What makes a Mac better for designers?

Lil306

I've always wondered this, why do designers/artists usually select Macs over PC's.

What additional benefits do you get, or what seperates them from PC?

I'm a PC user, but will be buying a Macbook mainly for troubleshooting and having a play around with, but I'm also interested in webdesign etc and feel I may benefit with some more understanding

bosseyed

Didn't it used to be the case that Macs were better suited to graphics application for whatever reason, more power, or better applied power for that manner of work - or something along those lines? And by all accounts Apple OS s**ts all over Windows OS every day of the week for reliability, speed and functionality.

Or maybe its the one button mouse, nice and easy

Lil306

bosseyed wrote: »

Didn't it used to be the case that Macs were better suited to graphics application for whatever reason, more power, or better applied power for that manner of work - or something along those lines? And by all accounts Apple OS s**ts all over Windows OS every day of the week for reliability, speed and functionality.

Or maybe its the one button mouse, nice and easy

I understand, they're better applied but what makes them better applied?

Are the OS's like Snow Leopard coded better to work with graphics applications, do they benefit more from encoding, are the graphics better detailed, colour resolutions etc.

I have no argument over what is better, the only concensus you seem to see is that people who switch to Mac fall in love with them and never want to change. I personally wouldn't select a Mac only because I understand there are certain things you can't do on Macs (unless under emulators) that you can do on PC's (like gaming) so I'd always be a fanboy of a PC in that respect.

In the other respect, I'd also like a Mac because I know they're the preferred tool for encoding and graphics / web design. I'd really like to find out the reason why

I know my old boss used to love the multifunction touch pad on it and the way it installs programs (drag and drop)

JJ_Egan

Habit really from the early days of PC/Macs as more programs available for early Macs in that line of work .

jje

Chimpofdoom

I guess it's reliability of the mac.

I switched last year and I can honestly say.. I'm not going back to Windows or Linux!

After a year of constant use the system isn't sluggish, it's still fast and i've not had a single crash yet!

I do a bit of photography work (Not as my main job, i'm an engineer who works with apps that run in *nix environments!) and I can't explain it.. but it runs so much smoother than what windows or Linux did.

My gf she's a graphic artist.. her work used to use macs (well apple macs) and they switched to windows.. yet she has a macbook pro. She has a few niggles, but generally prefers the mac's stability and ease of use, to quote what she and everyone else says.. "it just works"

Edit:

found this thread about the same question! http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=423044

[Deleted User]

Lil306 wrote: »

What additional benefits do you get, or what seperates them from PC?

On a similarly spec, there shouldn't really be that much of a difference between the two platforms now Adobe have released 64 bit versions of their software for Apple and Apple have improved access to the hardware acceleration APIs on OS X.

Traditionally the notion of Mac = Creative probably comes from when that was the only market segment Apple put themselves in, now most of the difference will probably just come down to the quality of the display rather than the software.

Lil306

Thank you all for the links and posts

It has sort of clarified my opinion on the reasons why, has not deterred me from not buying a Mac since I was planning on doing it anyway, was mainly gauging interest

poppy10_2

JJ_Egan wrote: »

Habit really from the early days of PC/Macs as more programs available for early Macs in that line of work .

Yep, it's really a throwback to the early days when the major creative/design programmes like Photoshop, Premier and Illustrator were Mac-only. It was all about the software, the fact that the computers looked purty was secondary. Nowadays with all the major programmes available for Windows, (and in some cases running better on Win than on mac) there's no real reason to overpay by 2-3 times for an Apple machine.

amcluesent

>It was all about the software<

And the printers! For a while there, only Apple had the Adobe Postscript rendering in the laser printers so you got exactly what you saw on screen on the paper.

IIRC PCs of the era used Epson 9-pin printers to produce spreadsheets.

parallax_20

Get the best of both worlds. Find a similar spec PC for a fraction of the cost of a Mac, and dual boot both OS's. Looking on Amazon, Snow Leopard is about £25 for a single user license. Unless you're drawn to the lifestyle design of a Mac! Otherwise its just throwing good money away.

flyingscotno1

One of the major things that kept Macs out of Architects and design offices (or kept Windows machines in!) was the need to run Autocad which was windows only till this week.

That might mean people consider Mac more for those applications rather than fuss with virtual windows etc