Any reason why screenwriters don't just use Windows laptops?
The answer boils down to not only personal preference but for some cases it's easier and more orthogonal to use. Even if that _wasn't true_ and many people are going to shit on me for saying it _is_ true, but even if it wasn't: the perception is that it's easier to use, more orthogonal and made with premium materials.
Aside from the pro-sumer market, (which is still hit and miss) the build quality of laptops and battery life is sub-par in Windows-land. Add to the fact that unless you have a Dell support contract you're going to be fighting your laptop vendor over random things potentially and suddenly you're not looking at an appealing platform.
This is _especially_ true if money is literally no object as is the case for screen writers who are probably the most well compensated people on the planet (as roughly 30% of a movie budget goes to the screen writer(s)).
ergonomic?
With a laptop, any old laptop will do 99% of what the typical user needs and do it well enough most of the time, regardless of whether you spend $3k on a pretty MacBook or $1k on something else.
I suspect there's a good deal of overlap between the kind of person who buys a Macbook and the kind of person who buys Beats earphones even though for the price they are subpar (at least earlier iterations were). It's the same concept - status signalling with expensive and outwardly pretty tech.
>your case is that you think people will spend significantly more money for something that looks nicer.
Is this not a fact? Why do you think people buy diamonds? Are you aware that their role as a symbol was also purely manufactured by commercial interests? Look up the dealings of the diamond cartel in the early 1900s.
Screenwriters are great and all that, but they're eminently fungible, whereas folk like Cruise are not.
I'd suggest it's more like 5%-10% upfront. What they get on residuals may be a lot higher, but that assumes the film covers its costs, which in Hollywood can mean anything.
Not any more. Case law has basically ripped the old “Hollywood accounting” to shreds. I’m not saying profits and losses can’t be manipulated, but you can’t get away with the dirty tricks used 20 years ago, and firms are held to somewhat higher standards.
Honestly I would chalk it up to the cultural cache of Macbook ownership. It's hard to even get a job interview in Hollywood unless your phone number is in the 818 area code. Appearances go a long way in that town as you can imagine.
I know 213 isn't the fashionable area code, but I thought 310 was.
At least macOS doesn't phone home (as much?) and doesn't show you ads like Windows does. Microsoft isn't helping themselves doing such silly things.
Many PC vendors also install a lot of crapware.
I could go into details, but the audio APIs for Windows and Linux were complete hot garbage in the 1990s and 2000s. Not so big a deal for games or web browsing but a pain in the ass for audio production.
In the same era, the software for working with video on the Mac was just miles better. QuickTime was really amazing. Everything was super editable. If you had iMovie and iDVD you could easily create an amateur movie and hand people DVDs. Famously, there’s an email from Bill Gates in 2003 where he just rips into the terrible experience he had with Windows Movie Maker.
Desktop publishing is a similar story. Installing fonts and working with printers sucked on Windows in an era when it was super easy on the Mac. The desktop publishing apps on Mac had a much better UI when it came to integration. You could just drag and drop images however you wanted between applications and it just worked.
This is no longer true but people still remember it.
Mac OS doesn't bother users with alerts and notifications [0]. There is no busy start menu with distracting ads and Apple doesn't push ...gems... such as Candy Crush to everyone's computers without asking.
It just quietly works and lets users focus on their jobs.
Windows has come a long way but they're not there yet. For people who aren't interested in tinkering with technology, spending a bit more to get a nicer experience is a no-brainer.
[0] except for the software update prompts
Scrivener and Microsoft Word are my primary tools. There is no Scrivener for linux and there is no acceptable alternative for native MS Word when it comes to working with publishers. That means macOS or Windows.
Here is why I use macOS over Windows:
- Windows version of Scrivener is missing a lot of features, some that I frequently use. (The Mac version of Word is also missing features, but not critical ones.)
- OS-integrated dictionary (three finger tap)
- OS-integrated dictation (tap fn twice to start, tap fn to stop) I use this to speak words I can't remember how to spell. I don't know if Dragon on Windows is usable like this.
- Preview (tap spacebar when any file is selected)
- OS configurable keyboard shortcuts. Any item in any application's menu bar can have a custom keyboard shortcut. I have green, red, and blue highlighting in Scrivener tied to keyboard shortcuts. This is a critical part of my editing workflow.
- Time Machine backup. Easy, seamless backup. If my computer goes down, I can be fully up and running on any Mac hardware with Catalina in two hours. I started using Time Machine in 2008. Since then, every new machine has been restored from a backup of an old one. I've never started with a clean Mac.
- Reliability. Only my linux servers have better uptime. Every single Mac I have is more reliable than any windows machine I've worked with.
- It Just Works. Actually, no it doesn't. There's fewer bugs but when you hit them, they are absolutely infuriating to workaround.
- Unix terminal. Built in to the operating system. Homebrew adds okay package management on top of that.
- Built in apps. macOS comes with significantly better default applications than Windows does. Preview alone is a thousand times better than anything I've seen on windows.
- App install/removal. Almost every Mac application uses one of three install methods. App store, disk image, or package. Removing an application is as simple as deleting the executable from /Applications. If you want the configuration gone too, you can remove its associated folders from /Library and ~/Library.
If I had to pick one thing, it would be Time Machine. It's easy to setup and forget it's there until you need it. Nothing else has saved me so much time and aggravation. It's allow me to effectively work on the same machine for twelve years while periodically upgrading the hardware and operating system.
That is one of the reasons I don't like coding on Windows. I imagine people working with text all day long could have strong preferences here.