Of all the points thrown around in PC/Mac discussions, there is but one that I can’t get my head around–the frequent assertion that Macs are better for the creation and editing of professional-level image and video. It seems to me that the relevant factor is the speed and memory capabilities of the system in handling such large files, and PCs have the edge there. So, why are Macs preferred for this purpose?
Back in the day, they had all the software. Now, there’s no reason, other than momentum. Most graphic design shops use mostly Macs because that’s what they’ve always used. It’s really more of a historical thing, than an actual advantage that Macs have, now.
For extra money last year, I worked in a film imaging service beureau (sp?) making negs for plate production from clients raw files. As far as Mac vs PC there, Macs don’t crash as often, Macs run graphic programs faster, tool bars for said programs usually make more sense on Macs, and what Flymaster said. With new P4’s and programs like Corel Draw 10, Adobe N Design, etc…, I expect Pc’s will catch up with Macs, but momentum is hard to overcome.
Also, faster clock speed doesn’t always mean faster running graphic programs. They way Macs are designed actually gives them a speed advantage in graphics heavy applications. Try it out. But PC’s are catching up
Mostly it is because the high end software that artists needed used to only be available on Mac’s. Besides the software suite which came with your SoundBlaster and a few shoddy off the shelf products, you really couldn’t find decent software for multimedia editing on the PC up until 3 or 4 years ago.
Much of this was because most of the high end hardware, the midi sequencers and 8 track sound cards, were built for the Mac system. Remember that Mac championed technologies like SCSI long before the PC market, making them the first desktop systems to make broadcast digital editing possible.
5 years ago you could buy a Media 100 for $40,000 and produce broadcast video from your home studio. At the heart of the system was a suped-up Mac filled with all sorts of cards connected to Mini-DV recorders and hard drive arrays, and of course Mac software. After working on these systems for years most experienced multimedia artists are reluctant to learn a new OS, hence the prejudice.
Now that PC’s have caught up to Mac’s with state-of-the-art video cards, ATA-100 hard drives and DDR memory we’re now seeing a lot of new software utilizing the power of the PC CPU, and so it isn’t uncommon to find a few PC’s in a multimedia lab nowadays.
The software situation has also been helped by companies such as Adobe developing their products to be cross-platform, for both PC’s and Mac’s.
Moral of the story: If it ain’t got the software, then no one’s gonna buy it. Just look at the X-Box.
I am not an expert in video, but the word I hear is that Final Cut Pro is the software to use for video editing. And it’s only available for Mac.
I know that personally, I like the layout and setup of the Mac OS. I like working on Photoshop better on the Mac. I guess a lot of other artists feel the same way I do.
The reason to use Macs for video:
Final Cut Pro.
Another reason I have heard is superior colour reproduction. Its not that Macs are objectively better than PC’s its just that they do it differently. People worling in design shops are used to how macs output colour and when something comes out slightly wrong could lose you a million dollars, the price of hardware isnt a factor.
I wouldn’t want to suggest this as the primary reason, but it has to be said… artists see a Mac and see a PC, they’re going to go for the Mac. Because it looks better. Because Apple are light years ahead of every single PC manufacturer in existence when it comes to design. The PC manufacturers’ attempts to make their boxes stylee in the wake of the iMac are just totally laughable.
Momentum is I think the best explanation, as has been noted above. In the early days the Macs had all the best graphic design and desktop publishing software, and there is no advantage a Windows-based system offers today that outweighs the cost of learning a new OS interface and making hundreds of minor but collectively annoying changes to all kinds of processes that have grown up around the MacOS and hardware.
-fh
::ahem::
Not quite. There’s more bang per megahertz in a G4 processor, but PC processors have so much raw muscle behind them that they make up for the G4’s elegance.
