Mac/PC/Graphics discussion - this time w/ civility!

Factual Questions
1

There was an interesting thead on GQ a few days ago, about which platform is better for graphic design - Mac or PC. (This Macfixit.com thread discusses the same thing.)

I was disappointed that the previous thread in General Question was closed, but it had gotten side-tracked by a certain odd person, who apparently took the Mac/PC thing a little too personally. Everything tail-spinned down from there, yada yada.

So, if you please. Could we further explore this topic, with some level of civility this time? I know we can. I am keenly interested, as someone who is learning (for my own enjoyment at this time) computer graphics. I have both a Mac and a PC, but I prefer my Mac for graphics. I still like my PC, and am “cross platform”. I like Paint Shop Pro on my PC, for instance. (Anyone else use Paint Shop Pro for professional graphics?) What about Corel Paint? Anyone like to use it? I have Paint 9 on my PC, haven’t used it much.

I am interested (very much so!) in what the current situation is with Macs and PCs in the graphics world. The previous closed thread indicated that Macs lead in graphics (this is what I also believe.) But what about the future? Any active, profession PC graphic artists out there? What’s it like for you? What’s the whole graphic design biz like? What about web design?

I guess this could be a general graphics art question, with the Mac/PC thing being only one of the things discussed.

2

I was the person who started the former thread, and I’d still like to hear more about the subject. I have a 5-year-old Mac 8500, which I use for everything (not just graphics), but it obviously needs to be replaced. I’ve got my eye on the new double-processor 500MHz G4, but am puting off the decision until I understand things better.

And, if I decide to get a new Mac - does anyone know what Apple is coming out with next, and whether it’ll be worth the wait?

3

OK, I’ll take a crack at this one, having worked for a dozen years at a newspaper, 8 years at a weekly and the last 4 at a daily. That covers the era of transition between the first glimmerings of pagination, i.e. designing full broadsheet pages on a Mac Plus and printing them out (it took for-frigging-ever) in tiles of six 8½ x 11 sheets on a 300 dpi laser printer then cutting and waxing to pasteup a flat that would be delivered to the prepress folks.

These days the waxer is empty and we do everything digitally, including sending digital output directly to an imagesetter that turns out film, and will soon install a direct-to-plate system.

We do 75 to 125 pages a week (counting special sections) and use the latest pc setups.

So, lots of experience with Macs and lots with PCs. The verdict from here is that Macs still have the edge. They are far more intuitive and have better programs native to them.

One small example is Typestyler, an absolutely killer application for extruding, bending, and shaping type in eye-catching headlines and graphic designs. The closest thing to it in the PC world is Corel Draw, a program with a lot of depth, but with a nonlogical, nonintuitive set of controls. The instant Typestyler ports to the PC environment we will own multiple copies. But for now, the folks at Strider are only making Mac versions.

Most of our agency ads come in in Mac format as well, which sometimes causes problems (they helpfully send the typefaces, but that does us no good as they are Mac version typefaces. Not everybody is up to date with Adobe Acrobat which will probably alleviate this program.

To those of us who work with the design every day of the paper and the ads, we would have Macs in an instant if the people at the company HQ would let us. Some years back they hired a bunch of programmers who live for the pc world and have gradually converted everybody over. I think it means job security for them.

Most newspapers use Macs or some sort of PC-Mac combinations.

The analogy that we use here is to cars. There are some folks who love to soup up the motors and spend endless hours under the hood tinkering with them. Those are the PC people. Others want to just get in and drive the damn thing, They are the Mac folks.

Thanks for listening

4

Hometown Boy’s analogy is quite good.

As a former editor (and a layout staffer before that) I can offer my opinion that the Mac’s handled eerything so much better. The system’s just seemed better suited. I only started using PCs seriously abotu 18 months ago but the macs system and OS handled everything so much better. And programs like Corel? shudder This is more personal opinion than any fact but one I’ll hold firm to. I know if I was still freelancing I’d have a G4 here next to this PC and it’d be the Mac that did the work.

