For the overall user experience I prefer Mac. I'm a graphic designer, so that sways my decision quite a bit. I do own a PC for gaming purposes though.
Why I think the Mac is better for graphic design:
1. It's better with large files and folders containing a lot of large files, especially the ones I deal with--I regularly deal with 1.5GB Photoshop files. That's not a typo--a gig and a half for ONE file, and sometimes I have a folder with 20 copies of that file in it. This much traffic will choke any PC I have ever seen. The Mac just whips right through it.
2. A lot of programs on the PC--CorelDraw comes to mind quickly--keep all their data internally as RGB and convert to CMYK when you print. That's an okay workflow fifteen years ago, when everything was sent to imagesetters separated. Nowadays, all workflows are composite and if you dump an RGB file into a composite workflow the colors will come out really strange. I did an experiment with my workflow--I took two copies of a file, converted one to RGB and one to CMYK, and ran them side-by-side on cheap vinyl. You'd have sworn they were completely different files.
3. It's easier to rename a file in the Mac Finder than it is in the Windows Explorer. It sounds petty, but when you've got 500 files in a job and they've all got weird names, being able to rename them quickly is a godsend. On a Mac I can hit down-arrow, press Return and type in the filename I want. If I press down-arrow and hit Return on a PC, the file opens.
4. Only the best software finds its way to the Mac. I was in an electronics store one day and looked at the "graphics" software. They had six different greeting card programs, nine different fake page layout programs, a whole slew of digital camera photo editors... Right now you're saying, so what? Well, the "so what" is that there are freelancers out there attempting to make a living with this garbage. They'll get a job that should be set in something real, like InDesign, and attempt to set the thing in MyPageCreator or whatever. Then they dump the files it creates on production and tell them, "here you are, you make it work." And you've got your boss, and HIS boss, and the person who's paying for you to print the magazine, drumming their fingers on the lid of your half-million-dollar platesetter which isn't running because every time you send a MyPageCreator file to print it crashes the whole machine. And you can't get it out into something like Illustrator because the one time you tried it, it managed to shove ALL the type on the page into a column one letter wide. Yes, I'm production-centric here but the point is clear: you can't select the wrong tools if you run a Mac because they don't make them for the Mac. There are advantages to not having quite as wide a selection of software.
5. Macs handle type better.
6. It's easier to find graphics-specific tech support if you've got a Mac. It is EXTREMELY rare to find a Windows IT guy who knows anything about this very complex software. If you find someone who really knows graphics, he's probably running a Mac.
7. Macs produce cleaner PostScript than Windows machines do. All high-end graphics output devices run the PostScript page description language. Windows PostScript can totally hang a RIP; Mac PostScript runs much more cleanly.
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