The ol' PC vs. Mac Debate

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I know this is taking the risk of starting a religious frame war, but any perspective that can be granted on this topic would be appreciated. Up until now, I have not given serious consideration to purchasing a Macintosh for my copious image editing activities. However, the G4 has me... let's just say... VERY interested. I am really a Mac person at heart...

I've had a PC for several years, and have piles of stuff for it, including an HP PhotoSmart scanner. I understand fully and completely that the HP hardware will not work on the Mac. That's fine because I plan to keep the PC and transition to the Mac platform slowly. Eventually I'll get a scanner for the Mac itself. For now, I'll do the image acquisition on the PC, then port it to the Mac for editing and printing, and perhaps even archiving to CD or DVD-RAM.

My question is... Is it crazy to switch mid-stream to a Macintosh? I mean, is it worth the trouble? I am really motivated to separate myself from Windows even though I know there isn't nearly as much software out there for the Mac. My theory has always been that more is not necessarily better. But from what I have seen of the G4... Now might be the time to start migrating away from the Wintel platform...

I appreciate any perspective on this topic...

-- Jeffrey Sevier (jsevier@one.net), January 16, 2000

Answers

Whatever advantages the Mac may or may not have in general (I have both platforms but am 99 percent Mac), the G4 is an absolutely amazing processor for running Photoshop. The claims are not just hype. After a few months with this machine I'm still startled how fast all image editing tasks are when used with an Altivec coded application (that means Photoshop, for now).

-- John Lehet (justme@well.com), January 16, 2000.

I use mac & PC desktops, and own both mac & pc laptops. It's a good year to be a mac fan. The G4 is really great hardware, and with built in USB and firewire, you'll do fine with newer peripherals. I'm more than a little excited about the forthcoming OS X, which brings what unix had 20 years ago to the mac world. :) Finally preemptive multitasking, protected memory, and a microkernel. The power of modern unix with a great UI. With the increasing market share from imac sales, support is increasing from software and peripheral makers. OK there are some holes for the Mac in certain software areas, but for multimedia and publishing mac is great. My brother just got the low end G4 for $1699 and loves it.

Disclaimer: Apple stock was my best investment this

-- benoit (foo@bar.com), January 16, 2000.


Ok, I don't know ALL the techno-babble. I do know that the G4 is FAST. Faster than anything Intel or AMD can come up with in the very near future. If you want to switch to the G4 be prepared to spend more money on software. (It's like if your old machine was a 486 running Win3.1 and your new machine was a PIII with 98. Don't expect the old software to work under the new OS)

-- David Erskine (davide@netquest.com), January 16, 2000.

DITTO. I, too, began with Apple, then to Mac, then to Power Mac, Now to G4. I spend most of my time presently working in Windows NT on an engineering level PC at work (software engineering)and on the web at home on Windows 98 on my Gateway Solo Laptop for convenience.

Photo/video editing is the most stressful activity you can do on a computer. It maxes out the processor, the ram, and fills a hard drive in the blink of an eye and that hard drive better be the best. You'll even want 2 video cards to support two monitors. You need a clydesdale to pull that kind of plow; the PC is a thoroughbred. Now the thoroughbred computer will get the appreciation of friends as it sits on your desk but the clydesdale is the ONLY one that will get the work done for you. Trust me. I bought a GATEWAY with firewire to interface with my Canon GL1 and it cannot see it, cannot see it at all. So, back it went to Gateway. Another piece of advice...don't let your PC see any of your editing. Buy the Mac with the Apple Editing software or Adobe Suite, and use your thoroughbred for EVERYTHING else.

Robin Bishop Temple Productions

-- Robin Bishop (bishop@boulder.net), January 16, 2000.


Hmmm... Well all I know is what I've actually tested and I work for a retailer of both Mac and PC. We had a couple of machine set up and were benchmarking them in photoshop 5. One was a G3/450/128MB/SCSI, a new G3iMac DV, and a 600Mhz AMD Athlon and the Athlon smoked the Macs hands down, Apple reps were in the store for the weekend and had no answer for the results they saw. Honestly I didn't expect it to go down like that, I can also say that when I go to the Photoshop conferences and see the Powerbooks running the LCD projectors, that damn those things are slow. The Macs are very good machines and their biggest advantage as far as I see it is that you can almost bet on widespread compatibility since there are no longer clones. The PC market is kind of a pain since products can't possibly be tested on every configuration. I get excellent color matching and desktop publishing work off my PC's and when I use Macs at work I just don't see the benefit I would get by switching. As far as video editing, Avid cinema just dropped all Mac support and I was talking to a customer about a machine and he worked for NBC and he said NT machines are used for Monday Night Football so NT is a very good Video platform and widely supported by excellent professional products like Speed Razor and Trinity. 3D is totally NT as Maya and SoftImage are the kings of modeling. Also many excellent high performace RIP's are made for Windows (as well as Mac) and you could always slap on Linux, dual boot and run the most stable OS out there today. Oh yeah, then read one of John Karmak's (sp?) interviews ( the developer of Quake) and he discusses how Mac is just catching up to PC in terms of horsepower, games are the most demanding application on todays machines. Hmm... what else... multitasking, PROTECTED MEMORY!!!, all these standard Windows features. I can't begin to tell you how many people tell me at the store that they just lost a huge graphics when Photoshop spit up on their Mac, and of course many customers are looking for OS8.6 since 9 is wreaking havoc on some machines. Apple makes good equipment and I wont take that away from them, it's that I feel ( and I use the machines at work) that their performance claims are overinflated. P.S- dual monitors are cake on Win98, acutally Win98 supports up to 9 monitors. Matrox G400 Dualhead card uses 1 AGP slot, two monitor outs and excellent 2D and 3D performance.

