What's so good about macs besides retina display?

If the Adobe Suite was available on Linux, Mac sales would take a hit. A lot of unhappy Windows users would have the option of just switching OSs instead of investing in Apple hardware. At some point, I could see PC manufacturers, wanting to steal sales from Apple, lobbying Adobe for this, if they're not already.

Apple just isn't for me. I'm more comfortable with Windows environment.

In terms of hardware, yes you can pick a higher spec PC cheaper then Apple but Apple OS runs very smooth even compared to a PC with higher specs. Comparing Apple to Oranges (no pun intended).

Apple does charge a lot for parts and that's also another reason I like PC. I'm on a budget. I can get 16GB of RAM and 240GB SSD for the price of a 16GB RAM up grade for a MAC. Not sure if they have gone down in pricing but I've seen them go up towards $250.

jay25 wrote in post #17975732
I'm trying to switch from pc to mac. However when I read the specs is not worth the cost. For example I can build my own pc for about $1200.00 with a core i7 processor and 16gb ram. I'm trying to comprehend why $3000.00? I tried over and over again. Is like buying a z06 corvette for $45000.00 and then trying to justify paying for a Acura $65,000.00. Mac displays are awesome I love them but man they are charging a grip and only using i5 Intel processors.

Mac guys help me understand what I'm not understanding? I never ever used a mac.

Macs are invaluable to me because I am very technologically challenged. With an Apple purchase, you have an option to buy 3 years of phone support. I always do so. With the phone support, every time you have trouble figuring out how to do something, you can call Apple Support and talk to a live person that is surprisingly knowledgable. They will really dig into your problem with you and not stop until you find a solution.

I recently bought Photoshop Elements. I had trouble when I tried to download the program - an error message came up that I didn't understand. So I called Apple Support. Mind you, my problem was with Adobe's program, not with my iMac. But the Apple Support person was still determined to help me get my new software installed on my iMac. So they set up a screen share and walked me thru the entire process of downloading PSE. It took one hour and 40 minutes. But they stayed with me the entire time until the program fully downloaded and was working as it should. Without Apple Support, I never, ever, ever would have figured out how to get Photoshop onto my computer.

There is another main reason I use iMacs: Years ago when I used Windows-based computers, I was always getting viruses. And I could never figure out how to get anti-virus programs to install and operate on my computers. So I had to hire a kid to come to my home and install anti-virus software. What a freaking hassle! And even after the anti-virus stuff was installed, it would either let a virus slip through, or, after a number of months or years, it would need to be updated or re-installed for whatever reason. Then my PC would get all bogged down and weird and I would have to once again hire the kid to come re-do the anti-virus software.

My iMacs don't seem to get viruses, ever. So I never have to work thru any of that horrible anti-virus updating and re-installing crap. And I should mention that I am very, very fast and loose with my internet browsing habits - I will click on anything at all without fear. Do that with a PC and you're doomed.

Another reason I like Macs is because I can do screen captures simply by pressing the SHIFT, COMMAND, and 4 keys simultaneously, then move the cursor to crop to get the exact capture I want. The Macs come that way, and I never had to download any app or program or whatever you call it - the Macs just do that right out of the box!

Another reason is that they just keep working without you having to do anything to keep them working. When I had PCs, every year or two they would require me to do something, such as update the operating system or something else that was ridiculously difficult. So I'd have to hire the kid again to do all of that for me. Then some of the stuff I had, software-wise, wouldn't work the same exact way on the new operating system, so I would have to hire the kid to come back and explain everything to me. That just doesn't happen with the iMacs I have had. I bought my first iMac in 2008 and never had to update anything - I used it just as it was, out-of-the-box, as my sole computer, from 2008 until late in 2015. Seven years of very heavy usage without ever having to update anything. Can you show me a PC that can do that?

I love my iMacs. As soon as I run into any difficulty or don't understand something, I just call Apple Support and a live person who is friendly and personable and who speaks English as a first language helps me work thru my problem until it is completely solved. Does any PC manufacturer offer that?

And yeah, once your eyes get used to seeing everything on a 5k screen you will realize just how crappy almost all other monitors are and you'll never want to go back to anything else (unless you spend a few grand on a monitor for a PC).

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Tom Reichner wrote in post #17979671
And yeah, once your eyes get used to seeing everything on a 5k screen you will realize just how crappy almost all other monitors are and you'll never want to go back to anything else (unless you spend a few grand on a monitor for a PC).

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A Dell 27" 5K monitor is about $1500.

jay25 wrote in post #17975732
Mac guys help me understand what I'm not understanding? I never ever used a mac.

I had something very surprising happen yesterday.

