Adamness, in your opinion, what are the inherent qualities still in a Mac that make them better at graphics than a Windows platform?
Well being around professional designers, I've found a big draw for Macs is the most superficial: the cool factor. It sounds silly, but walking into a meeting with a slick looking Apple and a big ugly Dell or HP makes a difference to the client. Most designers also have enormous respect for Apple because they have good design themselves. Everything from the product itself to the packaging it comes in is throughly thought over.
That aside, I think it comes down to a lot of the typical Mac vs PC debate. I asked one of my instructors why they still prefer Macs, and it pretty much comes down to ease of use and system resources. I can say that when having a big Illustrator, Quark or Indesign file, we need every bit of memory and cpu. An antivirus program using 50MB makes a difference. And when you're sitting in front of a computer all day, it's nice not having to worry about getting viruses and having the program crash.
There's also a somewhat minor thing in terms of the interfaces. I like how OSX doesn't give you the application background and window frames, which creates a much easier experience, especially when having multiple programs open. Not having the toolbars integrated into the main taskbar at top makes things easier and less cluttered. The dock in OSX is a million times better than icons all over the place. If I didn't have ObjectDock, especially after they added the drag-to-open ability, I'd just kill myself. But again, most designers don't want to have to deal with adding a bunch of programs and customizing. They just want stuff to work out of the box, which Apple provides.
I've noticed that font management is much better with Apples. Windows significantly slows down with around 500 fonts, but the Adobe font pack has 10k fonts. Any computer would be affected by 10k fonts, but in Windows, you
need to install a separate font manager like Suitcase. Apple displays, including their laptops, are probably the best there is. I've never seen a PC laptop with a display anything close to a MacBook.
It's certainly true that PCs are narrowing the gap with Apple, and PCs run the standard design programs quite well. I know firsthand of that. But I also know the top designers out there don't know what they're doing with all the ins and outs of running a well maintained PC, and even if you prefer Windows PCs, you know there is maintenance that needs to be done.
Of course, there are exceptions to this and I'm only talking about what I'm experienced with, which is graphic design. I mostly work with Illustrator and Indesign, but usually have Photoshop handy to alter an image. In video and film work, it's probably a mix of both. Apples usually lag in terms of the latest and greatest in hardware, which film and certainly people who work in 3D need, and which PCs provide. Nowadays anyone can use either platform they want, but there definitely are advantages in Apples.
I think I wrote too much.
