Professionals switching

On Aug 31, 2005, at 9:22 AM, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:

> At 18:24 -0700 UTC, on 2005/08/30, Marilyn Matty wrote:
>
>> On two design lists I belonged to, there have been many discussions
>> initiated by designers who work on PCs that can't find jobs in
>> companies because they don't have experience with Macs. As I've
>> worked in recruiting, I've pointed out that companies hire not just
>> on portfolio quality, but on how someone will work in a team and how
>> quickly people can accomplish particular goals, and PC people are
>> often at a disadvantage when trying to break in to Mac environments.
>>
>
> Interesting. Would you care to share what sort of problems they run
> into?

Keep in mind that Rupert Murdoch, Sy Newhouse, Art Sulzberger,
Richard Parsons, Bruce Crawford, Maurice Levy, etc. do not buy tens
of thousands of Macs because they care about the ultimate happiness
of their creative and production people with the equipment they use.
And at the Conde Nast/Fairchild/Advance and NY Times families of
companies, everyone gets Macs, even the suits and IT guys, so they
will all be on the same page.

The superior color technology offered by the Mac enables colors to be
more accurately fine tuned for output, and therefore fewer customer
complaints and make goods. The savings in advertising makegoods and
in time will be very significant, and it would run into many millions
of dollars every year in advertising production overtime charges and
makegoods alone. It's only recent that PCs have been able to display
millions of colors, and there is nothing in the PC world that comes
close to Colorsync, which is the industry standard (and was developed
in partnership with the International Color Consortium) for
calibrating monitors and delivering color fidelity. And virtual color
proofing for print is a huge time and money saver that's becoming
increasingly feasible and popular, and what you see on a PC is less
likely to be what you'll get on press than when proofing on a Mac.

http://www.apple.com/pro/training/colorsync/

Macs were designed from the ground up to WISYWIG printed type - a 10
point font on screen renders as 10 point type would on a printed
page. PCs suck bigtime at handling type - they've never been able to
do automatic ligatures on the system level, and kerning, tracking, 10
point type looks like 14 point type, etc.

And something as simple as a corrupt font on a PC can bring InDesign,
Quark, Illustrator down for the count until the font is identified
and removed. On a PC, it often isn't so easy to locate the problem
file, and designers can have hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of
fonts loaded and ready to go.

Prior to every big release of Windows, Bill Gates always threatens
that Windows will deliver superior font rendering, manipulating and
display, but to date it never has. And to date Windows does not have
significant system level font management; I've got thousands and
thousands of fonts, and I've been chugging along just fine with
FontBook. However, I think Steve Jobs has been taking Gate's threats
about Longhorn seriously, which is why type display and management is
even better in Tiger.

Stuff like trapping is difficult to do on a PC - it takes longer and
the results are often not as good even in the most expert hands.

Try dragging and dropping high resolution graphics and articles
between applications in large sized or imposed documents on a PC in
applications like Photoshop, Quark and InDesign. Stuff like this
might not mean much for Excel users, but to companies that need to
churn out ads, newspapers, magazines, video and film, time is money.
And Final Cut Pro totally changed the film/video landscape.

Editors and designers are usually given documents in Word, rich text
format, and other files from many sources, and often they inevitably
are given files carrying PC cooties and venereal diseases. Macs have
thus far resisted contagion; you don't need to download patches, etc.
every day. And when a PC catches a virus, it can be fatal to a
significant amount of data, and it takes a while to restore the
machine. Over the last few years, I've seen ad agency networks
brought down by viruses, and the PC-using suits go for days without
use of their computers while entire IT staffs scramble frantically,
and the Mac creatives working away off network with smug grins on
their faces.

Ever since OS X, the Mac has become a more stable platform,
particularly for graphic apps. For those working with PCs, a corrupt
font (and designers do have very large and diverse font collections),
driver, or whatever can bring, and keep, the whole system down, for
example. PCs crash often and crash big.

There's more Quark, InDesign, Cumulous, Photoshop, etc. extensions
for Macs, and better font stuff and more quality fonts (Some very
high quality foundries that sell very expensive fonts design them in
Macs because that's who the bulk of their market is. They run a
converter for a PC version and don't bother to tweak and refine
because the PC people are such a small segment and they don't notice
the difference anyway. No matter what Microsoft, Adobe Quark, etc.
about their graphic and page layout aps running the same on PCs and
Macs, Every Mac user I know that has had to use Photoshop, Quark,
etc. on a PC moans and groans in anguish over slowness and
unintuitiveness.

Good design continues to be increasingly important in the
marketplace, and Macs were built from the ground up with designers in
mind. When it comes to graphics, Macs "rule the world" because Macs
rule.

There's lots more information and case studies at the Apple site:

http://www.apple.com/pro/design/

>
> I can see how it will take Windows users (which I assume you mean
> with "PC
> users") some time to get used to the Mac UI, but it sounds like
> that's not
> all you mean, or that in your experience it takes them a lot of time.

It actually wouldn't take a whole lot of time for a PC user to get
used to a Mac, but even if it took a few weeks, productivity would
take a major hit. And for media companies, time is definitely money,
usually lots of money. When there are 25 outstanding candidates for a
job competing with 1 PC person, the PC person is most probably going
to have his/her resume and book relegated to the circular file.

For independent creatives, or people in small companies that don't do
big jobs for media oriented companies, PCs can work just fine. But as
I mentioned, Macs continue to prove their viability in the media
market. Coping with viruses, futzing with and fixing fonts,
correcting color and futzing with calibration with expensive hardware/
software, having problems on press or in the production studio, etc.,
add up to lots of time, and billable time = money.

Marilyn

Lately I have had two calls from two different individuals that do the 'mom&pop', DTP business Marilyn mentioned, on their PCs, and their issue of late was the problem with their computers' perfomance suffering the negative impact of running the various anti-virus, anti-pop-up, anti-spy-ware, anti-whatever in order to keep their systems 'safe' and now they feel a noticable performance drain as well as issues with software compatibility, etc. Their systems take a long time to wake, shutdown, startup, and these are XP Pro systems, in both cases, plenty of ram, disk space, and all that. I told them I've seen Mac users burden their systems with lots of startup apps as well, but that they are generally unnecessary and can be easily removed and their system will then return to their original, snappy selves. In their case, however, I had no words of comfort. Either isolate their machine from the Internet and use a secondary system for 'net access (not really an alternative, since viruses can still be moved by disk, LAN, etc), or invest the money in a performance expert to come and tweak their systems, install a really good firewall ($), and have them back every 3 months or so for an in-house tune up

I also mentioned they could pick up a Mac for that secondary system, pretty inexpensively, and get used to the idea so that in a year or so they can consider the switch to a Mac for their production work as well. I think one of the best things I did for our 3 sons was supply them with an iBook AND a PC (with more ram, more processing power) so they could use both on a day-to-day basis. They are looking forward to MacIntel systems so that when they are forced to run Windows, it can be run natively on a Mac. I remember my 9 year old exclaiming one time when workng on his PC, "Aahhh, why can't this PC work as well as my iBook! Why does it take twice as many steps to do anything!" Of course I told him that wasn't true. Some tasks are actually simpler on a Windows box. It's the other 95% of common chores that make it seem like a Mac is easier! ;-)