> >>I agree that this is generally a useless, aggravating discussion. However, I >>think the fact that professional photographers, publishers, and graphic >>designers have all standardized on Macs and Photoshop is something that >>people should be reminded of once in a while. >>
I remember when we switched from pen-and-ink ruling and hot metal type to Macs. We had thrity-six people in the typesetting department, which management soon pared down to a dozen or so. It was a sad day when we threw out that huge old Robertson process camera that took up most of two rooms. One reason we chose Macs over anything else was cost. The Macs worked a little - but they were dead slow, and we had to learn a lot of things to "never' do. Our other options were proprietary systems that cost a fortune and could only set type, not modify or create art. Funny thing - over the course of ten years, our Prepress operators never really learned the difference between RAM and hard disk space. They were always complaining about running out of "memory", but they couldn't tell me if their hard drive was full or if they had a RAM shortage. They were really impressed when I bought G3's and G4's with lots of RAM and big hard drives, but still they managed to run out of memory... running the same small tasks and small vector files as they ran on their IIci with tiny bits of RAM and 10 mb HD... grrrr. I'd get so mad.... Windows was not even a workable solution at that time we bought Macs. I think that's where most of the Graphic Arts foundation of Mac phrenzy came from. Before Windows 95 (or more accurately Win 98) Macs clearly outperformed Windows boxes for the simple reason that Windows machines did not work at all running graphics programs. They crashed often and hard. Macs crashed a lot, too, but they were more pleasant crashes that did not require a complete re-install of the OS. A few years ago PC's started to run rings around Macs, but no dyed-in-the-wool graphics artist really wants to accept that simple fact. They've got too much history with Macs to change. Old dogs, sort of. Oh, recently Macs have started to improve a little, but now they're a sorta like Windows - the fastest machines require serious tweaking and multiple OS boots to run favorite applications, and to be really good you will have your favorite version of OS tweaked just right. The days of plug-and-play simplicity of Macs are over for sure, if there ever was really such a time (I had a hell of a time getting a simple modem and internet connection on a G3 once, and my four G4's still intermittently fail to logon to the server on startup, something I've never had happen with the Windows machines.) But like a tech at my shop once said with a grin, as he was installing a new NT server connecting our formerly all-Mac Apple-talk-slow group of computers: "the best thing that ever happened to Macs is Windows NT." -- John Mustarde www.photolin.com
