I just sent an email to Gabe in response to his "should I get a Mac or PC" post. It's reproduced below in glorius technicolour as I spent fucking ages writing it, and it contains opinions that I've wanted to express here for a long time but haven't really been bothered to actually type them out:
I've used a PC for most of my life. My father has had computers in the house since I was a wee laddie (I'm 22 now), because he has been geeking it up since they cost as much as - and filled up - a whole building.
I've always been keen for getting into Macs though. They're gorgeous, and apparently they're harderbetterfasterstronger. I had a little bit of time with the G4s (at design school) soon after they'd come out, but I left before they had OSX installed so I didn't get that great a feel for them.
Since then I've still held this vague desire to get a mac laptop to compliment my PC workstation and make me multi-lingual/platformal (whatever). Last semester I went to a new uni though, and started working with some seriously specced out machines. I'm talking AU$15,000 dealies here. Dual G4, Gigs of ram, DVD burners, cinema displays, the works. I thought I would be in heaven.
Here's my theory about the artist/designer mac love affair thing:
When most designers go to school they don't even know how to turn a computer on. They learn all they know about computers on a mac - as has happened for shitknows how long - most of these schools (at least in Australia, and I'm pretty certain elsewhere) being kitted out with macs. So of course they're more productive on a mac, because that's all they know.
For someone who grew up using a PC, it's a massive step backwards. When I use these G4s I feel like I'm shackled, I don't know how to set it up to work as I like to, and I feel inefficient. I'm not saying that you can't customize these things, they fucking run Unix now, of course you can, it's just that I don't know how. I have all this PC knowledge, and then I'm starting from scratch with macs.
The crashing thing: I personally use 2 machines - one workstation for Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, coding - creation stuff - and the other a server for file-sharing, instant messaging, music playing, and other random crap. I keep the workstation system minimal and try to install only stuff that I'm using to work. It's got dual 19" monitors, and I use a remote desktop connection to the server machine. This gives me 3200x1200 desktop for working on, and another 1600x1200 of miscellaneous crap, which I can minimize if I don't want to be distracted (it's a little hard to explain effectively, but some screenshots - http://www.jaymis.com/jaydesktopUP.jpg, http://www.jaymis.com/jaydesktopDOWN.jpg probably help). Having only the essentials on my workstation minimizes crashes, because there's not the usual mish-mash of drivers and programs conflicting with each other. This system is also great because it really lets me multitask effectively, I can extract movie RARs on the server while I'm rendering a movie on the workstation, but control both seamlessly with one mouse / kbd. Oh, and I've managed to crash the G4s at uni probably about the same amount as I crash my home system, which is buggerall.
Next comes the money thing: As I've mentioned the Uni G4s cost as much as a new car. My system is nothing amazing, it's an AthlonXP I put together myself, plenty of RAM, plenty of hard drives, couple of nice monitors, and it would have cost me all up about four grand which I spent over a period of time. This thing doesn't have any noticable performance difference from the behemoth that I use at uni, I'm talking about general browsing / surfing / stuffing around, as well as rendering, resizing, filtering, and processing stuff, there is no noticable difference. I haven't gone as far as to time trial them, but hey.. I should.
If you get a mac you have to shell out all a big wad of cash all at once, plus get new copies of all your software and learn a whole load of new stuff, just to get yourself to the productivity level you already have with your current system (and nowhere near the efficiency you could get from an upgraded PC). From your posts I've gleaned that you're not really into PCs that much, you're a console guy, so the work you've put into learning how to make your PC do what you want will be wasted as you'll have to learn all the basic crap again.
What I'm saying is this: The fastest, most efficient computer for any person is the one they've grown up with and learned on. If you learnt everything you know about computers on a Mac, then you should get a Mac, if you've grown up with a PC, you should get a PC. If you're starting with computers for the first time, I'd probably say get a mac, because like Tony Hawk said:
If you don't know how to use a computer, you can use a Mac
http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/tonyhawk.html
If you do know how to use a computer though, the Mac will give you the shits, but by that stage you will have already mortgaged your house to pay for it, so you won't want to admit that you screwed up bigtime.
Having said all that, OSX is the most beautiful operating system I have ever seen. XP Aqua themes are just pathetic ripoffs, and XP's default look should be alternately pitied and scoffed at. The systems themselves - as we all know - are stunning, and I'm seriously considering getting one of the Mac keyboards - I seem to type so much faster with those babies, and of course they look the bomberest.
If you've got the dollars to burn, grab the sexiest collection of PC stuff you can get, and add a studio display or two and one of the apple pro keyboards (they're clear, clear is cool), or mix and match as you see fit. If you're really keen about the Mac thing, spend some quality time with one first. I don't mean have a bit of a click around on a friend's one afternoon, but spend a week trying to do everything on one. For me the love affair ended at 4am in the uni G4 lab, with a multimedia assignment due at 9am, and I was thinking "If I'd done this at home I would have been asleep by now".
In other news
Jaymis: by the way: http://crustacea.nhm.org/~dean2/crab.html
Jum.HouseHusband: dear got im going to love this
Jaymis: the MPG?
Jaymis: it's so fucking good
Jum.HouseHusband: yea
Jaymis: it's one of those things.. you read it and you go "this file that I am downloading is going to - in a quantifiable way - make me happier"
