Why are Macs better for Graphic Design?
So I've just landed myself a new job at a graphic design agency where they all use Macs. When I look at the processing power I see they're pretty similar to PCs I've used before, but nevertheless wherever I go Macs always seem to be the industry standard for graphic design. Does anyone know why this is? What is the reason they get chosen over PCs?
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Power wise, they're the same and now thanks to boot camp and Apple, Intel partnership anyone can Install Mac OS on other systems.
In short they're now an industry standard and people use them because they're easy to maintain.
If I get a Mac do I have to be like
I avoid using Flash in any website, I find it best to exploit CSS as much as possible. And thanks to HTML5 and CSS3 [2.1] you can now add many more things. Also, flash is heavy and don't forget Jquery! But then again I suck at Graphic Designing
*Thinks about hijacking skittles*
I should learn flash anyway.
AFAIK it's because there's a lot of software for it that's Mac only. That's the only thing I hear from people who do video editing, etc. Final Cut, Logic Pro, and some other programs are Mac only. I know a guy who's going to buy a macbook pro simply because he has to use Final Cut.
As for graphic design, it's either for the software, difficulty of totally fucking the office computers, or it's a throwback to some time when macs were "good for graphic design." Honestly I don't know why there would be any difference aside from software.
That's what I thought. Macs used to be the best for graphic design, but now its kind of leveled out and its just all that history of using a Mac that has run through to today.
To me, Macs seem to be able to open a lot of programs at once. I can have like 20 programs open at once and it still runs smoothly. Even switching back and fourth between them is very fast, whereas you try open that many programs on a PC and you'll be fucked. It seems as if PCs get 'tunnel-visioned.' Like if I was working on Photoshop for an hour then switched to Flash it would take a while for the computer to pull all the processing out of Photoshop and into Flash, whereas a Mac seems to be able to run them all consecutively.
Either way, I've never had a Mac before. It will be an interesting (possibly frustrating) change.
They don't bug you on needing an AV, they don't have a UAC, and are overall rather simple.
To add on, the screen is a killer and it requires far less cables than a PC, not to mention Adobe programs are less buggy on it. I had the MSCS5 installed on Win7 and it kept exiting because of some invalid key. Similar thing occurred to Vista but it cleared up. Might just be a coincidence, but I've had far less trouble with my 27" iMac than with my PC.
Maybe it's just the way the OS handles the programs. On my core i5 laptop I can have tons of shit open and there's no issue, but the i5 is a nice processor.
OS X does have a sort of UAC, though. Whenever you want to install anything you have to enter your password. At least that's how mine is set up. That's probably a security thing I could change. The root user doesn't have to enter a password.
They are easier to maintain, that's for sure. My iMac from '04 doesn't require any maintenance aside from running Cocktail every so often.
Good to know. I don't think I've ever legitimately bought software for my computers asides from a few games I play online. Even If Macs don't have as many torrents and stuff, they can still run everything in BootCamp right? Anyone had experience using Windows on a Mac?
Look at the $2000 computer you posted.
Now for $2000 you could build a PC way more powerful than that.
I know I could've gotten some beast of a compute, but my iMac's fun.
Maybe. My old imac is still pretty fast, but I don't buy the argument. For $2000 you could build a godly pc.
Yeah that's why I initially got a PC. I think if the majority of the industry I work in use Macs then it will just be easier. Plus Macs look sexy.
Congratz on the new job Skittles.:)
To understand why MAC is the prefered platform for graphic design you must understand something of the history of PC hardware (x86) architecture vs that of MAC hardware architecture. All PC hardware was based of the original IBM x86 architecture which had certain memory limitations as follows.
conventional memory
The first 640 kilobytes of an IBM PC's memory. Prior to EMS, XMS, and
HMA, real mode application could use only this part of the memory.
base memory
The lowest 640 kilobytes of memory in an IBM PC-compatible computer
running MS-DOS. Other PC operating systems can usually compensate and
"ignore" the fact that there is a 640K limit to base memory. This was
put in place because the original CPU - the Intel 8088 - could only
access one megabyte of memory, and IBM wanted to reserve the upper
384KB for device drivers. The high memory area (HMA) lies above 640KB
and can be accessed on MS-DOS computers that have an A20 handler.
High DOS Area
upper memory blocks (UMB) - A section of memory in the high DOS area
(the 384K address space between 640K and 1MB). Some such blocks are
used to store BIOS (video card and PC motherboard firmware, etc.), and
some are free. Of the 384K UMB; 128K is earmarked for video RAM, but
on most systems 32K of that video RAM will remain empty. Typically,
system ROM takes 64K (128K on PS/2s), and video adapter ROM takes 32K.
A typical non-PS/2 system with VGA video and no other adapter
interfaces will have 192K of unused UMB.
Due to these memory limitations in early to mid PC hardware development the PC had severe limitations processing the vast amounts of data required by graphic design.
The MAC on the other hand developed hardware architecture based on a Motorola CPU which did not suffer from the base/conventional/High DOS memory configuration limitations. This meant that MAC graphic design software could access the full amount of physical memory (unlike PC software). Until Vista a PC still suffered from some of these limitations due to the HAL maintaining backwards comparability in order to be capable of running legacy software.
Since the Intel/Apple partnership and the advent of a mainstream PC OS (Vista) that does not address memory in the aforementioned limiting fashion there is no real hardware advantage enjoyed by the MAC over the PC platform for the purpose of graphic design. However the graphic design industry is firmly steeped in the MAC culture as it was born and raised on this platform. Therefore the leading graphic designers in this world use MACs and if you want to be accepted and succeed in that industry you will learn to work on a MAC.
also, HFS+ is significantly better than any other filesystem at handling and storing large files.