CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • February 22, 2015 at 9:16 pm #73460
    KEVIN ROBINSON

    Member

    My son is a computer tech. And of course only believes in PC and rubbishes Mac. He has offered to build a hi-spec PC for half the price of the 27″ iMac I would prefer. So here in Australia that’s about $3600 for the iMac and about $1800 for the PC. I would like some kind of reassurance that spending so much money would justify the iMac. Keeping in mind I have about 20 years worth of work in archives I only occasionally use these days. Plus the fonts I’ve used over those years. I am concerned about things I’ve acquired over the time being scripts, paragraph styles, plug-ins. Main reason for upgrading is to keep with new technology, I’m still using a 2.8 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with only 4GB RAM, and haven’t been game enough to upgrade past OSX 10.6.8 and InDesign CS4.

  • February 22, 2015 at 9:34 pm #73462
    Tom Pardy

    Member

    From time to time I get asked by parents whether they should buy their child a Mac or a PC. I always reply by telling them to ask themselves which of their friends they can call at 10 (or later) on a Saturday evening when something goes wrong with the computer. Find out what sort of computer that friend has and get one the same. Tech help from a dealer is impossible at that time and their friend with the same machine will probably get them out of trouble with most of the things that go wrong.These days both platforms can do most things, even if one of them does one thing more smoothly than does the other.

    Having said all that, your archive does raise a significant issue. I have a friend who has many, many documents written in Publisher and switching to a Mac would be a headache for him. Similarly, as a Mac owner myself (yes, a 27” iMac) I have a number of things on my hard disk that would be difficult if not impossible to access if I changed to a PC. But boy! You sure will discover a whole new world when you move from your Duo to an iMac. Then, just when you come to terms with that, moving from InDesign CS4 to the latest will blow your mind.

    Good luck in the argument with your son. I have a nephew who is a computer tech and he is similarly one-eyed. (Not that I am.)

    • February 22, 2015 at 10:50 pm #73466
      KEVIN ROBINSON

      Member

      Thanks Furry. That’s really the kind of comments I was expecting. Just needed to reassure myself I wasn’t missing anything by changing.

  • February 22, 2015 at 9:48 pm #73464
    Caspian Ievers

    Member

    My 2 cents (I’m not an expert but have had to live with a PC for my design work for a while)
    PCs slow down over time to a greater extent than a Mac – so unless you want to call on your son/friend to do your system admin I’d go Mac.
    If the majority of your work is publishing via InDesign there is a benefit to having a PC as I discovered recently: Acrobat X1 Standard is on;y available to PC users. For whatever reason they have decided that Mac users can afford the $400 extra to buy the Pro version.
    And LiveCycle (for proper PDF form work) is only available for PCs too which is a bit lame too.
    Fonts: I bet that the fonts that were worth keeping would be fine on your Mac — you might have to lose some of those freebies you collected over the years but they weren’t really any good (I know form first hand experience when I rebuilt my library)
    Scripts etc will probably be fin as they are .js right?
    It’s a pretty even playing field but what does it for me is the lack of having to know a thing about ‘computers’ and still my Mac is virus free, as zippy as the day I bought it and hardly ever crashes and I’ve never had to call a guy to make it work/install/delete anything.

    • February 22, 2015 at 10:53 pm #73467
      KEVIN ROBINSON

      Member

      Thanks Caspian… My suspicions confirmed! And I only need Acrobat for making Print quality PDFs. So I’m all good!

  • February 23, 2015 at 4:37 pm #73476
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    From my perspective, it all comes down to support and maintenance. The PC is fine for people who have an IT department to fix problems and answer questions (get rid of viruses and malware, etc). But I just don’t have the time for that anymore. (But some people love doing that kind of troubleshooting! Nothing wrong with that.)

  • February 23, 2015 at 5:17 pm #73477
    Dwayne Harris

    Member

    I’m biased because I’ve been on a Mac for over twenty years (at work and personal).

    In the old days of Quark and InDesign there were always problems with cross-platform issues with the files (usually fonts). And some things did not convert correctly. Unless I”m mistaken, there was an issue with ligatures. Mac supported, but the PC did not (I don’t remember if it was true ligatures or fake ones). I think there were some other characters not supported on PC side

    And to be honest–I’d be lost on a Windows machine. I haven’t used Windows since my old laptop which had Windows 95 and 4 megs of ram.

  • February 24, 2015 at 5:10 am #73482
    Gert Verrept

    Member

    I’ve been working on a pc since 1990. I started with PageMaker 3 and a runtime version of windows. I worked with Mac’s too. For me, it all comes down to this, some like Windows (I love fiddling arond in the software and the settings) others don’t. Once you’re working in Indesign, there isn’t much difference. I can buy 2 pc’s for the price of one Mac (and it even will be faster). But, when it comes to the “looks and the feel” I love the Mac most. What should you buy? Try them out both if you can and follow your instinct.

• Author
  Posts