The Great Debate

Almost every time somebody comes into the studio for the first time, I get a comment along the lines of:

“You use a Mac?”

I generally don’t comment much beyond affirming that the studio is, in fact, entirely Mac-based. I am a very happy Mac user. I drank the Macintosh Kool-Aid a VERY long time ago (1988), but I don’t talk about it much. It seems like most people who bring it up (author’s note: the folks who comment on the Macs in the studio are not trying to spark debate, it’s just that an iMac is one of the first things you see when you walk in the front door) only bring it up to debate the merits of Mac vs. PC.

The question has come up a few times in the past couple of weeks, so I’m going to give you a little bit on my history as a Mac guy. I don’t care if you agree with me, I don’t care what kind of computer you use, I don’t care if you convert to Mac or not. If you have a PC and you love it, that’s great. Don’t change a thing! If you are thinking about buying a Mac, this is not meant to sway you. I don’t get a dime from Apple no matter if you buy one Mac or one hundred.

The first time I ever touched a Mac was in 1988, working on a few-year-old model in student media at Central Michigan University. It was a self-contained beige box with a keyboard and mouse. No hard drive, swapping 3.5″ floppy disks back and forth to use applications. It was completely different than any computer I had used to that point. The mouse alone was enough to distinguish it, but you also had the white screen with black type (as opposed to the black screen with green type). It allowed you to change type size and style and it showed you EXACTLY what you would see when you printed (WYSIWG was pretty novel in the mid- to late-eighties).

Over the next few years as I began dipping my toes into the world of design (by way of publication design) I used our Mac more and more frequently. When I got my first job at Kinko’s, my familiarity with the system allowed me to work as a typesetter in addition to my other job responsibilities. I kept working on Macs and kept loving it more and more.

Apple made a conscious decision to focus on the niche market of computer graphics very early on. They knew that they couldn’t compete with PCs, whose market share was pretty close to 100% when Apple first came on the scene. With their focus on design—both physical design of the Mac as well as the completely innovative user interface (the mouse and desktop)—they were catering to a very specific user set.

The strategy worked very well. Macs are the go-to computers of graphic designers around the world. In the early going, it was your only real option. As the hardware of both Macs and PCs have changed over the years, the software manufacturers have worked hard to make design an option on both platforms.

In the early going, design and publishing software on the PC was pretty dismal. Early PC versions of PageMaker (a blast from the past!) and Illustrator couldn’t hold a candle to their Macintosh counterparts. Over time, though, I have to admit that other than little things like key commands and the way certain menus are organized, the software packages are pretty much the same thing. You can accomplish the same thing on either platform, so now it does come down to personal preference of platform.

I’ve worked on both platforms, although my exposure to PC is very limited compared to my Mac experience. In my experience, though, I prefer the way the Mac works. The operating system (I can’t remember if we’re on Leopard or what other cat-name we’re on now) works very well. One of the things that I love about Apple is that they spend a lot of time and money on the actual design of the software—being innovative is a part of the culture at Apple and I appreciate that. And not just in the computer division, either. Sure you can get an MP3 player for less than an iPod, but I like the way the iPod works.

You can see Apple innovations turn up in non-Apple products all of the time. For me, it’s not about being cool or cutting edge or anything like that (when I bought my first iPod, it was the only game in town and I’ve stuck with it), it’s about supporting a company that actively works toward innovation. That being said, I have thus far steered clear of the iPod, although with my cell phone contract coming up soon, I may end up making that switch. Once again, though, not for the cool factor. I rarely take my cell phone with me when I go out, but it would be nice to have a phone that integrates all of my vital information with my computer so easily. I digress.

I think I have purchased about 10 Macs over the years (including the five I currently use for my home and the studio) and I’ve never had a significant problem with any of them. Sure, I’ve lost a hard drive or two over the years, but that is something that happens in the normal course of a computer’s life. The machines themselves are reliable. Very, very few random crashes (I think my two laptops have crashed a total of 8 times or so in the past three years), reliable performance, etc.

I’ve been a creative professional for a lot of years now and I can also say that no serious graphic designer I have ever worked with uses a PC. I’m sure there are some, but in every agency/company I have worked with/for it was all-Mac, all the time (web guys and other animators often use PCs, I know, but they are a different type of creative pro from pure graphic design).
Honestly, I’m not sure what got me on this tangent today. I guess I just wanted to wave my Apple flag.