Microsoft Windows 10 Event

Even though I get PCs for gaming and data science on the side for non-profits (not big data, for the most part). The wow factor of this computer for me will likely wipe out a 'swipe bar' added to the macbook pro and some 'better' (read: not years old) internal upgrades.

If Apple insults us with yet again no monitor update, it's going to be huge.

The sad part — that seems to play yet again — is that there's a standard just for that: DDC/CI. But none of the GPU vendors nor display vendors care enough to make it work reliably, if at all (apparently it's mostly used for automated display calibration, so if you fall out of that use case, tough luck).

I effectively hacked quite a lot of things around it, and ended up frying a couple gfx cards, because you can easily shoot yourself in the foot, write to the wrong part, and end up with a PCI card as useful as a waffle, only inedible. In the end I managed to pass some commands in very specific scenarios, but behaviours ended up highly dependent on the GPU, display, and combinations thereof I had available (from nothing, to glitchy screen, to aforementioned waffle, but it did work in one specific case \o/).

About that, I have had some luck with https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl to adjust an external monitor brightness and 'brew brightness' to read the current brightness of my MBP.

I set that up in a cron job and that works well enough (although with a delay) with the brightness button of the MBP. The delay is less important to me as I use it essentially to sync the monitor brightness to the MBP autobrigthness.

So many sins.

I've been an Apple zombie for a long time. Since like 2000 when I finally retired my beloved Amiga. Windows does everything the "wrong" way from the perspective of my habits. Yet I would be using a Surface 4 for most of my art nowadays if not for the fact that Adobe Illustrator, my main tool, doesn't talk to the Surface's NTrig stylus properly. So I'm still hauling around a four-year-old Air and a Wacom tablet. I have been ready to give Apple money for a new machine to do my work on for about a year now and they haven't put out anything that's worth bothering with for me.

And when's the last time Apple updated their super-high-end desktop machines for the Serious Major Power Users?

They've been focusing on phones and tablets, and that leaves the segment of the market whose work is "using Serious Art Power Tools" unserved.

Unless Apple's announcement tomorrow has something in it like "oh hey we finally decided to build a tablet that can run desktop apps" I'm probably gonna be pretty meh about it. And the rumors all point to "new Pro lappy with a touch panel instead of the f-keys", which is about as exciting to me as a lukewarm glass of milk.

I do not pretend to speak for all artists. Just for myself.

1. Windows has long been the platform of "boring corporate creative": the AutoCAD using mechanical engineer; the board room PowerPoint presenter. The drafting desk is a familiar acquaintance in some offices with a Windows PC.

2. Microsoft's DNA is in the maker space: it did begin as the software company for software developers. There is a creative DNA there too, but yes that creativity sometimes shines as rather "vanilla".

Microsoft here seems to be trying to celebrate its existing (sometimes unsung) creative users as much as to attract (back, sometimes) the same sorts of creatives that have been Apple's loyal following. The drafting desk is a staid, icon of all sorts of important, but "mundane" creative work, and Microsoft building essentially a "sexy" digital drafting desk seems as much for the "boring CAD shop" as the designer that clings to their MBP all hours of the day.

There's also some implication that Apple may have grown weak/complacent among creative types in the last few years. Certainly a great criticism lately has been that Apple's iOS/tvOS/watchOS-first strategies over the last few years seem much more content and much more at home with targeting (ease of) consumption over creation.

I think Satya in his closing remarks did a pretty good job of trying to tell the story of Microsoft long seeing itself as a creativity-enabling company. It's interesting seeing the Surface brand trying to shake off at least some of the long reputation of mundane creativity for something shinier. But it's also something I think they tried to sell the story of there's an importance to mundanity too; to everyone having a chance at creativity, to it not being a special class of person but something everyone should have access to. (In that way it seems also an attempt to grow a new user base of creative types that don't fit the classic Apple loyal model. Several references to keeping/capturing the imaginations of the so-called "Minecraft generation".)

Oh, and Microsoft have just made their laptop heavier than previous version to increase battery life to 16h. At the same time Macs are getting "thiner and ligher" (C)