As I pack up to leave a photographers' convention in Las Vegas, one trend I noticed is at top of mind: Apple is everywhere down here.
At the end of the conference, which had at least 12,000 people attending it, I totalled up the number of PC laptops I saw over three days. It was a pretty easy number - one.
That's it. One. As in, "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do."
Of all the presenters with their laptops on the podiums, all the attendees quietly typing notes, all the people sitting in the lobby punching out e-mails, only one person had a Windows PC. The iconic grey aluminum of MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs were everywhere.
In greater numbers were the iPads. Some were bareback, with no case. But every colour of the rainbow could be found in case designs. Trade show vendors offered iPad cases where you could vacuum-seal a photo onto the back (trés chic!). When it came to hundreds of tablets floating around, I think I saw all of three that weren't iPads.
Stepping into an elevator, if you found eight people would be standing there, five would be hunched over, looking at their phones in their hands. Of those five, four would be iPhones, in an even wider variety of cases. The hands-down favourite, however, was the OtterBox Defender, the tough as nails case that my wife and I both use to protect our own iPhones.
This overwhelming preference for Apple extends to the various podcasts I watch about photo techniques. You never, ever see presenters on CreativeLive.com using PCs.
For creative types, which would include photographers, Apple has long been the favourite. Part of this is the esthetic ("Oooo, pretty!"), and part of it is the mindset. Apples tend to just work, and haven't required as much technical expertise to keep going as PCs in the past. I think it's a left-brain, right-brain thing. Creative types would rather pay through the nose for an Apple product because they can't wrap their heads around the PC ecosystem.
It also goes back decades to Apple's strong support for desktop publishing and photo editing.
What was also clear was Apple's utter failure in battery design. With progressive versions of the iPhone, Apple has made a big deal about shaving off a millimetre or two here or there, making the device as thin as possible. This also means they have reduced the size of the battery, much more than they should have. There were several times where my fully charged battery did not make it through a 12-hour day, never mind 24 hours. Every power outlet you saw in the convention centre lobby had two white Apple iPhone charging cubes plugged in, and two people sitting beside it. This trend was not only visible on the three floors of the convention centre, but also all the way down the 200-yards or so of hallway connecting it to the hotel. Every 20 feet there were another two people sitting, charging their iPhones.
Since the vast, vast majority of iPhone users put a substantial protective case on their investment, what difference does shaving that extra millimetre off the phone make, anyway? No one ever sees a sexy thing iPhone in the wild.
If you want to make friends at one of these events, bring a multiple cord charger and several cords. Then you can just stake out the nearest power plug and have an iPhone charging party. BYOB, please.
Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net
