Has anyone ever noticed that Apple fan(atic)s ALWAYS trash everything else, but PC guys tend to have a more overarching viewpoint, and the Apple complaints all sound like this, "switched to Apple 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 yrs ago because of reliability/stability/durability issues. Haven't had a single problem since. Been using the same computer for 5,6,7,8,9 years AND IT STILL WORKS. Besides, the graphic people use them. Oh, and no viruses."
Now for a more balanced view.
Reliability/Stability. Yes, laptops running Win2K or XP did have their share of OS stability issues. Thanks to the standard set by Apple, this is a thing of the past. Machines break, and Apple is no stranger to this. This is why they have an extended care program that for a top Macbook Pro costs $350/yr. A comparable plan from Clevo/Sager costs from $79/2 yrs to $350 for 3 years which includes accidental damage. The most expensive plan is 1/3 the cost of Apple's plan. If you do not go for an extended warranty, the machine is covered by a lifetime labor, 1 yr parts, with free shipping both ways in the event they need to see the machine to repair it. And they provide 24/7/365 hotline with real people in the US who answer the phones. There are other small companies that also have good product and support. Clevo is a favorite of mine because they have been around since 1985, and still going strong.
Durability. Does anyone here REALLY want to work on a 5 yr old machine? The industry forges ahead, and the development cycle is usually set for a new product every 18 months to 2 years. Regardless whether you use a PC or an Apple, for the most part, old machines will always work with the software that was designed to run on them. but 5 yrs ago we were using 12mp cameras, jpeg files were 6mb, we used USB2.0, and 4 gb was more than enough to do what you needed/wanted to do on a display system that displayed, in the fuzzy language that Apple resorts to in order to avoid direct comparison to other companies that publish specs that are meaningful "millions of colors." This was their way of obfuscating the fact that their display pipeline was only 6 bit, and their monitors were incapable of accurately displaying 8 bit sRGB color gamut without dithering. This is something PCs have been able to do for quite a while, certainly longer than 5 yrs ago. It was the source of several lawsuits and resulted in Apple's "coming clean" on this spec.
But now cameras are 24mp or denser, 16gb ram is the minimum for serious photo editing, 8 bit displays is a general standard with 72% or higher NTSC coverage and 100% sRGB considered entry-level minimum - high end graphics workstations for critical work in Photoshop use a 30 bit display pipeline, using the 30 bit option in Photoshop, an ATI Fire Pro or NVidia Quadro graphics card, and a 10 bit display for 100% AdobeRGB gamut. The bit depth and color space size are important for editing because in a smaller color space it is easier to clip a color channel, or fail to see detail (even a dust spec) on a lower bit depth panel that you can see on a 10 bit. Also, there are colors that your camera can capture and printers can print that cannot be seen in the tiny sRGB color space.
While the notion that graphics professionals "prefer" Apple products, the real power users are working with PC products or Silicon Graphics or better workstations. The numbers make sense. Apple's market share is 11%, the Windows market share is 89%, Even if every single Apple computer user was a power graphics user (Photo editing), it is still a small fraction of the entire photo editing community. The reason why there are more power users on Windows has to do with ROI and machine power. In the simplest terms, Apple's best offering, maxed out with all the options, is still no better (faster) than a middle of the road graphics workstation, and the Apple machine will cost as much as a more powerful Windows workstation. Other than the bit depth issue, which is hard coded into Mac OS, there is nothing "wrong" with an Apple machine - it as good (but not necessarily better) than a Windows computer, and it will cost more.
I don't have to trash Apple computers to make the Windows machine look good. I just rely on facts to point out the differences. The OP's question was a simple one - is Apple worth the extra $$. Only the OP can answer that, since everyone's idea of value and priorities is uniquely different. For me, it is not. But that's me. I'd rather save the extra $$ and buy another lens or camera body and end up with the same or better functionality. I routinely do panos, hdr, restoration, fashion retouch, and focus stacks that often result in in images that are several gb in size. The most cost effective solution for me was a desktop, with dual 10 bit displays, 32 gb ram, 2 gb Quadro K620 display adapter, 1 tb system drive cached with SSD drive, and a 4 Tb "enterprise-class" storage volume with RAID 5. The total cost, including the dual displays, was under $2300. Enterprise class drives are the best drives with the most robust construction and materials, intended to survive 5 yrs of 24/7/365 duty in a RAID array, with very low failure percentages. They are often the only drives provided with a 5 yr express replacement warranty. My system serves me quite well, and frees up a lot of time to take pictures.
Has anyone ever noticed that Apple fan(atic)s ALWA... (
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