And panache, remember that the processing speed of the G4 is way faster than even a 700MHz PC (32 bits hehehe)

5

Here’s a PC user with another perspective:
It depends what type of graphics you plan to use it for. The Mac had (and presumably still has) the edge when it comes to things like print graphics, layout, etc. However, the major software packages are available on both platforms, so it likely won’t matter which you use.

However.

When it comes to things like 3d graphics, the PC has the edge. The “major” 3d packages have long had NT-native packages (although recently it seems the Mac has been making headway in this area). The stuff that used to be UNIX-only first migrated to NT. (Again, some stuff is now being ported to the Mac).

Basically, it comes down to what you intend to do. The Mac has a long “graphics design” history to it, and thus has many ardent supporters. In reality, it doesn’t really matter which you use, as long as the software is available on your particular platform. But don’t discount the PC as a graphics machine, since for some things it retains a superiority over the Mac.

6

Whoa! Deja vu!

7

Panache45,

You asked a couple of questions:

[ul]
[li]First of all, the 8500 is still a good machine. I have an old 7100 that I am in the midst of upgrading. The only hardware change is that I upped it to 64mb of RAM. Everything else is original. I am about to install System 9 and I need a AAUI to Ethernet adapter to get it onto my home network. Once that is done, it will work fine for word processing, web surfing, home finance, etc.[/li]
[li]Of course, if you are wanting to use the newest versions of PhotoShop, Illustrator, XPress, etc, you need at least a G3 processor, and you would be happier with a G4. My wife is a Graphic Artist and I am her help-desk. When she upgraded all of her design apps, I insisted on upgrading her Mac. I got her a middle of the road G4 and it works fine.[/li]
[li]I don’t think the new dual-processor G4’s are worth buying just yet. Of course, two processors will run faster than one, but not that much faster. The sad fact is that Mac’s hardware is out earlier than it’s software; System 9 can’t take advantage of dual processors. Once OSX hits stores, this will change.[/li]
[li]Apple is releasing something new soon: OSX. They’ve been hyping it for over a year and the beta is available at their website now.[/li]
[li]Once OSX is out, I expect a bunch of newer, faster dual processor machines. Thus, I would recommend against puying one now unless you really need it. Why not wait a year, then get one of them on the cheap - they will be bumped out by the newer models that arrive after OSX ships.[/li][/ul]

8

As a knowledgeable PC user, I SO wanted to respond to the previous thread. Alas, it closed too soon.

Processor speed isn’t everything. A 1Ghz Athlon will not outperform a 500mhz PowerPC based computer across the board. Processors and the supporting chipsets can and are optimized for different things. Most of the layout/graphic programs on the Mac were originally designed for the system and then ported to the PC, thus more optimized for the Mac. Porting is not always an exact science, as optimized code doesn’t port directly. The original version of Pagemaker for Windows actually had a Windows runtime included in the package, as the number of Windows systems was miniscule at the time. Software is rarely written directly to the processor, it is comprised of function calls to the kernel of the Operating System. The Mac OS wins the stability award over Windows hands down.

If your primary focus is layout/2-D graphics, the Mac is probably your best bet. It does cost more for the power, but has a better selection of the software you’ll need and is a much more stable environment. As for high-end 3-D work, occ was correct, the PC will probably be a better bet. There are numerous raytracing tools available (some are free) for it and they rely heavily on the floating point unit. The PC also has some VERY nice 3-D accelerator boards that can be had for a reasonable price.

I’ll be happy to answer any PC-specific questions you may have and I promise to play nice.

9

Ah rational! What a concept! :slight_smile:

I am leaning towards Mac more and more these days. I still do just fine on my PC (I’m on it right now, as a matter of fact) but I enjoy doing art on the Mac sooo much more. What is it about that? What is it about the Mac OS that some of us are drawn to it? I started out on a PC, how come I’ve embraced the Mac so much? No one strong-armed me into trying it, quite the opposite, in fact.

I think I was a Mac person trapped in a PC-user’s body. Well, that’s not true. I still like my PC, I’m cross-platform. But there was a Machead laying dormant inside of me, that’s for sure!

10

If I needed to do heavy-duty graphics work, I’d try to get my hands on a Mac. As it is, any graphical work I do is strictly ametuerish for my own personal (read: I don’t get money) projects. And yosemitebabe… I use PSP, as well (I love it, too).

