Whenever I write something about the “material” things, I feel the negative reaction from the “spiritual” people who are “above those things”.
Let me write something about tools.
There is “logos” – the consciousness, the creative spirit, the mind presiding over matter. That’s where ideas are made. Then there is energy that sets things into motion and powers action until it is completed. And then there are the tools, that are driven by the logos, with energy, and they accomplish the creative act within the physical world. Whether the tool is a piece of stone, or a piece of paper and a pencil, or a camera, or a computer, is beside the point. Whether the energy takes the form of money, or gasoline, or food, or electricity, is also beside the point. The point is, without energy and tools you can’t get anything done here, and if you don’t appreciate them, you are ignorant. This means that your logos, the content of your spirit, which pretends to be too absorbed with spiritual heights to care about the material things, is full of ignorance and you don’t know what you’re talking about.
If one isn’t passionate about his tools, and if he doesn’t appreciate the energy that needs to be invested in a creative act, he probably never really created anything of value to begin with. A soldier is very passionate about his weapons and armor. An artist is very passionate about his instruments. A scientist is very passionate about his lab equipment. If you try to accomplish anything of value, you’ll understand that there are requirements, and you will respect and appreciate those things that make possible everything that gives your life meaning.
It is important to me how my lens draws. It is important to me how my camera handles, and how the sensor captures the image. It is important to me what kind of tactile feel my keyboard produces, or how my mouse handles, or how my monitor displays colors and reflects ambient light. It is important to me how quickly my storage drive responds to requests, how quickly my CPU processes multiple concurrent tasks, how securely my data is stored, how accurately my headphones reproduce sound, and so on. Why is it important? Because my mind connects with those tools and projects energy through them, manifesting ideas into concrete form, be it text or image. If the tools suck, the end result will suffer, and the creative process will not be seamless. If the tools are good, I can manifest thoughts and emotions more easily, without annoying interruptions caused by waiting for the computer to do something so that I can go on issuing mental commands that I already have queued. Essentially, if the keyboard and the computer itself allow me to type as quickly as I can, and if the computer gets me the information I need quickly and without pointless delays, I can proceed to elaborate on the line of thought that I’m following. If the tool lags behind me too much or interferes with the creative process in some other way, it doesn’t contribute anything positive, and can be a significant hindrance. If a camera handles very poorly, I am more likely to leave it at home and forget about photography altogether, than take pictures.
Tools are important. Energy is important. They are not a substitute for the guiding light of consciousness that reigns supreme over those things, deciding where to invest energy and how to apply the tools, but they control the result-side of the creative equation. You apply consciousness and energy to the tools and you get a creative act.
Any person who thinks he or she is above those material things is basically too fucking stupid to understand the first thing about doing anything useful, and above all, is too fucking stupid to be allowed to have an opinion about any kind of spirituality, because spirituality isn’t for idiots.
Yes yes yes yes, so many times yes. After working for years with imperfect tools, I came up with a term for it: saddling a porcupine. It really is no replacement for a horse. Or a car.
Sometimes you can achieve great things even if you start with imperfect tools, but after a certain point your level of skill increases and the imperfect tool is an impediment. This creates a high level of frustration.
In comparison, when you finally get to use a good tool, creation just flows forward in this magical suddenly easy way. The tool becomes a source of inspiration.
Seriously, one of the greatest obstacles in this world is the inability to express great ideas through matter. It takes years to gain the level of skill to be able to even scratch the surface. So, to further burden yourself with imperfect tools… it just sucks.
Here I’m talking about things from my personal experience, ranging from guitars, pianos, mechanical keyboards, monitors, graphic tablets, phones and computers. Even desks and chairs. I’ve gone through the same experience with all of these tools, probably many more. I’ll saddle a porcupine if I have to, but I’d rather not.
+1
When someone asks why I’m so fascinated with modern equipment, it’s because I did photography on a Zorki 1, and I did photo editing on Acer TravelMate 290E. I would rather avoid those if in any way possible. 🙂 And having abundant experience with working on shit, I prefer buying the best possible gear and not giving a fuck whether it’s an overkill for 99% of my usage cases.
I think really contemplating things before buying anything is extremely important.
But I also see the right people as tools, without them there is nothing (for a producer). I don’t have much knowledge in specialty stuff, but I know who I need to contact for something and who I can get cheaper to do their stuff. I search more than one source.
Spirituality for me is seeing my work get done, if when I see it I feel it is good. And that’s the tricky part, figuring what is worthy for God to see here and not screw people over.
I had to quit one job because their products were so bad I felt I was aquiring more bad karma for selling it to people. Seller methods are basically magic influence. This is especially true for Apple, when realistically Dell XPS 13 & Thinkpad X1 Yoga OLED are king on that market.
Well, regarding Apple, they actually have things that rule on price/performance. For instance, the previous generation 13″ Macbook Pro is actually cheaper than the competing equally specified products from Dell and Lenovo, and Dell XPS is on par with the Macbook Pro – I can’t really say whether one is better than the other because they are similar enough that you can decide based on the OS. The only serious “fault” of the Macbooks is the GPU; they all suck for gaming compared to the competition with the Pascal GPUs. But if you don’t need a GPU, a Macbook Pro is a seriously good machine in every other respect. And I don’t see AMOLED as an upgrade compared to IPS. I’ll take IPS for critical photo editing and even for normal work any time. If you saw the burn-in patterns on my Samsung smartphone you’d know what I mean.