I've been working on an image that is composed of 88 exposures taken one second apart. The framing is exactly the same for each image, but the subject is moving. I needed to stack all 88 exposures in Photoshop and blend the exposures in a way the showed the subject's movement.

Clearly, this was not a job for my little MacBook. This was a job for my PC workstation.

So, I loaded all of the images to my PC and started the image stack in Photoshop. I just wanted to align the images, not turn them into a smart object.

The process failed. Photoshop froze. It failed repeatedly. Sometimes Photoshop crashed. I tweaked memory and performance settings in the PC. I tweaked Photoshop settings. I asked my husband for help (a former IT professional). I asked my son for help (a PC geek). Nothing worked!

In a fit of desperation I tried it on my MacBook. It took over an hour and half, but it stacked and aligned all 88 RAW files.

My PC:
Windows 7 Professional 64bit
3.06 GHz Intel Quad Core Xeon
12GB ECC RAM
240GB Intel SSD (+2X 7200RPM 3TB 6Gb/s HDDs)

My MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014):
OSX El Capitan (10.11.4)
2.8 GHz Intel Dual Core i5
8GB DDR3 RAM
500GB SSD

While a bit long in the tooth, my PC was built for crunching massive amounts of LiDAR data and for performing complex spatial analysis and mapping tasks that can take days to complete. Just a couple of months ago it ran for two full weeks generating 10m contours from LiDAR for the entire Province of Alberta. This involved a truly massive number of calculations. It isn't fast, but it has always crunched through anything and everything I've thrown at it (until yesterday).

At this point, I don't know what to think. I just know that in this specific Photoshop task, my little MacBook spanked my PC workstation. I am left completely confounded.

My husband just shrugged his shoulders and said "Macs manage data differently." He didn't say "better." He said "differently."

Two different sets of source code, written to work within the design criteria of different capabilities of the operating systems and their use of different kinds of hardware in the respective computers. In this case, the PC code working on PC O/S had an imperfection not encountered on the Mac code working in the Mac O/S. Nothing mysterious at all!

It could be nothing more than an imperfection in the compiler for Windows vs. the compiler for Mac O/S, with identical code in both places.
Or the Windows subroutine happened upon an error which the Mac subroutine did not.
Not necessarily a hardware issue.
But then again, the loose environment of the PC might mean that the code has problems executing in YOUR configuration of PC, while it might run perfectly on someone else's PC...because graphic processors are different, amount of RAM varies widely, etc. whereas the Mac is more constrainted, you do not find aftermarket graphic processors, etc. because everything has to be purchased from Apple.

Or just a corrupted file on the one machine. All it could take is corrupting one bit of one byte in one file to do that. Once upon a time the hardware was different between Apple and the Intel based Windows PC. Now they all use the same Intel based hardware, so that the machine level the code to carry out a particular function on the processor will be identical. The main differences between running on OSX and some version of Windows will be the calls to the graphical interfaces, which will be completely different. Since OSX is a FreeBSD derivative, I don't think it would take that much work to port the whole of creative suite to a *inx distribution. I guess the only reason they don't is that they probably think that they won't sell enough licences compared to the other two OS's. Especially since most of those *inx distributions that are not being used for servers, are being run by people who prefer to use software under things like GPL, where there is virtually no cost to the user.

Alan

BigAl007 wrote in post #17979761
Once upon a time the hardware was different between Apple and the Intel based Windows PC. Now they all use the same Intel based hardware, so that the machine level the code to carry out a particular function on the processor will be identical. The main differences between running on OSX and some version of Windows will be the calls to the graphical interfaces, which will be completely different.

The machine-level instructions are the same, but all of the code that executes to carry out a particular user operation certainly isn't. There is certainly a lot more that is different at the OS level than just the GUI layer! Windows and Mac OS manage memory and processes very differently.

The significant OS differences as well as the tightness of integration between hardware and software make it difficult to compare Macs to PCs based on things like processor clock speed and amount of RAM. Real-world tests are the only thing worth looking at.

In another thread, people assured me that my 2.5GHz i7 Macbook Pro (mid-2014, 16GB, GeForce 750M) laptop "can't possibly handle 5DsR files". Yet here I am, doing just fine with it on every shoot, using Photoshop on multi-gigabyte files and delivering work on time. The only time my Mac actually choked and gave me a "The system has run out of memory" dialog was when I tried to do a polar coordinates transform on a multi-layer 65535x65535-pixel file (a panorama of 15 5DsR files stitched together) with a bunch of other apps open (Lightroom, Chrome, etc). But I was deliberately trying to find out the system's limits, it was not a real-world use case.

BigAl007 wrote in post #17979761
Or just a corrupted file on the one machine.

That is pretty much the only thing I can confirm wasn't a problem. The PC was able to process all of the images into smaller stacks. I started with batches of 20. It did do two separate stacks of 44 images, but that wasn't ideal as I wanted all of the images in one stack to process.

