**
Even if it’s not a home run, why is it a strike? By that measure, it’s no help to the Windows side, either.
I use both platforms fairly constantly. Actually, all 3, I should say: Mac OS 9.x, Mac OS X and Windows XP. None of them crash, ever, in my experience. I’ve had crashes in the past – with Windows 98, with Mac OS 8, but not with the OS 9 or OS X series, or with Windows XP. And that includes beta testing Windows XP.
However, I work in the print industry, and let me tell you, the Mac has some very key advantages, which factor in to these Adobe products you are mentioning. ColorSync and proper PostScript support.
I interned last summer at a printing house here in Lawrence, and we got all sorts of publications from all sorts of folks. Almost all Macs, which were a breeze to print, and a few Windows-using clients, too. One day a Windows client mentioned that he’d saved “so much” money by using Windows, and he didn’t see why anyone used Macs.
Thing he didn’t realize was that he actually paid more for printing, because printing Windows InDesign or XPress files involved more work. Windows’ support for color matching is nonexistent, and its PostScript routines have had the same bugs ever since Windows 3.1. Whenever we got files from Windows clients, we had to take them, open them on the Mac, reflow the text based on proper PostScript metrics, and rebalance the color in CMYK graphics, otherwise the Windows-hosed files would look like crap on the printed page.
Our printing machines were platform-agnostic. They’re just these big things that take raw PostScript code and press it on the page. They are certified by Adobe for proper PostScript output – which is why if you run an uncleaned Windows file through them, they end up all sorts of messed up.
Things have gotten better on the Windows side, from what I understand, now that they ask their Windows clients to run their documents through Adobe Distiller and just send the press .PDF files to the press. It’s gotten much better on the Mac side, since OS X’s lingua franca for all on-screen graphics is DisplayPDF, a form of PostScript.
So don’t say that the Mac has no advantages. In some fields, it’s pretty much the only choice.
I wouldn’t use it for basic business computing, like secretarial work. That’s not what they’re designed to do. Nor are they gaming rigs (which is what my Dell is for). But they are solid machines with a very important niche market.
