Mac for Graphic & Web designer?

Mister Man

Ok, So i've been thinking for a while that I should consider buying something like a good MacBook pro, or a iMac, but I really need something that will force me towards going for a mac, over staying with PC.

My current PC is
AMD II X4 Phenom 840 OCed to 3.7GHz
4GB 1337MHz Ram
1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3
80B Seagate baracude
Sapphire Radeon HD 6850
MSI Motherboard

I'm a freelance graphic & web designer, and I always hear people going on about how Mac's are good for cretive use, so can someone tell me why is that?

Why should I pay more for a mac? Will it be better in anyway for what I'm doing now?

conor.hogan.2

I find its invaluable for testing things across platforms, along with it being just faster, easier etc in general.

ozt9vdujny3srf

This question is asked and answered hundreds of times across hundreds of fora. I also don't think you've done a whole lot of research. I'm guessing you built your current machine yourself. If that is so, then you should have enough knowledge to do some research and then come back again with a much better informed and more specific question for the users of this forum. This way you might get some good advice rather than generic "macs are good / macs are bad" comments.

skymap

Well I am going to be doing graphic design in college then a technical college full-time and they all are using macs which is slightly disconcerting considering the price of a mac verses the same price for an Alienware PC.

I realise on an after thought that dont most design companies use macs, therefore designer would also to save hassle with cross platform work, need to have a finished product to produce to a company... Just wondering, and I am fully aware of the pros and cons of the above, I also want to know why a mac, now I could have just answered this as I have typed my thoughts on this subject... sigh.

fasty

Macs run the Adobe software just as PCs do. It's a misconception that Macs are "better" at this sort of work. This hasn't been true for years and years.

maccored

totally agree with above. there is a plus side though, at least with a mac you can run windows and osx which means you can test better, plus you can run apache by default, meaning you can test web environments without any extra installs.

Price wise, you can pick up some really decent macs on adverts.ie for pretty cheap.

fasty

Yeah, it's nice to be able to painless run a dual OS machine. I wub my Macbook Pro.

Given the OP's got custom built PC with a decent videocard and has it overclocked, he should probably know better anyway!

OctavarIan

OSX renders typefaces better than Windows, but that applies to a very niche userbase.

You ultimately can do the same work on both OSX and Windows (regarding web and graphic design). It's really down to personal preference. Many designers prefer OSX and Mac because it's designed much better than Windows and PC. Many also prefer Windows and PC because it's cheap and easy to build your own spec. A diehard (lunatic :pac:) few even prefer using Linux boxes.