A good Mac is a heavy investment, since they’re generally more expensive than their PC counterparts, and there’s less available software (but the compatibility gap is shrinking, thank god). Which means that if you’re going to get a computer just to have around the house, to check E-mail and type stuff up (and maybe the occasional computer game or two), you’d be better off with a PC. If you want to do big-time graphic work or video editing, get yourself a G4 (but go with the tower, not the Cube… I’ve heard bad things about the Cube).

That being said, I ask the Mac users out there… do you know if OSX (which I have also heard good things about) will shrink the compatibility gap any? I’d love to have the ability to run most software with a Mac’s power.

11

You won’t see me dumping my PC anytime soon. I write software with SQL backends, the PC still rules in that area.

The Mac has many nice things that are so subtle that most users don’t notice them. A prime example is file associations. On the Mac a data file (image, word processing document, etc.) has information embedded into it that ties it to a specific application. The PC tries to imitate this, but cheats a bit. It uses the extension of a file to determine the application it belongs to. If you rename a .jpg file to have a .doc extension, Windows will try it’s hardest to load that file into Word or Wordpad, instead of the graphics program you used to design it. This also makes life difficult if you have multiple applications that handle the same file types. On a PC, only one of them can be the default. The Mac OS is also built as a GUI from the ground up. Most home versions of Windows are still built on top of DOS, no matter what Billion Gates would have you believe.

Stability is also overlooked by most people. If I’m typing out a word processing document on a PC and it crashes, it’s usually fairly easy to reproduce the changes made since I last saved. If on the other hand you make a few changes to various layers of in image file and the system crashes, you’ll be begging for a Macintosh in no time.

The Macintosh was built to be intuitive and enjoyable for creative types. The “Big Brother” commercial in 1984 set the foundation for that, even if it was only shown once. The PC has evolved from a system that was primarily used to create spreadsheets. Just do a search for the terms “expanded AND extended memory” to find evidence of that.

I’ve been having a good day, by the way. My system has only had to be rebooted once. My girlfriend’s Mac was rebooted 4 weeks ago when we lost power.

Have a peachy day!

12

And the moderators breath a sigh of relief…

13

Ahh… ahhh… iMac!

Gezudheit. :smiley:

14

I have to admit, I’m an old geezer in design, my grandfather taught me how to set cold type on a little letterpress, and I’ve been working since that time around the graphics industry. And for almost as long, I’ve worked around computers. I can even lay a convincing claim to have invented Desktop Publishing in around 1978, I showed it to the local Apple rep without realizing what I had created, and accidentally paved the way for a whole industry. But I digress…

