Originally posted by unit_number_43@August 01 2005, 9:31 PM
In the 80's and early 90's Mac systems had much better gamma correction on their monitors. Ergo mac became the standard in the art and design industry. Old habits die hard, but the design industry is slowly dividing between the two systems. To do a mac to pc conversion can be difficult, depending on alot of variables. For a single person to switch, it's no big deal.
:edit:
I forgot to mention another reason why mac's were so popular, especially in the 3d moddeling field. RISC(PPC) vs. CISC(x86). I won't go too deeply into the tech jargon, because it frankly confuses me sometimes. Sufficed to say a PPC chip of the same (and even lower) clockspeed as an x86 chip performed better because it had shorter pipelines. Floating point calculations on a PPC would absolutely demolish the CISC based chips. Not to mention that the RISC's often had much better effeciency ratings.
:/edit:
Here's a breakdown of the good and bad as I see it.
Mac
+ Reliable (apple built everything in that machine to work with that machine. no driver problems or incompatible hardware. it's gauranteed to just work.)
+ The Desktop (It's freaking beautiful)
+ Speed (like I said, apple built the entire system as a single unit. Everything is finely tuned and compatible.)
+ Easy (once you adapt to the way a mac works it becomes soooo easy to use)
- Software (there's a lot more software out there for windows than their is for macs)
- Gaming (that goes doubly so for gaming. There are only a handful of game titles available for the mac)
- Compatibility (sometimes you can run into some serious problems when passing files between a mac and a windows system)
- Expense (they ain't cheap)
Apple is moving over to an Intle based CPU instead of their PPC's. So if you are going to buy a mac, wait until those new chips are released. They should be out by 2006 on most systems.
Windows
+ Software (just about any kind of software can be bought for windows)
+ Expense (an x86 box is cheap to build and a windows liscence isn't too harsh either)
+ Gaming (you can't beat a solid x86 box for gaming, especially with a 64bit CPU)
- Unstable (you run into a lot of problems, not just with software, but also hardware)
- Scattered Support (You're dealing with multiple companies making each peice of hardware, getting help and servicing can be a problem sometimes)
- Attacks (Windows has more holes than Bush's WMD in iraq report)
- Just plain ugly (fess up, there isn't a pretty looking reasonable priced x86 machine out their, and XP out of the box is pretty ugly in itself)
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I would recommend a Mac if you have the money for one (remember, you're going to have to actually buy the software too, there's not much mac warez out there), and you're not going to be gaming...and you're not going to be doing alot of work with Windows machines.
If you can't meet those requirements then you'd be better off using a Windows machine.
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