Photoshop: Mac vs PC

In my job I run into a number of people who are vehement Mac users. While a Mac with OS X is not my machine and OS of choice, I understand everyone has a personal preference. Hell, we’d all be running Amigas with some strange AmigaOS/Linux hybrid if I had my way.

A large portion of this Mac group in my workplace are art and graphic design people. I have conversations with a number of them every once in a while regarding why they like the Mac above the PC, and while I always hope it comes down to personal preference, more often than not the conversations follows this unfortunate trend:

Me: “So why do you like Macs?”

Them: “It’s better for graphics applications, that’s why virtually all schools and organizations use them”

Me: “What applications do you use?”

Them: “Photoshop (and other Adobe products)”

Me: “Don’t they make Photoshop for Windows?”

Them: “Yes, but it runs better on the Mac”

Me: “In what way?”

Them: “Its faster, less clunky, crashes less”

This is where it always breaks down. Apparently, “The Mac” is just faster than “The PC” running Photoshop. It doesn’t matter what processor you have, the amount of memory, hard drive speed, or fragmentation, etc, the Mac will always win. Thank goodness I have this 350 mhz G3, I’ll keep that as my Photoshop computer and remove the software from my dual core AMD 5600. I’m being sarcastic obviously, but as far as speed goes, I would love to see benchmarks of Photoshop operations on a PC vs Mac. And here’s the stipulation which is where many benchmarks crumble (on both sides), use equipment that’s equal from a cost perspective. Don’t use my example of two 2.8ghz cores vs 1 350mhz core – to sway either side. Spec out a PC from Dell, and a Mac of the same cost from Apple, and run benchmarks.

And as for the “clunky” or “crashes more” argument, I completely throw this out. I have seen both unstable PCs and Macs, both computers have an OS that allows files to get corrupted and deleted, both have fragmentation issues, both use hardware that can fail, both crash. I’m not a graphic design person by any means, but I’ve put a number of hours in using Photoshop on both a Mac and a PC, and I can tell you I get a spinning beach ball of death as much as I get segfaults on my Windows box.

If you like a computer or an OS, just say it’s a personal preference. It saves this myth from getting any bigger, and stops causing headaches for IT and business departments trying to support two platforms and justifying a larger budget.