As I mentioned near the closing of that earlier thread, PCs always had some technical problems that made life difficult for graphics work (i.e. the extended vs expanded memory issue someone else mentioned). The Mac went way out ahead at a time when it RAM was really expensive, and they got a reputation as more expensive machines, but this really wasn’t deserved, I mean, at that time people with 256Mb of RAM were considered insane for spending $5000 on memory. They just had bigger tasks to do, and were happily spending the money to enable them to work on incredibly hirez files. Even if it was expensive to do this, it took work away from even more expensive machines like Quantel Paintboxes. This really broke new ground for designers, putting the power where people could afford it.
Designers have quite an alliegance to the Mac, because it really grew the whole field of computer design. The mainstays of the Mac arena are still the leaders of their fields. Adobe says the Mac is still the best Photoshop platform, even their high-end Unix versions aren’t as fast. Animation programs like Electric Image and Lightwave are used from everything from making the movie effects in Star Wars to TV commercials. Soon Maya 3 will be released for MacOS X. Mac is still the ultimate nonlinear video editing platform with systems like Avid Media Composer. Architects are big mac users with systems like FormZ. I could go on and on.
But my point… I deal with people every day who have to make these Mac/PC decisions. Every single one who goes with Mac, I help them out and in no time, they’re flying under their own power. Every one who goes with Windows, I hear from them after weeks and months and they’re still cursing about their system not working the way it is supposed to.
But ultimately, I prefer the Mac because it’s the ultimate cross-platform system. Windows users are used to designing everything so it works The One Way, The Microsoft Way. Mac users are more forgiving, more able to work between Mac, Unix, and Windows systems with ease. Someone mentioned that the PC rules for SQL Backend stuff. I should describe a job I just did.
I just finished a web design project with an all IBM and MS shop. I installed Virtual PC with Windows 2000 on my little Mac Powerbook and plugged into their corporate net, I got connected to all their services in about 10 minutes. I set up the laptop as a test server for IIS 5. I designed a dynamic website built on SQL, using standard Mac apps like Dreamweaver UltraDev. Then I copied it over to the Virtual PC side for testing to see how it would perform in an IIS5 environment with SQL hooks. I could work in my own preferred Mac environment, then test and demonstrate it in the Windows environment they preferred. I could take the laptop home, plug it into my cable modem, start up the Windows server and let the client test-drive changes to the site as I made them. When the site was finished, I went back up to connect from inside their firewall and dumped the site from the laptop to their servers. It all worked like a charm. The job is done, and now I can archive the Virtual PC disk image on a CD, and just drag it back onto the Mac whenever I might need to resurrect the site for maintenance. Their tech guys were green with envy. The Mac really rules at crossplatform work.
But in the end, I think it really comes down to something they’ve been saying about Mac vs PCs for ever since the argument started. MS comes from a heritage of Big Computing, where the computers expect people to adapt to how the software and hardware works. The Mac was the first “user-centered design” GUI, and it still shows. The Mac was designed to assist people in getting their work done without having the computer distract you with computer geeky crap. The Mac is for people who want to get work done. PCs are for people who want a hobby tinkering with computers.
Well, anyway, that’s just my more than 2 cents about the subject. In my lifetime, I’ve made way more money off of IBM and Microsoft than off Apple, but using a Mac is what enables me to do it.

15

I always do love hearing about the “good old days” of computing! Thanks Chas.E!

As sdimbert alluded, the iMac has changed a lot of things. The newest iMac is only $800, and that’s with monitor included! :smiley: And so easy to set up, so easy to learn. I think it is an excellent choice for the newbie computer user, who just wants to do email and the Internet. AND…it’ll do graphics well, which is the topic of the OP!

16

Not meaning to start flaming, but one thing I have always wondered about the iMac. Why didn’t they include a $20 floppy drives? The only way to move files around to another computer or archive them off of your HD is to email them. What is the deal with that?

Eric

17

What fits on a floppy disk these days? Anyway, that’s what USB is for, you can buy cheapo USB floppy drives for $50, or better yet get a Zip drive for a bit more. What I can’t figure out is why iMacs don’t come equipped with CDRW drives instead of a CD. I guess they want to push DVD instead.

18

Small files you want to move to another computer. A floppy is still the quick easy cheap choice. I have never seen a USB drive of any type for $50. Do they make USB 1.44 floppies?

19

Geez, i hardly even mentioned the early days. I guess I should tell the rest of my story about my invention of DTP.

I grew up around type and typesetting, especially with early digital “cold type” systems where you input your copy on a teletype and made punched paper tapes, then fed them into a phototypesetter. I knew that computers had more potential in this area, these systems were really clunky and hard to use, and all you ended up with was galleys you had to paste up yourself.
About that time, in 1975, I built a microcomputer from a kit, a Processor Tech SOL-20,. I started working with printing companies and publishers who just wanted word processing for input into their publishing systems. About that time, I read the classic book “Computer Lib” by Ted Nelson, it showed some kiddie hackers club that had (with permission) gone in and experimented with a large corporation’s mainframe phototypesetting system and produced a fake New York Times front page. I figured that if these kiddies could do something like that, so could I, and without any mainframe stuff.
So… a few years later (around 1978 IIRC) I was teaching a class in Apple BASIC. We covered a lot of graphics stuff, and as our “graduation” ceremony, I had people print out their “diploma” on a little Apple II demo system. This system was equipped with Apple’s new Graphics Tablet, the predecessor of the current mouse input systems. The system was equipped with a color printer and some graphic fonts. It was the first system I know of that had all the requirements for real DTP. I consider those requirements as:

