Which is better for PhotoShop / Lightroom? PC or iMac? (Page 7): Update (now that I'm back to my Mac): The current version of Mail (Version 11.2 on MacOS 10.13.3) will work with...

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

burkphoto wrote:

None of this sounds quite right. What version of M... (show quote)

Update (now that I'm back to my Mac): The current version of Mail (Version 11.2 on MacOS 10.13.3) will work with iCloud, MS Exchange, Google, Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, AOL, Vimeo, and Flickr accounts, right out of the box. So if you're having trouble, it's probably a solvable configuration issue.

I do know that standards for mail connectivity have recently changed to accommodate security issues. Various port reassignments have surprised many users. AOL went through this back in the Fall of 2017... I had to reconfigure my AOL email account on every OS X and MacOS instance I run that is safe to put on the Internet, along with my iPhone. You might have to refine the settings for your email accounts, or recreate the instances of them, entirely. That may require backing up your email if you don't keep important email threads on the server.

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burkphoto wrote:

Well, some pretty big companies like, oh, IBM and General Electric are saving money on computer support with Macs. The savings range from $200 to over $500 per Mac! This MORE than offsets the purchase price differential.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cio.com/article/3133945/hardware/ibm-says-macs-save-up-to-543-per-user.amp.html

Burke -- Have you read this article? It's all fluff. Not a single piece of hard data in this article.

It's all the usual subjective opinions.

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dsmeltz wrote:

I was about to unwatch this thread. I think it is about to get interesting.

I hope so. :-)

So far it is all the usual Mac vs. PC arguments. The PC fan will argue that Macs are much more expensive than MACs and how much more configurable and modular PCs are, and the Mac fan will list all kinds of subjective reasons that attempt to justify the extra cost, like the typical "quality" and "intuitiveness" subjective arguments.

And so it goes. This thread doesn't read any different than a Mac Versus PC thread from 5 years ago.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

TriX wrote:

You’re correct about OS2’s timing - it was roughly coincident with early versions of Windows and prior to the adoption of Linux, but it was a loser in the market even then and never gained traction. My next door neighbor was an IBM mid level manager, and he found the company-mandated OS2 on his laptop so frustrating that he brought it over for me to install Windows on it (and Windows early versions were “no box of chocolates” either).

Regarding EMC (now Dell), as you know, EMC is a storage, not a server company, and while they did own VMWare before it was spun off, it was pretty much OS agnostic - you can run it on Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. Probably the closest EMC comes to adopting an OS in its products is Isilon storage (clustered NAS), and that is based on free BSD. I was actually referring to the laptops and desktops used by EMC’s tens of thousands of employees, and as an EMC employee from 2010-2014, I can tell you with some authority that there are no company provided Macs in any EMC office I’ve ever seen in the US, including the company headquarters (we did have the option of IPhones however 🤫).

My comment about GE’s CIO was tongue-in-cheek (but true in this case). On a more serious note however, it is the CIO, either at a National, district or local level that decides on the client platforms, and from many years selling to GE all over the southeast, I can tell you that the chosen client platform varies from location to location, even within a given state like NC, where there are a number of GE facilities.

Although my comments were intended to be flippant, I don’t accept the idea that Macs are cheaper to maintain or last enough longer to offset the higher price. I actually do like many Apple products. I have carried a number of MacBook Airs (great for travel), we have two IPhones, and i’m writing this on an IPad (and struggling, as usual with its miserable spelling autocorrect). In fact, I just bought my wife a new Gen 5 IPad to replace her Gen2, which had become so maddeningly slow and buggy (due to OS “upgrades”) that it was unusable after a “lifespan” of 3-4 years. So much for the idea of the long lifespan making up for the higher cost. Macs are physically well-made and packaged attractively, but their limited upgradability, combined with Apple’s continuous OS upgrades, which often make older products so poor in terms of performance that the customer is forced into new hardware, mitigate any potential long life advantage compensating for the higher cost such as the case I just described. You might ask why I’d purchase another if I feel this way, and in my wife’s case the answer is simple: it’s the ease of interchange of data, music, FaceTime and imagery between her and our grandchildren’s parents. In my opinion, that is Apple’s actual strength - ease of use for the semi computer literate and seamless interchange of information.