-- Cris Daniels (danfla@gte.net), January 17, 2000.


Let's see. Ninety percent of the PCs in the world run Windows. Adobe says 50 percent of their PhotoShop sales are for the Mac platform.

I have a Mac at home, and use Windows NT and Linux at work all day. I use a Mac at home because it is compatible with all other platforms, setting up a color management system is easier on a Mac than it is on Windows, and plug and play actually works on a Mac.

As for Chris' comparision of a G3/450 vs. Athlon 600, maybe he should have tried a G4/450 vs the Athlon. The Altivec engne in the G4 speeds PhotoShop up to 10x over the G3 (which I have at home). I seriously doubt the Athlon was 10 times faster than the G3. I'm also glad to see Microsoft got around to multiple monitor support only 10 years after Apple.

If you're considering making the switch this is a great time to do so. Mac OS 9 is extremely stable on my G3/450. No crashes in two months of intense use. Mac OS X promises to be even better. The UNIX underpinnings will unleash the full potential of the G3/G4 processors.

Where do you want to go tomorrow?

-- Darron Spohn (dspohn@photobitstream.com), January 17, 2000.


Also, Cris is dead wrong about Avid discontinuing Mac support for its video editing products. They tried to migrate users to NT last year, and the outcry from professionals nearly knocked them out of business. Most pro video editors are cross platform, but they count on the Macs to be up and running. Bringing a dead NT machine back to life under deadline pressure is one thing; pulling the external hard drive off of the hiccoughing Mac, plugging into another one across the hall, and continuing the job is another. Also, the G4 is very useful for compression algorithms (tenfold increase with Altivec). Video editing uses that. But we were talking about digital cameras, I believe...

-- John Lehet (justme@well.com), January 17, 2000.

Well I never said it wasn't a good machine, and the Athlon was running equvalent operations at least 3 times faster than the G3. Video editing is just as good as on Mac however most pros use UNIX anyway. I did the tests and Apple was there to see it so reguardless of what you believe, it happened and I have a hard time believing that a G4 is 10 times faster than a G3, even Apple doesn't claim that. If you've never used a fast new PC dont' make assumptions.

-- Cris Daniels (danfla@gte.net), January 18, 2000.

Not that the g4 is 10 times faster than the G3, but that altivec gives a 10 fold speed up to a narrow range of things that take advantage of it (just as MMX can dramatically help certain things, like large gaussian blurs). A video editing pro mentioned that he got a 10X speedup when the Final Cut Pro software was upgraded to take advantage of alitvec.

-- John Lehet (justme@well.com), January 18, 2000.

Chris, Apple was not there to see it. The people you had on site were low paid enthusiasts who volunteered to help answer questions about Apples. I know the people who help recruit these enthusiasts. Apple does not fly engineers around the country to demo their computers, they pay Mac fans a token wage to help out.

-- Darron Spohn (dspohn@photobitstream.com), January 18, 2000.


Cris, Darron:

Regardless of the benchmarkings and the cold hard numbers... a lot of this comes down to perception. The G4 is just flatly a more efficient machine, both at processing huge amounts of data (as with images) and at managing computer-human interaction. (In other words, it has a much better interface). Now that the processing has been enhanced I can see where the speed would be that much better. PCs have always had inferior architectures that depend on brute force jury rigging for imaging, a process that they were never ever designed to accommodate. What we have now are just bigger, badder versions of the original 8088, which if we recall were accounting machines for the most part. I have always argued that you can't keep getting bigger and bigger. At some point you have to become more efficient. It appears at least to me that is Mac's advantage. So regardless of whether or not the G4 is actually ten times faster, I have seen and used a G4 and know it to be far and away superior for my needs to any PC that depends on Pentium-class architecture. That might be simple perception. One thing I do know for a fact that Windows, both 9x and NT, is a simply AWFUL operating system.

-- Jeffrey Sevier (jsevier@one.net), January 18, 2000.


I also have both MAC and PC in my graphics studio. I'm a long term MAC person. But, hey! I gotta admit that the DELL 500 MHz NT puppy is excellent on Photoshop! It cooks!

In fact, unless you are doing large (8" x 10") 400 to 600 dpi files all the time the G4 is hardly needed at all. For 72 dpi web stuff it is shear overkill.

V

-- Verne Robinson (widmagic@pacbell.net), January 23, 2000.


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