What it boils down to is that Maccentricity (a new word I just made up) is evidence of greater intelligence and way phatter cool quotient. Windosers are geeks; Maccentrics are coooooooooool. Anything else is just defensive (and frankly kinda geeky) blustering.
It is true that Macs “support” Colorsync while PCs do not, but that is because Colorsync is a trademark of Apple. PCs w/ Photoshop or other Adobe applications have ICC-profiles which can be used to color-match input devices, and all windows drivers I’ve seen have color correction for video. 3dlabs cards even come with filters you can use to calibrate your monitor yourself.
Heck with all the money you save on a PC you could theoretically get it ISF calibrated. Then you would be SURE you have the right colors.
And indeed, Apple is squeezing out third-party software and hardware manufacturers (such as the one I work for, as well as Adobe, who will no longer support Premiere on the Mac platform) by [insider secret]not cooperating with them and being generally difficult[/insider secret].
I’ve heard that Avid stopped working with Apple after Final Cut came out.
Sounds kind of pissy on both parts to me.
I use a Mac. I love my Mac. I also own an XP machine. I love my PC too.
I use my Mac for some things (graphics, video editing, internet) and my PC for gaming and burning CDs.
Apple is trying to make it’s own programs bigger, better, and badder, and telling everyone else, “We don’t care what you’re gonna try and help us with, we have our own built-in programs now”. So, the other people don’t see a market in porting their programs to Apple, so they don’t. Apple’s alienating it’s third-party developers quite deliberately.
Well, Premiere – while it was waaaay ahead of its time when it first came out – has long been relegated to the trash bin. It’s just utter junk as far as editing programs go.
Final Cut – eh. Has potential. But professional editing equipment, for the most part, starts and stops with Avid. The Media Composer (their high end system) is also on both Mac and PC. Not quite graphics, but similar enough that I want to add it to the discussion.
Basically several years ago Avid threatened to drop the Mac from their lineup. Their stock plummeted that day and the decision was reversed the following day. Their problem (from folks I know who work there) is that Apple keeps changing their hardware. One model has 4 PCI slots, the next has 3, the next has 6. Every time they cut back. Avid has to redesign their “pizza box” – an external box with all the needed cards that can be connected to the computer via a PCI card.
But us editors frankly don’t care. The vast majority I work with simply don’t want to work on PC Avids. A job I started a few months ago was on a PC based system “because it was cheaper.” We warned the show’s producers that it was only cheaper on paper, that the reality would be lots of down time and technical problems. They ignored us for 2 weeks, til they realized we were right. I’m not exaggerating when I say we averaged over 15 crashes/day. The instant we switched back to Mac systems, the problems vanished and we’ve run smoothly ever since.
For all the anecdotal stories I hear praising/denouncing one system or the other, my experience has been that if a Mac crashes, one of the show’s editors can always get it up and running quickly (assuming it’s not a dead hardware card, which simply has to be replaced). When our PC editing systems crash, they involve massive tech support the vast majority of the time. And I’ve had several instances of the high end PC Avid Symphony machines (the systems used to finish a show once the creative decisions have been locked down) making us miss crucial deadlines. Now that there are Mac Symphonies available running OSX, I’ve yet to miss a deadline during the online process.
From my individual perspective, THAT is why most editors I work with favor Macs over PCs, and why the vast majority of shows I’ve worked on for 10 years have been edited on Mac based Avids. The PC ones I’ve used are usually replaced within weeks of the show starting.
For me, the REAL question is… why is the majority of the world running Windows? I’m not trying to get a flame war going, and I’m well aware of Apple’s arrogance and they can definitely be difficult to work with. But for us professional creatives, many of us don’t want the technical hassles required to keep many PC’s going.
Well, Premiere – while it was waaaay ahead of its time when it first came out – has long been relegated to the trash bin. It’s just utter junk as far as editing programs go.
Final Cut – eh. Has potential. But professional editing equipment, for the most part, starts and stops with Avid. The Media Composer (their high end system) is also on both Mac and PC. Not quite graphics, but similar enough that I want to add it to the discussion.
Basically several years ago Avid threatened to drop the Mac from their lineup. Their stock plummeted that day and the decision was reversed the following day. Their problem (from folks I know who work there) is that Apple keeps changing their hardware. One model has 4 PCI slots, the next has 3, the next has 6. Every time they cut back. Avid has to redesign their “pizza box” – an external box with all the needed cards that can be connected to the computer via a PCI card.
