Mac, what's the deal?

I have decided that I'm getting myself a laptop and I have decided it's gonna
be a Mac also. People says it so much better for designers, and it's the design industry's choice. I just love the look of Mac OS X and how it looks. The Laptops
are also very appealing.

The thing I'm wondering about, what's the deal? What is it making it so much more
better for us designers?

Regards

I think that we may want to abstain from such subjective terms as 'better' when discussing macs here. There have been some historically heated arguments about which is better, why it's better, why the alternative sucks, etc.

Here are the reasons why I like macs, and you may take from this what you will.

When I had my mac, I experienced an unparalleled ease of use, wherein I never had to deal with problems such as paging file (scratch disk) size, networking isues, spyware, adware, and a bevy of other problems that I can't even think of right now.

Now you may say that those issues have nothing to do with actual designing, but you'll find that they actually do. You see, time spent addressing any of the above problems is time not spent designing, and accordingly making money, if you are working in the professional arena. Ideally, you'd like to be able to sit down on your computer, get to work, and not have to deal with any superfluous issue that ultimately doesn't directly effect your ability to design. Often times however, a certain job depends on your ability to read your e-mail, download a file, etc, and when your internet is 'on the fritz' for some anonymous reason, you're unable to do those things. In my experience, internet will never just not work for some indeterminable reason on a mac, wheras on my PC, it very often will, and it's virtually never as a result of my ISP experiencing a problem on their end.

Now as far as Mac's supposed superiority specifically dealing with designing, I can't say that I know quite all the reasons, but I know that the built-in color management system lets your monitors' colors be as true to life (or at least as true to a print version of a given document) as possible. I'm afraid I don't know much more than that, as far as specific designing issues go, but it is my opinion that the issues I mentioned earlier are specifically related to designing, because I believe that the more time you can spend, unabated, making art, or designing, then the better the end product will be.

Macs have pretty much been grandfathered into the design world. It was the first to use many of the designers programs and many of the print houses in the early days of digital format printing only used Mac so the designers had to use what they used. Mac and PC compatibility was almost nothing back then. So macs have just been what designers have used sense. Since its not broken why fix it? Of course now some designers are moving to the PC realm, but Macs still dominate.

I use both, and both do a great job at what they do.

There really aren't that many advantages specifically to designing anymore... Photoshop and all of the Adobe, Corel, and Macromedia apps are identical on both platforms, and are compatible between each other.

Like pganguly said, it's really just that the whole system is easier to use, with less headaches to worry about, etc. It's also much better looking, with a much better attention to detail. After using a Mac for a few months, and then going back to Windows, you'll notice how disjointed and inconsistent Windows is. With a few exceptions, Mac applications will work and behave like all of the other Mac applications.

On the other hand, some specific design apps or drivers don't work on the Mac, so if you are doing anything specialized, make sure it works on the Mac before you get one. For instance, an Add-on for Corel Draw that I wanted to use is PC only (so is Draw now, actually). Also, some special drivers for a sublimation ink are PC only. So if you do anything specialized at all, make sure there is a Mac version. Other than that you should have no problem finding Mac compatible stuff, or good alternatives.

For me the whole Mac thing is pretty intangible... Or a lot of little things add up to make the difference. The whole system is just more polished and friendly, while also having many ways to increase productivity. It's much more flexible than Windows, and you always have the command line to do some techy stuff too. When I first started using the Mac, whenever I had a problem or question I'd start looking for a "Wizard" or dialog box like I would in Windows, only to find that 9/10 times, all I had to do is drag and drop.

But if you ever play any games at all, don't get a Mac if it will be your only computer.

In the beginning, Macs were the ONLY option, not just a lucky first choice of designers. The original Mac came out with a full GUI when MS still only had DOS. The original Macintosh launched the entire desktop publishing revolution, which is why they became the standard. Plus they are easy to use and pretty.

I use my mac and my pc and own copies of Photoshop CS for both. I actually use the PC more for designing just because my mac is a laptop and its more comfortable on a full setup to design. BUT, if I had a powermac, for sure i would be editing on that. I wouldn't get a mac laptop expecting to want to edit and design more on it. I thought I would but so far, nope havent. Dont feel as comfortable designing on it.

NOW THE OS !!!!!!!! OMG it defeats windows anyday. Its so much more stable and smoother. It looks beautiful also and I love how it opens and you edit stuff and dont have the grey background on the window so you can actually see windows and stuff behind it. so you can click the desktop or whatever. Its great.

EXPOSE rules. cant wait ti TIGER comes out too!

PROPRIETARY DVD PLAYER

Ugh...

Windows has no proprietary dvd player. Mac does.

I had to pirate a divx player, then hack the registration, which all in all took about 15 minutes before I could watch The Punisher, which I just bought on DVD, but the fact remains. You'll often find that all the little things just work easier, faster, and more intuitively. Like Deker said, drag and drop. When in doubt, with a mac, just drag and drop.

Oh, and that problem I often hear from PC users considering a switch is that they have to learn a new operating system, and why do that when they can just stick with what they know. And sure, theres some validity to that, but if you're a somewhat seasoned Windows user, Mac OSX functions so intuitively you will virtually never be at a loss for an answer when it comes to how to do something.

Oh yeah, and when someone says 'what the hell do you mean intuitively?' I mean that if you think 'I wonder if it'll work this way' odds are, yes, it will work that way.

ie. Drag and drop.

Yeah, and this other dvd playing prog kicks WMP's ass because it's a whole hell of a lot like mac's DVD player. And the whole program is like 4 megs.

yeah the best thing happend to me with my mac yesterday, i sent a huge massive ugly indesign file to print from which it took an hour to process after processing i find that i sent it to the wrong printer, as i curesed I dragged the job from that printer and dropped it onto the other printer and BLAM it prints saving me another hour! /me hugs his mac

Thanks for all the info.

Well, I'm getting a new laptop anyhow. And it will almost 100% be a mac.
Just for small designing and carry.

I use my 12" powerbook for designing and coding at work, as opposed to the 3ghz Dell with 2gigs of ram that sits next to it, with the dual 19" displays, so that should tell you something.