Trigger Finger

Almost Free?

Having placed my order for a new 2009 Mac Pro, I have set myself (and my wife) a goal of making it pay for itself in 12 months.

For someone who has 40 hours a week to work on such a thing, that doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. But I have a full time job and a 10 month old son, so the most I will be able to give to such a project is at best a couple of hours a day! But I have a few angles to attack this on.

1. My main reason for going Mac as opposed to Windows is that both OSX and the hardware and OSX seem to work much faster when video editing. Editing HD footage I had taken, and worse still encoding it, was painfully slow on my modest Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4ghz). Yet when installed hacked OSX on the exact same machine it took half the time even though it was on unsupported/hacked hardware. I don’t know whether it’s something as simple as the file system or that the mac version of the Adobe After Effects etc is more efficient, but a 50% reduction in encoding time is pretty incredible. So a switch to OSX with 4 or even 8 cores is a huge thing for me here. Maybe I can make some cash editing other peoples footage, outputting it to HD etc.
2. A secondary reason is my photography hobby. There are so many better tools for image processing and RAW work in particular was also faster on the hackintosh. Just waiting for a RAW preview to load in Windows Explorer on Vista 64 bit takes 30 seconds or more. For some of my best pictures I can start to sell some prints and/or license them for use.
3. A third big reason is perhaps the biggest potential for profit, developing iPhone apps. Sure the get-rich quick stories are a drop in the ocean of the total number of developers out there. But I don’t necessarily want to get rich…. earning enough to pay for the mac, learning something new and then maybe even paying for a holiday for the family in a year or two would be a huge success for me (though I won’t object to earning millions of course ). I have some good ideas (and plenty of bad ones!) and I am really itching to go on this front.
4. Advertising from this site as I write about the challenge…. that should accumulate at least 16 cents over the next ten years

Now I realise the first two things on that list can be done on a Windows PC, but much less efficiently in my experience so far. Number 3 is something that is Mac only as far as I am aware and I have spent some time getting used to the SDK within the hackintosh environment as preparation. But many many things just simply don’t work in the Hackintosh (even the USB ports don’t work for any hardware more complex than a mouse) and XCode or OSX crashes on a frequent basis. The machine was not built with a hackintosh install in mind, so to even get it working as it does took a few weeks of real research and 20+ fresh installations.

Anyway, thats the plan. I am not worried about leaving Windows behind as I already proven via the hackintosh that everything I want to use / do works in OSX, plus I will have a native install of Vista via Boot Camp to fix my gaming needs! I’ll keep you posted on the this undertaking as time goes on, now I just need the damn Mac Pro to actually be dispatched!

Anyway, if anyone else has any bright ideas on how to achieve this challenge, let me know in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Switching to Mac / Review of the Mac Pro 09
2. Yes Another New Look…