I was speaking to a consumer who is part of the growing photobook consumer group of Grandparents. He is in his late 60’s and regularly orders photobooks for his children and grandchildren.
He tells me “Most photofinishers work with PC downloadable desktop software but I prefer not to use Windows PCs and stick with Macs. A large proportion of the creative community operate only in the Mac environment and I cannot understand why Photofinishers & labs have not exploited this market. When I make photobooks I have had to resort to using a Windows PC which is awful!”
Mac Users actually account for around 5-8% of global shipments per year, as do Linux users who never seem to get a mention anywhere.
As you know we sell and promote photobook and photo merchandise software too. And like most photofinishers and labs we have not catered for Mac users either.
Fernando Prunonosa, The CEO of our Photo software partner Imaxel explains “Mac users are unlike the rest of us and prefer to operate within their own communities and environments which is why iPhoto is pretty much the only photobook application available to them”.
Then he went onto clarify, “The effort to develop a solution for PC and Macs is double, and the return on invest is unclear, therefore most of the publishers prefer to invest in developing further to offer a better PC solution than investing in a Mac one; and having to bear with two average solutions. This applies to Linux and may also be the case of other operating systems like Google Chrome.
This seems to be just a temporary handicap as software platforms are being moved to a pure web environment which— being cross platform (windos-mac-linux-chrome-?)— will be a single common solution to all.”
Does it really matter if you are PC or Mac when countries like Finland are making it a legal right for every one of their 5.5 Million population to have access to at least 1mb broadband by July 2010. Yes, July 2010! This grows every year until 2015 when all Finns will have the legal right to 100mb broadband, just 5 years from now!
Can you imagine how many photobooks you can create online with that bandwidth? Will consumers ever bother to download software and edit offline again??
With bandwidth like this across the world, PC right clickers and iBook Flickr’s will be in cyberspace together unaware of their neighbour’s preferences….
What do you think… are you Mac or PC? Or are you part of other communities like Linux or even Google Chrome?
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Hell Ursula,
first of all I have to say: “I am all of them”, so I am many but this is not a psychological diagnosis. And I feel the same like this young, old man. Why isn’t it possible to program a good offline client for all plantforms? If you do it right, it is nothing more than compiling your code for each platform and that’s it. At least for Mac, Linux and PC. But I guess there are so many “PC-only” programmers out there, that they might not even know, that this is possible and quite easy if you do things the right way from the beginning.
Good enough I can switch my plattform if I have to. And I not agree, that offline clients are something from the past, because there are many advantages if you can do things offline.
We run all three.
Macs for Design, Pc’s to help pc customers change/correct their artwork and Linux (ubuntu) for our servers and Social media machines.
I am the owner of the company, and I only use mac..personal machine and then a work and mobile machine. But my staff…all use mac at work but all use Pc at home.
Votes here…everyone should if they could have mac but don’t because they can’t.
….but Macs are losing ground I think …
I really the complete online solution…and thus linux is looking more and more attractive to me
I work with any platform given to me; but, I prefer Mac. I have a much better user experience with Apple products. It’s too bad there is not more development for the Mac; the masses win again.
Hi Guys
It’s great to hear you are all pretty flexible in whatever platform you use. We have a Mac at home and I find it really difficult going from one platform to the other. Am I alone?
Ursula
Hi – As the owner of a photobook company I strive to support both platforms. Thay is why we supply our software for both the PC and Mac user
Lorne
Hi Ursula!
I love my MAC. It provides me with a superior computing experience… I would never give it up!
The 1st application I “formally” learned on my MAC was Illustrator ’88 – yes that was the year! : ) The intuitive nature of the Mac is empowering… and learning a program takes the form of simply exploring.
The other day I decided to tap into the “face recognition” feature of iPhoto. I had the need/desire to make a DVD for a birthday party occurring in a few hours – with 3 aging guests of honor. I was able to efficiently and quickly organize my imagery so that I could create three slide shows… each one featuring one on the Birthday honorees – complete with transitions, a different birthday score, and professional DVD menus. I burned one DVD for each of the candle blowers and I appeared very thoughtful.
I didn’t commit to paper the content – but the ease of categorization of my images has me thinking of what other directions I could take the content – and it could very well be in the direction of a service provider like Lorne.
Again the Mac did bring me a little closer to my content… and in turn created a positive “experience” that extended well beyond me, the one tapping on the keyboard.
I equate my PC with “work” which is most likely unfair to it.
– Yvonne Hickey in CT
As a person who has been quoted, and occasionally but not intentionally misquoted by Ursula in this current stream, the problem is not really that difficult to solve. Just look at Taopix software for making up photobooks. This in my opinion is the best software available, and then find a print finisher that supports this software. Then you have comparable functionality for both PC and Mac. Unfortunately, unless you are in Australia, there are not that many print finishers that provide Taopix that use Xerox iGen4 presses. Lets hope the Xerox iGen4 owners realise the opportunity they are missing and sign up with Taopix to support the Mac community.
Ah, the question of PC and Mac. I definitely see quite a bit of segregation between the two, especially with digital companies hiring. Most of them want Mac experience, which can be understood. I myself us a PC at home and at work, but use a Mac at school. I really don’t have a preference. Mac’s feel and look cooler, but other than that I could fall either way.
PC or MAC? In my heart I’m a penguin, but I do my work with a Mac Book Pro, most of the time I need to run Windows on it…
(tech term, a mac is a PC, the differences are technically the Operating System, so it should be titled, MAC vs Windows). It doesn’t matter if you are running mac or windows, as long as you know you can use it. I myself use a mix of Linux PC (for programming, coding, web browsing, etc), Windows PC (for Video Authoring, DVD/Blu-ray viewing pleasures, Email, some media rendering), and Mac PC Laptop(for photoshop, and media rendering). Now any of them could do the other quite nicely as well (I can do email on any PC), but because of familiarity, i use it on the PC that I’ve used the most).. schools teach with MACs, so the future may use MACs, but for teens and adolescents- games, software, and affordability really influences what type PC the person will get… that’s my 5 cents 🙂
I am Mac! This being said, there are solutions out there for creating photobooks that don’t require a software download and can work with PC and Macs provided the Mac is runing the new Intel chip. The product is Lumapix and in my opinion is a very robust solution.
Hi,
we are supplier for Photolabs and our Desktop Client works on Windows, mac and Linux. There is no requirement to develop it double, if you choose the right architecture.
regards
Frank
Hi,
We run an HP Indigo 7000 to produce top quality photobooks. We whitelabel Taopix software for our agents who want to offer a photobook business without the investment. As a result we see orders coming in from a wide cross section of consumers. The Mac application is definately used more at the top end of our product range but by fewer consumers than are using PCs to produce more, but lower value, photobooks.