for it with third-party tools.)
Good try, but no. Graphics and DTP professionals used the Mac. Heck, Photoshop debutted there -- it took several years to even be released for Windows, and several more to be used by proffesional studios on that platform.
Very few used the Amiga. It was mostly used for title work in small TV/video productions in Europe.
In Europe, Atari ST and Amiga ruled in terms of music, DTP, 3D and video production at consumer level, before the PC got widespread.
Mac was always out of reach for most pockets.
Actually I meant to write: it took years for Windows to catch up.