But us editors frankly don’t care. The vast majority I work with simply don’t want to work on PC Avids. A job I started a few months ago was on a PC based system “because it was cheaper.” We warned the show’s producers that it was only cheaper on paper, that the reality would be lots of down time and technical problems. They ignored us for 2 weeks, til they realized we were right. I’m not exaggerating when I say we averaged over 15 crashes/day. The instant we switched back to Mac systems, the problems vanished and we’ve run smoothly ever since.
For all the anecdotal stories I hear praising/denouncing one system or the other, my experience has been that if a Mac crashes, one of the show’s editors can always get it up and running quickly (assuming it’s not a dead hardware card, which simply has to be replaced). When our PC editing systems crash, they involve massive tech support the vast majority of the time. And I’ve had several instances of the high end PC Avid Symphony machines (the systems used to finish a show once the creative decisions have been locked down) making us miss crucial deadlines. Now that there are Mac Symphonies available running OSX, I’ve yet to miss a deadline during the online process.
From my individual perspective, THAT is why most editors I work with favor Macs over PCs, and why the vast majority of shows I’ve worked on for 10 years have been edited on Mac based Avids. The PC ones I’ve used are usually replaced within weeks of the show starting.
For me, the REAL question is… why is the majority of the world running Windows? I’m not trying to get a flame war going, and I’m well aware of Apple’s arrogance and they can definitely be difficult to work with. But for us professional creatives, many of us don’t want the technical hassles required to keep many PC’s going.
Well, Premiere – while it was waaaay ahead of its time when it first came out – has long been relegated to the trash bin. It’s just utter junk as far as editing programs go.
Final Cut – eh. Has potential. But professional editing equipment, for the most part, starts and stops with Avid. The Media Composer (their high end system) is also on both Mac and PC. Not quite graphics, but similar enough that I want to add it to the discussion.
Basically several years ago Avid threatened to drop the Mac from their lineup. Their stock plummeted that day and the decision was reversed the following day. Their problem (from folks I know who work there) is that Apple keeps changing their hardware. One model has 4 PCI slots, the next has 3, the next has 6. Every time they cut back. Avid has to redesign their “pizza box” – an external box with all the needed cards that can be connected to the computer via a PCI card.
But us editors frankly don’t care. The vast majority I work with simply don’t want to work on PC Avids. A job I started a few months ago was on a PC based system “because it was cheaper.” We warned the show’s producers that it was only cheaper on paper, that the reality would be lots of down time and technical problems. They ignored us for 2 weeks, til they realized we were right. I’m not exaggerating when I say we averaged over 15 crashes/day. The instant we switched back to Mac systems, the problems vanished and we’ve run smoothly ever since.
For all the anecdotal stories I hear praising/denouncing one system or the other, my experience has been that if a Mac crashes, one of the show’s editors can always get it up and running quickly (assuming it’s not a dead hardware card, which simply has to be replaced). When our PC editing systems crash, they involve massive tech support the vast majority of the time. And I’ve had several instances of the high end PC Avid Symphony machines (the systems used to finish a show once the creative decisions have been locked down) making us miss crucial deadlines. Now that there are Mac Symphonies available running OSX, I’ve yet to miss a deadline during the online process.
From my individual perspective, THAT is why most editors I work with favor Macs over PCs, and why the vast majority of shows I’ve worked on for 10 years have been edited on Mac based Avids. The PC ones I’ve used are usually replaced within weeks of the show starting.
For me, the REAL question is… why is the majority of the world running Windows? I’m not trying to get a flame war going, and I’m well aware of Apple’s arrogance and they can definitely be difficult to work with. But for us professional creatives, many of us don’t want the technical hassles required to keep many PC’s going.
My best guess is the reason we are all mostly running windows is bragging rights. The PC was an open architecture and the mac was a closed architecture. If you bought a mac, you unpacked it, stuck it on your desk, and that was it. If you bought a PC, you got to add your own serial ports, your own printer port, and anything else you wanted. I don’t know how many people I talked about were so proud that they had put together a system pretty much like an off the shelf mac, nothing really special in it, but yet they were proud because they had done it themselves. Plus everyone liked the idea that you could put whatever you wanted in it. You weren’t limited by what hardware one company put out.
If you were going to use a PC, then you had to run windows. There was the gem stuff, but that sucked even worse than windows (IMHO, of course). DOS had a lot of competition, but no one ever made a reasonably competitive version of Windows (even to this day, that’s still true).
Well, not sure about the building PC bragging rights. I also know several people like that, but we’re talking mass consumers here who frequently don’t know how to do that.