What bothers me most about Apple is the closed nature of their products in an era of open systems which extends even to their unreasonably tight control of OS updates. Apple is the only IT company I can think of which immediately makes previous versions of an updated OS unavailable, thus preventing you from rolling back to an earlier version if the update makes your platform less useful. My Gen 4 IPad has gotten progressively buggier with every update since 10.x, but I cannot roll it back to a previous release, essentially eventually forcing me into a HW upgrade, and that really pisses me off. Add to that the intentional difficulty getting inside an IMac or an IPad to make repairs or upgrades, and you have the ultimate “closed” system. Ever try to get inside an IPad to reseat a loose LCD screen connector? Better get out your heat gun (and a prayer book). End of rant.

This is a lot like the Canon vs Nikon debate, and while that seems to be slowly moving to a consensus that both make good cameras, Mac users seem intent on loudly proclaiming that Macs are great and PCs are junk, instead of the actual truth that both make decent platforms for specific tasks, and the easily provable truth that their products are less upgradable and more expensive for equal performance.

You’re correct about OS2’s timing - it was roughly... (show quote)

I think it's more complex than that. A lot of the debate does boil down to the user interface, its understandability, intuitiveness, peoples' habits, level of understanding of technology, focus, desire for control or simplicity... Many factors go into why people want to use one computer or another. Price is way down the list for many of us, because we're willing to pay to work in a walled garden where the software content is curated, it's really hard to find actual, "in-the-wild" viruses, there is decent protection against malware, and the customer support is stellar.

I don't have anything against Windows that is an actual show-stopper. I use Win 10 in Parallels Desktop on my iMac. But I only use it for database work. FileMaker Pro runs better on Windows, because the large community of Windows users of FileMaker Pro have made FileMaker (a subsidiary of Apple) a success. My wife uses Windows to test her web site development... Every site has to be tested on Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and whatever Microsoft browser her company is running today. They all behave differently...

I ran the digital departments of a pro photo lab for five years. We used around 36 Macs in the late 1990s, early 2000s. But Kodak migrated their software from KPIS on the Mac to DP2 on Windows during that period. So mostly, after 2001, we used about 70 PCs running Windows 2000, and later, Win XP.

I was the Mac support guy in the lab from 1986 on, in addition to my other duties. I had maybe 20 calls a year to actually fix something hardware-related such as adding more RAM. Most of the work was simply installing or updating software, rebuilding the Desktop on OS 8 or OS 9, and running drive directory repair programs. Average life of those Macs was well over five years when they were abandoned. I still have two of those 1998 G4s that still work! However, we don't use them more than a few hours a year to update old PageMaker files, and they NEVER go on the Internet.

My friend Ken, our IT manager, was constantly repairing, re-configuring, updating, upgrading, and diagnosing issues with PCs... daily. We had 50 GateWay PCs in the early 2000s. 36 of them had hard drive failures within the first six months we used them. He spent days recovering data and re-imaging drives for each of those. Gateway sent us a box of 55 replacement drives, all of which worked. They lost our corporate account, anyway.

The ultimate test was when one of our IT "geniuses" at headquarters decided to "save money" by building our own servers and high performance PCs. He had no idea of the demand a photo lab would place on the hardware! Eight of the 12 high performance PCs either melted or caught fire within the first few weeks of installation! The home-brew servers failed and corrupted hundreds of thousands of images. (Fortunately, that was before digital camera use, so we could re-scan the film!) The guy who built those machines was summarily fired, and we bought HP servers and Dell PCs. But the lesson cost us several million dollars and a lot of corporate trust. My staff and I were under enormous pressure that Fall to recover from the disaster. It was not a fun time. But ESOP companies' trials and tribulations are worth enduring... I didn't lose any of my core staff. Ken was pretty well rattled by the experience, though. He almost left. He was putting in 80 to 100 hours a week for a few weeks.

