[blackohio]

Im a designer, used mac's for over the last 13 years. Im in-house for a very small firm and Im currently bringing my macmini with me to work and home each night. Im not too keen on the idea in the long run.

So, I have to begin the process of convincing the owner to either buy another mini like I have or look at a PC. Im assuming costs will be close for performance with it edging out to the PC on the cost side of the spectrum.

The plus side of running the mac is software. I already have it all. So with that I do print design 90% of the time with maybe 10% video/web.

If I jump ship at work I need it to be fast and multitask well. Typically I run p-shop, illustrator, in-design and bridge simultaneously.

 

[BIGHITR]

Apple laptop sounds like your best bet.

 

[PepperJester]

MacBook Pro for sure. You can easily run windows on it too if you ever feel the need to.

 

[jonKranked]

definitely macbook or mb pro. apple sells refurb units on their website, so you might be able to find a good deal if you're tight on funds

 

[AngryMetalsmith]

Tell the owner that you would have to purchase an entire new Creative Suite to be PC compatible. Tell him you can run windows a Mac, and then talk him into a 27" iMac ( refurbs are cheap ). Keep the mini at home and transfer files with a thumb drive.

 

[H8R]

Hackintosh


Spend the coin on a very powerful PC, then install Mac OS on it.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-install-mac-os-x-on-a-pc-without-using-a-mac/

 

[blackohio]

Tell the owner that you would have to purchase an entire new Creative Suite to be PC compatible. Tell him you can run windows a Mac, and then talk him into a 27" iMac ( refurbs are cheap ). Keep the mini at home and transfer files with a thumb drive.

He's not sold on a pc. We talked about it and I mentioned I did'nt have an aversion to working on one, we have the discussion about how the makes have in the past made better use of 64-bit architecture.

Technically we'd have to buy a new creative suite anyhow to be fully legal, since individual licenses don't technically transfer to professional use. But that's neither here nor there really.

As for buying an imac, dont need it as I have a high-end 25" monitor right now anyhow and it does the job quite well and is super color accurate.

I can't justify paying for an imac just for the monitor when a great one is already in my office. Im not really looking to be sold on apple products, I'm quite familiar with them from the past 13 years of work. I wanted to get the opinions of some of the PC users out there that use them for desktop publishing. I think the hacintosh idea isnt actually a bad one given the cost.

View from my office and the 4th fastest mkv gti in america, and hopefully soon to be #1 again.

 

[H8R]

My daily graphic work is done on a Dell Core i5, 8GB or ram running Win 7 and it screams. I mostly run CorelDraw X5 suite and one or two raster apps at the same time. I have Photoshop, Photo Paint and GIMP installed to tackle most anything a client throws at me. The system rips through anything I throw at it.

 

[local717]

I have 2 Graphic Design jobs, with PC (custom built tower) at one and Mac (imac 27") at the other, and a mac mini and macbook pro at home. The PC is running CS4 and the Mac is CS5. I would prefer the Mac over the PC any day, and the PC is even much faster! The creative suite on mac is just a lot more user friendly. Good example that drives me crazy about the PC, is that when I need to go through my font list, mac displays a sample of the font in Illus or PS, the PC only does this in PS... May not seem like a big deal to some, but I have a crazy amount of fonts on all my computers, and having a sample really helps. There are some other differences too, the font thing was the first that came to mind. The amount of time wasted trying to sort through fonts vs the extra a Mac would cost would make me lean towards a Mac any day, and thats just one example...

 

[moff_quigley]

Used or refurb Mac Pro desktop. My wife uses the same list of programs as you. 8 core Mac Pro with 8gb ram, SSD etc. is what she has. Nice machine.

 

[IH8Rice]

whatever you get, id stay away from used or refurb personally

 

[eaterofdog]

If you install your software on the business computer, the owner better hope and pray you don't ever get audited. All it takes is one pissed employee calling BSA and they will be chin-deep in sh!t for years.