And it leads to another key reason Macs are so prevalent in graphics and video editing. Like it or not, you buy a Mac and you get a standard set of components. Sure you have a choice of a superdrive or just a CD burner, and a choice of hard drive size and RAM, etc…but overall the components are fairly standardized. Which means when you are building a $100,000 editing system, you know it will work on all the base machines you plan on running on. And – just as importantly – it will work the exact same way.
PCs have no standardized options. They’re certainly very flexible as far as getting only what you want, but the sheer volume of choice makes some peripherals not play well with others. And in video editing, that’s a disaster.
Even on low end systems. I worked with this company that sent several trucks out around the U.S. with home editing gear in it (during the height of the internet startups) to show people how to do editing on their own. Each truck had two PC’s with editing equipment, and one Mac. Of our six trucks, the Mac editing systems worked. The PC systems had to be retooled and troubleshot (did I just make that work up?) and all the software re-installed every two days to keep them running. There were just too many component variables and we were never able to get them to work right.
My $.02.
I’ve built two computers now, and any problems I had generally manifested themselves within the first month. They were easy to correct, and, well, yeah. An experienced computer user with a PC should have little problem with the “component variables” and things like that. Macs are easier to use I suppose, I mean they only come with one mouse button. But you price a hefty price tag for a machine that is generally at most, just as good as a top of the line PC. The PC will probably be at least a bit cheaper if it’s prebuilt, but places like Dell gouge you (most Dell systems are 25-50% more expensive than if you took the effort to build the system yourself). Because Mac hardware is manufactured only by Apple, they have hugely inflated prices. Yeah, I guess there are some advantages to having a Mac, but to me, the advantages do not come close to outweighing the huge problems. (What I consider problems anyway)
Well, I think just above your post was a perfectly illustrated example of why and how Macs have an advantage. They worked better for his business. Pretty cut-and-dried if you ask me.
I have both Macs and PCs. I always like making my Macs dual boot (OS X and OS 9) and I always partition the drives. My G4s both have 4 OSes (OS X and OS 9 on each hard drive). But trying to do a dual boot on a PC is much more time-consuming. I know I am not the most technically savvy person, but I don’t care how you slice it, it simply is not as fast and easy to dual boot and partition on a PC. This to me is a puzzle.
I am highly motivated to work well with my PCs. (I need to use them for career reasons.) I like my PCs most of the time–I spent hard-earned money on them and I want the best for them. So I am frustrated when I sometimes have to spend a lot longer getting something to work on my PCs when it was much easier on my Macs. Just my two cents.
**
Hey! wait! I’m a clueless computer user who runs a Mac. I do it because I’m clueless. The original ad for Mac called it “The computer for the rest of us.”
I have 4 mouse-like things. I use them for different things [sub]Too bad I’m never sure what those things are[/sub]
I’ve had Macs since 1994 and have never owned virus protection. A definate plus.
I don’t read manuals. PCs are less intutitive, in my opinion, so manuals are a must.
My son was a graphic artist in LA for Graphic Orb, prior to his death. His first Mac was a MacII. He did most of the computer troubleshooting at is work, and eventually, did their hardware testing and purchasing. Much of the hardware was much more sophisticated than anything outside the graphics industry, but his opinion was the industry toys were more Mac-like than PC.
Ok, you may carry on now
I really should review. The MacII was in high school, not Graphic Orb. Sorry if that was confusing.
I use a Mac for work - I do flash & perl programming to create online promotional games (I don’t do design) and most of the designers I get stuff from are all on Macs, so it is far easier for me to use the Mac to pull in graphics & fonts that a designer who uses a mac has provided. I can work with designers & acheive exact results - when I was on a PC - this was not always possible.
I would say performance is the same for photoshop, illustrator, flash & dreamweaver on a G4 with OS X as it is on my P4 with XP.
The only thing I’ve noticed that works far better on a Mac is Acrobat, and some tools for video & sound are better on the Mac too.
I got a 2 button wheel mouse for the Mac at work & it matches my keyboard, it is see through & glows just like the keyboard.
At home I have a couple of PCs (one with XP & one Linux box) - and I have no problem switching back & forth between all 3 -besides the occasional confusion with looking for the little apple on my pc keyboard.
I like all 3 OSes for different tasks.
Because, not all editing solutions are from Avid. My father makes commercials back home, and for editing, we use DPS cards on our PCs (Velocity). And the systems are very stable on Win 2K. And we work with both compressed and uncompressed video.