Win 2000 was probably my favorite version of Windows of all time. It was easy to use, and very stable. Early versions of XP were slow and messy, but they finally got it right by Service Pack 3 (and PC hardware caught up with it). Herff Jones Photography had a division-wide ban on Windows Vista and Win 8. Lifetouch bought us in 2011. They were still using mostly XP and some Win 7 when I left in 2012. But heck, Lifetouch was still running FoxPro databases from the early 1990s...

My own lengthy experience with Macs and PCs (I had one of each in my office from 1991 on...) is that they are good for different situations. I developed a dozen large FileMaker Pro solutions (databases) on a Mac, but tweaked and deployed them on Windows, where extensions were available to control other software and devices. The development was ALWAYS easiest on the Mac, and the deployment ALWAYS worked best on Windows.

I used Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) on the Mac and Windows. I preferred Outlook on Windows to Entourage on the Mac. (Outlook is now available on the Mac).

All of our corporate, proprietary software was developed in Visual Basic using Access tables. I ran it on Windows, but ran Windows on Parallels Desktop and Win XP, so I could document our Windows software with all my video and graphics tools on the Mac. It was great to capture Windows screens with a Mac video application that was MUCH more versatile and easier to use than the Windows apps that did the same thing.

I processed all my images for training use on the Mac, but did all my lab work in Kodak DP2 on Windows.

When we needed to do high speed electronic printing of portrait package inserts back in the 1990s, it was powered by Macs. When we set up electronic printing of ID Cards, rotary cards, sticker prints, and photo proofs, using high speed Canon color copiers connected to high speed raster image processors, we powered that setup with PCs rendering images in DP2 and other PCs running Planet Press software to encapsulate the JPEGs in PDF files for the RIPs to process for the copiers.

I ran AS/400 Client Access in Windows, sometimes on the Mac setup with Parallels. Our HR applications (time keeping, payroll) were on the AS/400.

All those examples are part of stating my point that I used a Mac because it was more efficient for me, for most graphics, audio, video, and creative tasks. Windows was more efficient and attuned to business needs. So yeah, the issue is... complicated. Despite my heavy Windows experience, I'd rather do most tasks on the Mac, because the hassle factor has been lower for me. Neither platform approaches nirvana or perfection... So use what you're most comfortable using.

GalaxyCat Loc: Boston, MA

Wow! I'm impressed! I was wondering if a 27 inch display attached to my 2013 15" MACBOOK PRO would solve all my problems, instead of getting an iMac 27 inch?

burkphoto wrote:

I think it's more complex than that. A lot of the ... (show quote)

blackest Loc: Ireland

GalaxyCat wrote:

Wow! I'm impressed! I was wondering if a 27 inch display attached to my 2013 15" MACBOOK PRO would solve all my problems, instead of getting an iMac 27 inch?

It'd make editing a llittle easier on a bigger screen, still leaves your other issues to be resolved.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

TriX wrote:

What bothers me most about Apple is the closed nature of their products in an era of open systems which extends even to their unreasonably tight control of OS updates. Apple is the only IT company I can think of which immediately makes previous versions of an updated OS unavailable, thus preventing you from rolling back to an earlier version if the update makes your platform less useful.

Hmmm... looking in the app store purchased list for my account, I see Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan,.. all available for me to download and install if I choose to.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Just to clarify, in spite of my digs at IBM’s marketing, I have great respect for them as a company, having started my computer career with them in the mid 60s, being on one of the teams installing their first “real computer” (as opposed to a “business machine” like the 1400 series), the IBM 360, which was considered a big gamble for the company at the time. They’re responsible for a ton of basic research, defined the modern PC (a bunch of smart young engineers went to Boca Raton, FL, and wrote the spec) and were smart enough to make it an open system, causing hundreds of HW and S.W. companies to jump on the bandwagon. They’re also leading the American effort (along with Cray and Intel) to recapture the US lead in HPC (high performance computing).

