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If somebody offers you swapping your PC for a mac cold turkey: would you do it?

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40hz:
Yeah... I've never really understood the received wisdom that graphics and video editing is better on a Mac. I mean, I understand the source of the "myth" but over the past 7 or 8 years (or more) as far as I know/can tell, it hasn't applied. Having said that, I think that 40hz point was more that the software that is available for the Mac platform for graphics and video manipulation is as good as that available for Windows...
-Darwin (August 28, 2008, 12:38 PM)
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Not so much that.

I think what I was trying to say (obviously not too well) was that you need to take into consideration what happens once your file leaves your desktop and goes out to a 4-color printshop, professional CD mastering studio, or design agency.

These people are expecting Mac files. (At least around where I live.) Show up with a file generated under Windows or Linux and you get put on notice that the money-back guarantee does not apply to your file if anything goes wrong.

It's a little like sex. Whatever you do in the privacy of your own home (or desktop) is pretty much your own business. What you do outside it is subject to local community standards, customs and ordinances. ;D

40hz:
There are different choices for video and sound but the professional tools available on both platforms are very good. ProTools on the Mac probably has the edge but only if you want to have a pure recording studio setup  and don't use the computer for anything else. Even so there is probably much greater choice on a PC even at professional level when you take into account the purely PC manufacturers producing video and audio equipment and software.-Carol Haynes (August 28, 2008, 12:54 PM)
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The choices are better (or at least more numerous) on the PC side. I use Cubase, Sonar, and GigaSampler. But anybody that does serious music work on a PC will tell you that, unless you want to have a grand day out troubleshooting constant bits of weirdness, you'd best dedicate your studio machine to your music app(s) and nothing else. General rule of thumb is start with a clean ultra-minimal Windows install and then only load  your music software. That means no antivirus, firewall, or other security software; no power management; minimal (or no) network protocols; etc. - which IMHO renders the machine unsuitable for general computing use.

And yes, there are more hardware choices for Windows music apps. But the industry heavies and big studios pretty much all use ProTools. If you ever get a crack at working with a ProTools studio setup you'll understand why. It's very fast and fluid once you learn it - and time is money in the recording industry.

Years ago the complaint was levelled that Windows was not truly WYSIWYG for publishing - but that complaint really died with the introduction of TrueType Fonts.

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Not so much TrueType per sce. What really did it was that the makers of various high-rez output devices (i.e. Linotronic, Fiery, et al) finally caved on their "Postscript Only" position and updated their raster image processors (RIPs) to correctly handle TrueType. Later on they added the ability to directly RIP Adobe PDF files and the issue became moot for most of the places that wanted to use TrueType. They just sent PDFs and that was the end of it.

Personally, I think the best quality type output comes from a RIP of either a Quark or InDesign file using "foundry quality" Postscript Type-1 fonts. PDFs always lose something in the translation. The letter shapes and metrics get distorted. It's subtle but still there if you know what to look for.

But most people have never seen old school typography so it doesn't really matter. If you've never seen it it doesn't exist. ;)

Deozaan:
My answer is emphatically no!

I've had jobs where the computers used were exclusively Macs, but I would never (in the foreseeable future) trade in my PC for a Mac.

ingkiller1:
I would not even consider it! I have used Macs at school and I will never use another unless required to. Software is way too expensive compared to a PC and the sheer amount of software available for great prices or free compared to the MAC is incredible not to mention the extreme amount of customization that can be done to PCs for gaming is undeniable. I have never seen a MAC with a Quad SLI Nvidia GeForce or SLI configured Radeon.

Not to mention Water cooling... so awesome.

techidave:
Let's look at the problems of having Macs on a Windows network.  One year ago we bought 8 of the white MacBooks and 2 MacBook Pros.  At first we used Boot Camp to run Windows XP, now we run it with Parallels but only because Boot Camp didn't support XP sp3 ( in june 2008) maybe they do now.

As a tech person for a school district I find them hard to do anything with. I image them using NetRestore to a firewire external hard drive.  Creating an image takes over an hour and restoring an image is around 40 minutes.  Compared to ghost this is unexceptable in my books.

Apple told me they would connect to a W2k3 server with no problems.  Not!  I had to turn on some macinstosh services first.  You cannot easily map drives like you can on a pc.  Creating an alias is as close as it comes.  In my books the dock is a joke.

Even those accounts setup as an administrator do not have full rights to all folders without logging as a root user.  That takes some work to "turn on" that feature.

Also, there is no "all users" folder to put shortcuts on.  Apple told me that it would connect with a projector without doing anything special.  Not!  You have to turn on mirroring first.

I believe their iLife software to be difficut to use.  I find burning a cd to be more difficult than on XP.

Apple brags up how their batteries last 4-6 hours but if you change the settings on a pc to match the apple defaults, it would do just as good in most cases.

the one advantage of a macbook running XP is it does run XP good and fast.  Boot up time is much faster than a pc.

I think there is good quality software for a pc that will match the mac software.  a lot of our students do not like the macs at all.  The teacher is probably one of the few that do.  

At the risk of sounding negative against macs, I am not 100% against them, only 90%.   ;D  I do think they have their place but I believe that will be short lived as their is continued improvements in Windows software.

Just my two cents worth,
Dave

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