Hp has been very well used in motion compositing (demanding performances) for quite some time.
Those units are really powerfull.
It seems to me that peecees are going to dominate the video and specialized market, and Mac will maybe be the consumer brand and ocupates the position of windows' decades ago. Wheel turns.
The thing is the real professional market for computers is small.
I don't know the numbers but I'll bet Apple sells millions of I-pads and macbook airs in relation to their towers, which is almost kind of funny, because I find the Ipad interesting, but not a true working machine.
It's kind of fun to watch a movie, or answer an e-mail, mess around with some prosumer software but as far as serious work, the new range of pads are not yet serious machines.
I have a new one setting in the box since last February and haven't had a need or the time to even load and sync it up.
Also professionals don't buy the newest and greatest for top dollar unless it's just absolutely needed. You can walk into any post production house and see millions of dollars of yesterday's equipment setting idle.
Also full tilt PeeCees aren't cheap. If you spec out a 17" HP laptop with fast video cards, drives, fastest processor you can get to 7 grand pretty quick.
The good thing about PeeCee's is you can get a pretty good machine for a few grand or less, but once again the numbers add up quickly.
But given all of this, in Europe if you go to an imaging show you'll see a lot more peecees than ever before because Apple has gone full consumer . . . period and unless we see a re write of 64 bit fcp 7 (won't happen IMO) and if your going to process, edit and round trip 4k footage your going to have to eventually move to Avid (think 1997) or Premier (think fast FCP 7 where all the buttons have been moved around).
Personally we're still running fcp 7 on our legacy projects, moving new projects to premier as I don't think Avid will be the standard unless they do a total rewrite that gets out of the keyboard based editing style and Adobe is building a full round trip professional suite.
Red and all 4k/5k professional cameras are are different animal as they require fast video render cards just to process out, so they see the handwriting on the wall or better put the posters in the Apple store, which is grab a camera, a macbook pro and become a you tube film maker.
Still, when you think about it what would you rather own, 1,000 shares of HP or Dell or 1,000 shares of Apple?
IMO
BC