 

[zdubyadubya]

whatever you get, id stay away from used or refurb personally

I would have totally agreed with you until I purchased two Apple refurb products. Both have been LESS trouble than the two most recent MBPs and AppleTVs I bought new. Everything has been covered by AppleCare of course, but just having to go into the apple store sucks. The refurb ipod touch for my daughter (she's only three if you are wondering why i went cheapo) and refurb macbook i got my wife (killer deal on a sweet machine) have been perfect. I would probably give a thumbs up to buying Apple refurb products.

 

[BeerMe]

Typically there would be a couple issues that would dictate this decision for you/your boss if you were working for a larger company. (I don't actually know how many employees work with you).
The company's network for one. Most IT managers are either set up for a Windows network or a Mac network and by all personal accounts hate trying to accomodate for the other. We have one Mac in our entire building and it gets looks from our IT everytime they pass it.

The other would be personal preference = working efficiently/quickly = more money being made. If you're used to using Apple's shortcut keys then I would highly recommend sticking with Apple and using this as a selling point. I spend 38 of 40+ hours a week on a PC. And while I know that Mac like the back of my hand those two hours I spend on it have a 20 minute brain switching period in the beginning. Its not impossible to do but I always catch myself using PC shortcut keys in Photoshop or Illustrator when I'm on the Mac. Its a waste of time when I could technically have done that task on my PC given the same software/printer/other hardware/etc.

 

[blackohio]

I guess some of the guys are slightly missing the point here or Im not asking the question correctly. I have the mac side of the argument on lockdown. I know about refurb, used, mbp, macpros etc. Im well aware of software licensing, and network related issues both on mac controlled networks as well as Win NT.

The big question really was how do newer PC's handle the workloads. I know the shortcut differences will be annoying and have almost 15 years experience with adobe products on apples OS platforms. My last PC experience was about 14 or so years ago running quark, crel and pshop and it drove me crazy. Seemed to need constant reboots, programs were buggy and font handling sucked as well as dealing with a lack of windows printable fonts. However I know that systems architecture has greatly been improved.

I didnt know about the font preview's on the PC, super annoying. Typically I stick with gotham, knockout or helvetica for body or headline type but theres always alot of font searching for one time use headlines and having to jump between programs to preview or go to another program entirely is annoying. I hate it when I have to use fontbook and wished some of the OS9 font handling software still existed.

My ex has a hackintosh she had built recently and I talked with her lastnight about it and said it's a needy bitch with constant patches and updates as well as sleep issues and numerous unresolved permission issues. After a decade of bulletproof apple machines im not really looking forward to increasing my headaches so thats been eliminated.

When I say small company I mean small. We're a high(er) end tuning and repair facility that specializes in VW, Audi and BMW. I do a fair amount of printwork and were working on setting up a small in-house agency. I don't need a workhorse like I had a magnaflow as i'll never work on a 1,000 page print catalog. Just something that wont cause me headaches - I just wasnt sure if the PC side has caught up. I know they can tend to be faster at some stuff, but I have BAD prior experience on them doing print work, but once again that was almost 15 years ago.

 

[BeerMe]

Hmm, I guess its hard to answer your question then. I work on a higher-end PC and yes it does occasionally crash on me. Not often but it happens. The benefits of being on a PC (Windows or Linux based) have always outweighed those occasional crashes for me. It doesn't help that I run on 64-bit Windows because 64 is generally more buggy than 32-bit. But if you buy a pre-built PC like an HP or Dell then you should get plenty of trouble-free productivity out of it for years. Windows has come a very very long way in 15 years and hardware even further in that time. Hopefully this helped.

 

[local717]

To try and answer your original question a little more directly. The PC I use is pretty high end, but even that can't operate CS4 in the 64 bit, I HAVE to use the 32bit version. But, with that being said, I can have PS, Illus and bridge open at the same time, and go back and forth between the programs with no issues, as long as it's in 32bit... The font issue is a pita! But, being that I can run all these programs at once, if I'm working in Illus, and need a font, I can check in PS. Still sucks, cause Mac doesn't have this issue...

 

[blackohio]

Yeah, I think for the cost assciated to build a PC i'd like to run we might as well buy another mac. I run a new macmini at home with 8gb ram and it's a pretty strong workhorse. Only time it feels buggy is large in-design projects.