Yeah I know crazy prices on the new models 🙂 Seems such a waste of money, but the tech will trickle down.
I like Lenovo. I saw a good Lenovo 710s on UK & german ebay for 400€ recently. Also many Thinkpad T440,T450 with fullHD IPS for that price pop up often because firm clearance – 2 year use cycles. That’s a good buy.
For your needs you can find a good 2015. MacBook Pro Retina ~1000€ from german ebay I see. But it’s such a waste of money. I would always scratch my head and say: “I can buy now two ultrabooks for that.”
I also like how Chinese ultraportables are becoming better, 200$ Chuwi Lapbook, fullHD, 7-8h battery life: http://www.gearbest.com/laptops/pp_589954.html?wid=21
I recently replaced my limping late-2010 13″ Air (2GB RAM, Geekbench 2100) with a 2015 15″ Macbook Pro retina, 2.2GHz i7 quadcore, Iris Pro, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Geekbench 13000. So, let me tell you what that thing is. First of all, it’s expensive. However, the real-applications speed matches my desktop, which is quite a feat since my desktop is an i7-6700K, Geekbench 18500. Second, it’s not overpriced, since I couldn’t get a better machine for the money, and believe me I tried. Try getting an i7 quad core with 16GB, that is made well and has good battery life, and you’ll basically end up with 15″ Dell XPS and 15″ retinabook, that’s it, and the Dell is more expensive. Yes, the Dell has a dedicated GPU, but I don’t need a dedicated GPU, I need a GPU that can drive several 4K monitors if need be, but I have no wish to play Witcher3 on a laptop. On the other hand, MailStewardPro works only on OS X, and that’s hugely more important to me, because I have 2GB of email archives in a mysql base.
Furthermore, having a native UNIX machine has huge advantages for me, so when I sum it up, the advantage to the Dell is that it can play games for an hour before melting itself down, and the Apple can manage my email archive, and I can restore it from my backup so it will all work immediately as I already set it up on the old machine. And the 16GB i7 Mac is 1000kn cheaper than the i5 8GB Dell. So, I question the conventional wisdom of Apple being more expensive. In fact, it’s the least expensive machine in the class that I could get. Sure, I could’ve got an ROG Strix 502, which has the computational power, but it’s built like crap, and has no battery life.
And I can tell you that this is a serious mobile workstation for a photographer. The screen is as good as my 27″ monitor, only glossy, computational power for Lightroom is completely on par with my desktop, and a Linux VM runs incredibly well on it, running Netbeans and all. The thing is much heavier than my 13″ Air, but it’s actually lighter than the IBM T43, so it’s nowhere near as heavy as it is powerful. So, could I have gotten a cheaper machine? Yes. With half the power, or with the same power and without battery life, or with a smaller screen and half the power. You get the picture. I am very confident that I got the best possible value for money, and if someone thinks that I could’ve gotten the same performance for less money or more performance for the same money, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I am quite informed and I did my homework and if I really could get a better deal, I would have.
Yes, I know you are a power user, but I was thinking more of other people who follow you. Like “Danijel has a Macbook and a dslr, I need that too”
Most people really need just a good reliable laptop machine, with a good keyboard, battery and screen. And the $200 Chinese are getting there. Like Chuwi Lapbook with new Celeron I think of buying for myself, because I need a fanless design, fullHD, 4W processor to last on the go, 7-8h battery life.
But I also like how german/UK firms change their Thinkpads often, so one can get them like T440 or T450 with IPS for half the price after one year. It’s ridiculous 🙂 and those have the best keyboards.
I tried the new Macbook Pro keyboard in a store today, it’s like nonexistent 🙂 but half the reviewers don’t even mention that.
Look, it’s a compromise between what you can afford and what you need. I know, because I usually needed the best gear and could not afford it. However, buying some Chinese no-name piece of crap isn’t saving you money, it’s flushing money down the drain. That one you mentioned, I clicked on the link and saw that it has a MMC card with 64GB, instead of an SSD. It’s what they put in the tablets. Can it be put to some use, well I guess, but I would still recommend getting something better, that will last you 4-5 years, because that’s how you get return on your investment: you get long and good use out of the device. So, buying something you’re not sure will last 5 years is simply a waste of money.
However, not all great machines are very expensive. For instance, I really like the Lenovo Thinkpad L460. It’s basically T460 without the fancy materials, and with a more conventional set of components, but still, you can get a Geekbench 6000 machine with an IPS matte display, on which you can install an SSD and more RAM, it has a great keyboard and will surely give 5 years of good use. I considered it myself as one of the options, but since I had enough money for the machine that’s optimal for my needs, I got that. The list of drawbacks for the L460, for me, was that I’d have to write the MailStewardPro replacement since it’s not a Mac, the smaller and lower resolution screen would be a stretch, and it had enough power for most tasks, but since I’d have to run a Linux VM on the Windows 10 host, I would be stretched for resources. So basically it would work, but I would have to divert work and energy from the more important things in order to write essentially redundant code and figure out how to get around the obstacles. By buying a Mac, I pulled it out of the box, plugged it into my timemachine backup drive, did a full restore, and I had the fully functional machine that same day. Everything worked, the keyboard is the same as on the previous one, the screen is ideal, the speed and capacity of the machine are ideal and I don’t have to fix anything, because it’s already good. Instead, I can keep my focus on the more important things, and that’s the whole point.