AUDIOPHILES
Maybe you've noticed that we have a lot of audiophile users posting. It's about 1/3 of our business now, and in the audiophile community, for whatever reason, there is a belief that Macs are better. That's changing now, but perhaps 1/2 of the audiophile market love their Mac's.
I think there is a difference between audiophiles as a whole and those who post frequently on the audiophile forums. However,
- Bringing out a Mac OSX version of MC would have merit as an offensive action and as a defensive action.
- You might have to make MC more obvious for newcomers to learn to use AND get up-to-date documentation. MC will be compared to iTunes over and over. If MC looks much harder to use, you may suffer from bad press in general.
- You will need to provide full support for syncing with all iDevices, full support for using iDevices as remote controls for MC and streaming audio and video to devices like the Airport express and the Apple TV. You would be claiming that MC does more than iTunes and does things better than iTunes. If there are major holes in your functionality, your story won't sell.
On the plus side, the Apple world is much more uniform than the Windows PC world. After a big initial effort, support might be pretty manageable.
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I see the Linux situation as being different. I think a Linux product would sell poorly and be a big support burden. Distribution hell. Driver hell. Audio framework heck. However individual parts of MC would have value separately: the server functionality in a NAS+ type product, UI functionality on smartphone and tablet to control the system and playback functionality for a headless device (like a Sonos node, a Logitech Squeezebox w/o a display or an Airport Express.)
--- my consumer feedback
As a consumer, I've cooled on buying a Mac as a dedicated MusicPC. Apple doesn't offer the functionality I want. Every time I evaluate a Mac alternative, it winds up to be more expensive and less functional. I might be a customer for MC in a Mac buit don't count on it.
I'm considering using peanut processors (Raspberry Pi like devices ) as headless playback devices. That part of my audio system would be Linux based.
Bill