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/features/cw_macvspc2.htm
http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/news/cw_macvspciii4.htm
In any case, I’d say that stability is the last big thing that Macs have going for them. Preferability of the OS design is a subjective thing (I prefer WinXP’s). And, while I will applaud WinXP’s stability to the high heavens (going on ten months without a single XP crash on my computer), I will note that its stability is random. For example, on my computer - built from scratch from hardware that I chose - XP is stable as all hell. But on our family’s Compaq POS, that came with WinME but we upgrade to XP, it’s stilly buggy and unstable as hell.
And while Linux may be solid as a rock, in my opinion it’s a bit more awkward to use.
So, yeah… right now, it’s a mix of stability and history.
Only if you’re the kind of pretentious artist that thinks computer box design actually matters.
Modern Macs are the ugliest pieces of crap I’ve seen in computing. Ugh.
But that’s just my opinion, I suppose… Hmph.
It’s not the external box that matters. There are plenty of Mac users who have older Mac models that have been upgraded. The older Macs are beige and ugly as anything, but the Mac enthusiasts swear by them. Of course, I can’t say it’s a detriment that my stylish G4 tower looks so fabulous, but I’d love working on it no matter what it looked like. 
In my opinion, it’s the OS that is much more pleasing to the eye. Both OS 9 and OS X. At least to me, and I daresay, a lot of other Mac artists as well.
I started out on Windows, and initially had limited exposure to the Mac OS. I still remember seeing some Macs on display at a CompUSA. The boxes were lovely (a turquoise blue—and did I mention? The model name was “Yosemite”! How could I not love them!). But the thing that made me gasp and feel so cheated as a Windows user was the sheer style and artistry of the Mac OS. The stylish way the folder icons were designed. The way everything was designed. It was pleasing to the eye, not “clunky”, like the way Windows was (and still is) to my eye.
I noticed the difference immediately, and it mattered to me. Not enough to go right out and buy a Mac then. Not enough for me to switch to Mac, had the Mac OS been buggier and less reliable than Windows. But since the Mac OS was just fine and dandy (and OS X and finer, dandier, and lovelier), the attractiveness of the OS is a nice selling point.
And, SPOOFE is right. As of now, Macs are lagging behind in raw speed. However, they do pretty well on some tests (specifically Photoshop tests); incredibly well when you take into account that their Megahertz numbers are so much lower. They are not all that much slower in some tests—certainly not as slow as you might expect.
When the G5 comes out (whenever that is) then Macs might catch up on the speed issues. The Mac community waits with baited breath for announcements of the new processors, and last I heard, there was talk of Intel doing something with the Mac processor? (You can tell, I don’t keep up with the latest Mac news.)
For many Mac enthusiasts, the speed issue is a troubling one, but they are not willing to jump ship because of it. For one thing, Mac OS X is far too promising, far too exciting. (Even former Mac-haters are getting Macs just so they can play with OS X! Unix geeks are in geek heaven with X.)
Also, like I mentioned before, there is something special about using Photoshop on a Mac. I can only speak for myself here (and, most likely many other Mac users) but there’s just a different “feel” when using Photoshop on a Mac. I felt it right away. And, in my case, Photoshop runs smoother and with less crashes on my Mac, compared to my PC. I have heard tales from a Photoshop tech support person that his support calls are much higher for Windows. When a Windows person calls, it’s usually asking how to get Photoshop from freezing or glitching out. When a Mac person calls, it’s usually to ask, “How do I get this effect?” Of course this is just antectdotal, but it mirrors my own personal experience. YMMV, etc.
No, you misunderstand me. As I said in my original post, I wouldn’t put it forth as the primary reason. But it’s not an opinion I’m offering here. I know this is a shocking concept, but graphic design students care about design. I went to art school and I heard many students discussing what kind of computer to buy. It mattered to them. Also, given that most of them had no technical saavy with computers (and were usually proud of that fact), appearance inevitably played a greater role than any technical comparisons in the Mac vs. PC buying decision.
If you haven’t spent a lot of time around creative types, you won’t know what I mean when I say they’re suspicious of computers, but they are. Attached to computers is the idea of the creative process being mechanized and that bothers many of them on a deep level. Either Apple understands this or they happen to have a design approach to the user experience that mitigates it. And I’m telling you it makes a difference.