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Dngallagher wrote:

Hmmm... looking in the app store purchased list for my account, I see Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan,.. all available for me to download and install if I choose to.

Can you point me toward a download for IOS 10.x? (Please)

blackest Loc: Ireland

TriX wrote:

Can you point me toward a download for IOS 10.x? (Please)

You didn't backup your previous copy?

in which case you are stuck until a jailbreak arises for the version of IOS that you are on. Stop blindly upgrading. My ipad wants me to install an update that will trash performance in order to mitigate meltdown and spectre. i refuse to install it.

With ios end users are not trusted.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

blackest wrote:

You didn't backup your previous copy?

in which case you are stuck until a jailbreak arises for the version of IOS that you are on. Stop blindly upgrading. My ipad wants me to install an update that will trash performance in order to mitigate meltdown and spectre. i refuse to install it.

With ios end users are not trusted.

Frankly I’m not sure how to backup a previous OS version on an IPad (or to backrev it either). I agree it’s my bad for allowing it. I come from a background of patching regularly so I just assumed that the “upgrade” was bug free after a few months after the initial release - silly me. In the enterprise world, you have a test system to try it on, and in the PC world, a rollback is typically fairly straightforward, and i would also typically wait a few months for bugs to appear (which I did). After all the bugs that appeared, I kept installing the latest version of bug fixes assuming it would get more stable - wrong. Unlike a PC, no way to roll back the OS, or wipe the machine and start over.

I guess that’s at the core of what bothers me about these machines - I can’t get into the guts of the machine or OS/FS when I need to. It’s also maddening how difficult it is to physically get inside. Instead of a few screws, you go around the perimeter with a heat gun and flat prying tools, carefully avoiding certain places where there are components underneath. Then, if you’re successful at getting in without destroying the device, and you can fix the problem, you need a kit to reglue the display back in. Most people just toss it (over a minor problem) because the repair charge from Apple is more than the device is worth. If I knew nothing about computers, I might love the simplicity, but for a knowledgable user, it’s just damn frustrating. Grrrrr.

blackest Loc: Ireland

TriX wrote:

Frankly I’m not sure how to backup a previous OS v... (show quote)

I think its mostly to stop licensed content leaking, still annoying i want root on my hardware. android tends to be more open but things don't interact as well.
my chromecast mostly works , my appletv always works.

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

GalaxyCat wrote:

Wow! I'm impressed! I was wondering if a 27 inch display attached to my 2013 15" MACBOOK PRO would solve all my problems, instead of getting an iMac 27 inch?

Bigger screen area, yes, but not necessarily more resolution, which will depend on your graphics card and total VRAM on the video card

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

blackest wrote:

I think its mostly to stop licensed content leaking, still annoying i want root on my hardware. android tends to be more open but things don't interact as well.
my chromecast mostly works , my appletv always works.

Yep, my AppleTV works very well also, and I’ll be the first to say it’s convenient being able to put the IPad display wirelessly up on the TV seamlessly (I used a wireless VGA extender to do that with a PC, and it was always a little buggy).

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

GalaxyCat wrote:

Wow! I'm impressed! I was wondering if a 27 inch display attached to my 2013 15" MACBOOK PRO would solve all my problems, instead of getting an iMac 27 inch?

If you have an HDMI port, or a Thunderbolt port, or a Display Port on that Mac, any of those can drive an external monitor. You might need an adapter cable, but you can always drive an external monitor as a mirror image of the MacBook Pro display, or use it as extended “real estate” for more apps.

Ten years ago, I used my MacBook Pro display for Mac apps, and my external NEC 24” for Windows apps running on Parallels Desktop. OR, I used one for Lightroom and the other for Photoshop. OR, I used one for FileMaker Pro and the other for DP2. OR, I used the internal for PowerPoint notes, while the external was driving a video projector for my main PowerPoint presentation slides...

I’m sure your newer MacBook Pro would do all that a lot better. My twins have 2012 models, and they do all that.