On the Mac, it just worked. And, that's what I really care about. I met the delivery deadline with room to spare.

absplastic wrote in post #17979777
The only time my Mac actually choked and gave me a "The system has run out of memory" dialog was when I tried to do a polar coordinates transform on a multi-layer 65535x65535-pixel file (a panorama of 15 5DsR files stitched together) with a bunch of other apps open (Lightroom, Chrome, etc). But I was deliberately trying to find out the system's limits, it was not a real-world use case.

That is my next test: a panorama with a pile of 5D3 files. At this point, I want to see which computer fails first, and what it takes to have both of them fail.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #17979671
Macs are invaluable to me because I am very technologically challenged. With an Apple purchase, you have an option to buy 3 years of phone support. I always do so. With the phone support, every time you have trouble figuring out how to do something, you can call Apple Support and talk to a live person that is surprisingly knowledgable. They will really dig into your problem with you and not stop until you find a solution.
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This is the one area I just don't get why some people bash Macs. Yeah my preferences is Windows but there is just something so simplistic about Macs that non-technical just seem to get unlike with Windows. I do find that the older crowd that are already Windows based find it harder to go over to Mac OS but at that point, who cares because they are already in a good swing of things.

Tom Reichner wrote in post #17979671
There is another main reason I use iMacs: Years ago when I used Windows-based computers, I was always getting viruses. And I could never figure out how to get anti-virus programs to install and operate on my computers. So I had to hire a kid to come to my home and install anti-virus software. What a freaking hassle! And even after the anti-virus stuff was installed, it would either let a virus slip through, or, after a number of months or years, it would need to be updated or re-installed for whatever reason. Then my PC would get all bogged down and weird and I would have to once again hire the kid to come re-do the anti-virus software.

My iMacs don't seem to get viruses, ever. So I never have to work thru any of that horrible anti-virus updating and re-installing crap. And I should mention that I am very, very fast and loose with my internet browsing habits - I will click on anything at all without fear. Do that with a PC and you're doomed.
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Macs get viruses. My wife's MBP got one about a year ago. It sucked to remove.

That being said, try downloading uBlock Origin for your browser. If your doing free spirited clicking online, this can help with some of the nasties that pop up.

neacail wrote in post #17979724
At this point, I don't know what to think. I just know that in this specific Photoshop task, my little MacBook spanked my PC workstation. I am left completely confounded.

My husband just shrugged his shoulders and said "Macs manage data differently." He didn't say "better." He said "differently."

ten years ago i use to be much more into these types of comparisons, now i don't want to embarrass myself trying to sound like i know what I'm talking about. But what you have experienced has been proven again and again. All I can really say is that there are so many components (hardware, firmware, software) that go into the experience of using a computer, having these kinds of variations are completely and totally expected.

back in the day macs used to handle ram pretty poorly, it was best to restart the computer when a program crashed to insure that all the other programs remained stable. Dynamic ram management between programs was non-existant. But other things were much more stable. I used the same install (copied to a Zip disk from the HD of my employer's computer) for probably a decade with many different Mac OS versions. It even worked in Classic OS 9 mode running under OS X. I honestly opened a document a few months ago that was created 8 years ago, with the same copied Quark 3.34 (circa 1995 ? ? ?) installed on my G4 tower from the early 2000s, Classic mode under OS X. And no, i don't use that machine more than once a year, but I can! Also, no, we are not going to have that kind of compatibility anymore due to business decisions at Apple. But Windows has never had anything remotely close to that.

The way Jobs and his crew screwed a GUI onto FreeBSD while keeping support for legacy apps will become the stuff of legends, if it isn't already. They crushed it.

OK guys I'm going to buy me a Imac 27 5k retina. Read a lot of good things about that retina display. Thank you for your input. I'll keep my pc too. I can't wait to try out machines

jay25 wrote in post #18049280
OK guys I'm going to buy me a Imac 27 5k retina. Read a lot of good things about that retina display. Thank you for your input. I'll keep my pc too. I can't wait to try out machines

That's great!
Maybe this will be of interest to you:
http://www.bhphotovide​o.com …_27_imac_with_r​etina.html

The software. I used Windows for a decade, and making the switch back to Mac back in 2004 notably improved my overall experience. I use Windows at work now, and nothing has compelled me to reconsider my decision.

The hardware is pretty solid as well, and as a photographer, a nice industrial design is visually appreciated.

I am concerned about the company’s direction. It has always been centered on making computing simple for the average consumer, but it seems to have slacked off a little on the professional side. Then again, what was once primarily consumer oriented, such as the iMac, is now powerful enough for certain professional demands…