This prejudice against computers is fading as we get generations of people who have grown up with computers in their bedroom, but it exists in force today and was undoubtedly much stronger in the past, during the rise of Apple and the personal computer.
-fh
Which is exactly why we dropped Matrox RTMac support for Adobe Premiere. It wasn’t selling. However, we still have the FCP crowd, and are working our asses off to re-write the RTMac drivers for OS X.
On the PC side, though, it’s Premiere all the way.
One historical reason is that Macs could handle multiple monitors a long time before Wintel machines. The OS had this built in, and the hardware could handle at least 5 monitors (6 expansion cards, MacWorld/User tried to get 6 working but couldn’t for some reason)
The processor that many Mac people are waiting for is the IBM (something) 970. It is a 64 bit processor (P4/G4 is 32 bit*) and will also have a higher processing speed.
Brian
*Classifying chips is not always clear cut.
I have both an XP Pro box and multiple Macs. Most of the high-end Adobe stuff is cross-platform. So why do I favor the Mac over the PC for Adobe and MS-Office?
MDI – the horrible, horrible “multiple document interface” that Windows can’t seem to shed. That’s the “window within a window” scheme that the majority of “big” PC programs use.
Of course, as is most of the above, that’s a personal preference.
Oh, the menu being in the same place helps a lot, too, although Mac OS X kind of changes that a little – the left-most menu (not counting the Apple menu) is the “Application” menu, which bears the name of the currently-focused application. If the name is longer, the menu is longer, and all of the standard File - Edit - Special - et al menus move left and right. But it’s still better than all over the screen.
How to be a niggling pedant, but not look like a pedant, it’s just impossible. Give in to the pedant force!
a) AppleScript. There’s still no elegant simple way to set up a PC so that you can click a single button in a FileMaker projects database and simultaneously: cause a graph of your tasks to be created or updated in Excel, a new folder named for the job code with seven subfolders to be created on a server down the hall, and a new Quark document to be created in the “Mechanicals” subfolder of that folder with the bleed trim and safety lines and crop marks drawn in, the slug input at the bottom, and job code and client at the top, saved under a name comprised of job code and client name, and if the total MB of work created since the last burn was performed is over a certain figure, a new CD burned using the burning station down the hall containing all the work created since the last burn, followed by all of the jobs moved from their existing folders to an “archived” folder. And even if there were, the presence of all those highly complex AppleScripts in use today means that unless the PC has an AppleScript-compatible system for doing the same, the routines would all have to be rewritten in something else.
b) Fonts. (or, rather, a degree of font compatibility you can count on. The standard is Macintosh, and PostScript). I’m not in the prepress business, but apparently there are some legacy advantages to an environment originally pegged to 72 dpi (Windows is pegged to 96), even in the modern world of multiresolution monitors where they are all “virtual inches”.
c) Graphics people are among those most likely to buy a computer and spend the next five years plugging new things into it, adding new software, and wanting to do so without having to know much more about their computers than the secretary does. I still see threads on this board in which Windows users advise newbie PC owners to install no more than a dozen or so applications, and it is also pretty obvious that hooking new hardware to a PC is a lot messier than hooking it to a Mac.
d) The “application window”. Graphics users have more of a need for seeing many different documents at the same time, not all of them created in the same application. The Windows environment’s application window makes it difficult to position a half-dozen different documents from several different applications on screen where you can see them simultaneously.
I’m not sure why people are always using the argument of stability in Mac’s. I am a design student and I use Illustrator 9. When designing at home, my Pc that was built for me never crashes. When designing in the Mac graphics lab, the brand new Mac’s crash constantly.
To prove my point… In the Mac graphic’s labs there are little signs on each Computer that say “Save Often, or risk loosing your work.”
Maybe it’s because for most people, Macs are more stable.
Your personal experiences notwithstanding.