  1. Microcomputer based, fits on your desk (it was an Apple II).
  2. What you see is what you get. The color screen images printed on the color printer exactly as on screen.
  3. Scalable accessory fonts. I could use 3rd party fonts (from Beagle Brothers, an early “baggieware” vendor) onscreen, and load them from disk in various sizes.
  4. Mixed graphic and text modes. Well actually, everything was graphics, and printed out at the screeen rez, which was matched to the printer rez. But I could draw with the tablet, or type on the keyboard and mix these onscreen
  5. Mouse-style menu driven input. The Graphics Tablet was what really made this work, using a stylus took a bit of getting used to, but basically functions the same as a mouse.
    So what I did was create a Certificate of Achievement for the BASIC class and signed it with the stylus. I had each student come in, sign the certificate digitally with the stylus, then print out their own certificate. Voila, the first DTP document in the world.
    A few weeks later, the regional Apple Rep came by. This was a big event, as we were in the middle of nowhere in Iowa and never saw our reps but about once a year. I showed them my certificate demo, and a few other demos I had created. One of the demos was how to use the graphics tablet to create perspective drawings. The other was how to draw a tree and copy it all over the page to make a forest. The rep began to splutter, he could not believe what he was seeing. He made me repeat the demonstration. He thanked me for a killer demo, and left. A couple of weeks later, ANOTHER Apple rep came by and asked to see my demo. I showed him as well.
    Now here’s the punchline: A few weeks later in our monthly dealer’s newsletter, a sheaf of papers was enclosed, showing how to demonstrate the Apple II’s graphic abilities. It included an almost exact transcription of my entire demo! Everything was as I showed them, the demo of the perspective drawing, the tree, etc. down to the last detail. And I received NO credit whatsoever. Dammit!
    So there you go. I created the first DTP documents in the world. And I gave it away without realizing what I had. And Apple immediately recognized its worth, and pumped it out to all their dealers without giving me any credit. Oh well, that was sorta what micros were all about back in the early days, we’d gladly give away our best stuff, just to be recognized as having the coolest hack. If ONLY they’d just have given me ONE iota of credit!
20

If you’re using an old 8500, you deserve an upgraded machine. IIRC, the 8500 is something like an 133mhz 604. If you’ve never run a new generation machine, you are in for a treat. A new G4 with some extra RAM, a suite of current top end programs like Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop or Freehand/Dreamweaver/Flash/Director, Maybe get a cheap Firewire video camera and iMovie, make some quicktime movies for a web page… etc. These new CPUs have capabilities you’ve always dreamed of, but could never quite reach with the old machine. You won’t believe what these machines are capable of, compared to your old machine.
The new dual processor machines are really nice, and not too expensive. But only certain programs are dual-processor enabled. Photoshop supports dual processors, as well as other programs like mp3 or video compressors (i.e. SoundJam, Premiere, Media Cleaner). If the kind of programs you’ll be doing are very CPU intensive and will benefit from dual 500 procesors, go for it. I have some friends who run video compression for days on end, they’d save days of waiting with a dual processor. But overall, most OS functions aren’t accelerated too much by dual processors, although this is expected to change in MacOS 9.1 update.
If I wanted an inexpensive graphic station now, I’d probably buy a low end model of the Cube (they’re cheap right now with rebates). I’d load it with RAM and remove the small hard drive and replace it with a bigger one. Maybe swap out the DVD for a CDRW drive. The Cube uses standard IDE devices like any PC, they’re cheap and easy to install. Then hook it up to a big monitor like a 19" or so. I think designers need more options like better, more accurate color screens, and more RAM, rather than faster CPU speed. Its all a tradeoff.
As far as the future? Hard to tell. I was worried about that myself when I bought a new Powerbook, they were rumored to have new models coming out. I bought one anyway, and I paid for the whole machine with one freelance job of just a few weeks. The machine dropped in price a couple hundred bucks but I didn’t care by that point.
Well, anyway, I don’t mean to hog this thread, but I’m doing a lot of interesting mac stuff and I can’t help myself sometimes. Sorry.