Personally, I think the argument is moot nowadays.
We just upgraded our news graphics room with twin dual P-4 machines with gobs of memory and scads of hard drive space, dual monitors, drawing tablets, the works. All of our stuff is done in Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere and so forth.
The new PC’s blow all the Macs in the building out of the water and are much more stable as well.
That’s been our experience anyway.
I would have to estimate that about 75% of all the times i have sat down at a Mac for whatever reason, it has crashed.
Yes Pc’s crash too, but in my experiance not as often.
::Shrug:: So you are better off not using Macs, then, eh? I wouldn’t blame you, since apparently all your experiences are negative.
Apparently, however, a lot of Mac users have different experiences. And, apparently, Macs still maintain a reputation for stability (particularly OS X—have you used OS X?) so there probably is a reason for that.
Perhaps their Macs are configured better, perhaps they know how to use them better (though Macs are known for ease of use, so one needn’t be a complete geek to get around on them). Certainly, I find my experiences to be completely opposite of yours. So, I enjoy using Macs, and will continue to use them. As do all the other Mac users, I daresay.
Macs that aren’t maintained by knowledgable people suck, and it’s been my experience that computer lab Macs in particular suck. At my university, the people working in the labs were primarily PC folk and didn’t know how to perform basic maintenance and troubleshooting.
I venture to say, teneisha that perhaps the Macs in your lab have the same problem.
I’m sure you are both right. Un-matinenced electronics fail. Although I have owned a Mac (years ago) and ran into allot of problems as well.
I just wish that Mac’s and Pc’s were compatible, then the world would not have to be divided in half, and my life would be allot easier.
Off to IMHO.
Gosh, shuttled off into no-man’s land.
I’m a Windows developer, and use Windows exclusively at work. Yeah, even at home I have a Win XP box. I consider myself an expert at many levels (don’t ask me about kernel programming).
I’ll choose the Mac.
I’ll say that XP Pro is (finally) more stable than pre-Mac-OS-X. But, Mac OS X is by far more stable than XP. Granted, like everyone else, this is personal experience. But I think a combined 20 years using most versions of Mac OS and Windows contributes pretty strongly to anecdotal evidence being sufficient.
Oh yeah, I can run Virtual PC and/or WINE on my Mac, but nothing the other way around (unless you’re content with 680x0 emulation).
And I’ll emphasize again what AHunter3 referred to as the “application window” – the MDI interface on Windows detracts from its usability more than the ugly (but changeable) Luna interface (for that that don’t like Mac OS X, you’ve got a point – you’re stuck with Aqua or silver Aqua). [see, I can be fair]
Much of the graphics art industry is tied into the professional printing industry, and when it comes to the preparation of documents in QuarkXSucksass or Adobe InDesign, Macs are far preferable to Windows solutions. Macs running OS X speak PostScript natively – in fact, PDF, which is itself based on PostScript is the technology used for displaying all data on a Mac OS X screen, and all applications can now print out directly to PDF files, a handy feature in an age when more and more printing houses are requesting that files be sent directly to them as PDFs.
Mac color management is far and away better than that of Windows. I’m not sure why Microsoft hasn’t addressed, this – they simply haven’t. Most graphics programs started out on the Mac, and are designed in very Mac-like ways. Pallettes instead of toolbars, and lots of windows spread out all over the screen – all of which works, in terms of interface, a lot better on the Mac than on Windows, where programs like Photoshop suffer dramatically under the strain of MDI.
And then there’s reliability. At the newspaper I work at (SMU Daily Campus), we use Macs for all our production work, for the reasons listed above, and also for their stability and the ease of troubleshooting when problems do arise. And then there’s the freedom from viruses – an important factor when you are on the recieving end of dozens of emailed-in Word documents a day. Macroviruses do Macs no harm, generally speaking. They were designed to hose windows systems, not Macs.
We have one PC in the production office. We requested a requisition allowance for a computer from the Student Senate, and the idiots at the Senate bought us a Compaq. It sits in the corner and there’s nothing we can do with it. It’s useless for us. Stupid Senate.
Kirk
Balthisar:
I’m not. I use Duality 3 and therefore my MacOS X experience is Classic Platinum instead of Traffic Light GummiCandi (aka Aqua).
I’m sure more ‘skins’ will appear as time goes on. (Kaleidoscope X, anyone?)