Are You Mac or PC?

Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have spent endless amounts of time pondering some of the most important debates in history: Did Han shoot first? Or was it Greedo?, Were Ross and Rachel on a break?, Do you prefer Pepsi or Coke? Now, we all know that Han did, in fact, shoot first (regardless of what George Lucas would have you believe) but what about Macs and PCs, which of these titanic machines really does reign supreme?

It may seem pretty obvious that for designers, it’s got to be a Mac. And many would agree. But they can be pretty expensive – for the money you’d spend on an iMac, you could potentially build a PC from scratch to the same specifications and also save yourself some cash.

Macs do tend to be the best platform for design and creativity, that’s mainly down to the strength of its applications and the fact that Macs are usually top quality machines.

Not to say there aren’t PCs that could do the job just as well. Considering you can build a PC, it can basically be anything you want it to be (You could even install a Mac OS on to it if you were so inclined). The only real issue is that there are applications that only run on Macs, and sometimes their PC counterparts can be bug-ridden after-thoughts.

Until I started my first ‘proper’ job in design, I was a champion of the PC (mainly because I couldn’t afford a Mac) and it was fine. It had enough RAM and good enough hardware to cope with the Adobe applications I needed it to run.

Macs always frightened me with their lack of buttons and simple app icons, but by the end of my first week working on my Power Mac G5 (old school, I know) I had fallen in love with the fluidity and simple elegance of the machine. And I firmly believe that once you’ve had Mac, you can never go back!

But that’s just me! What’s your preference? And more importantly, why?