Community Newsletter: Q&A: Is the Mac right for me?

Best of all worlds with a Mac

In reply to: Is the Mac right for me? by Lee Koo (ADMIN) 

In terms of pure hardware a mac is relatively close in price to an equally powerful PC (keep in mind that this knocks out the $500 PC's and most sub-$1000 laptops). Now that Apple has moved to Intel processors virtualization has become much easier, so if you did find a program you couldn't do without that was only available for Windows you could either install Windows on your Mac via Boot Camp (currently in beta, but will be a part of the soon to be released Mac OS 10.5) to literally turn your mac into a windows machine, or use parallels to run windows as a virtual OS (ie you run Windows or linux or whatever x86-based OS on top of Mac OS X). PCWorld has an article this month about choosing the right OS, and surprisingly Mac OSX was recommended over Windows Vista, XP, and Linux! ( http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129284-page,1/article.html )

Most mac fanatics will say that Macs do graphics better than PC's. Speaking as a PC and Mac user, I think that at this point in time the playing field is more level than either side will admit. Photoshop works as well on a PC as it does on a Mac, although CS3 is supposed to be a big performance boost for Mac users (currently Photoshop CS2 only runs using Apple's Rosetta software on Intel Macs, sort of like running Windows on a Mac with Parallels). Both platforms have plenty of software available on the market for the semi-pro photographer. That being said, I still prefer the Mac. For Photo Software you would need to purchase there's Adobe's Lightroom, Apple's Aperature, and Foto Magico (for basic slide shows). Mac's come with iPhoto, which I like better than the Microsoft equivalent that I used before (I forget the name of the program because I only used it a few times and it was a while ago). Since there is this much software available for the Mac, I'm sure there is even more for the PC but it may be more difficult to sort out the good from the bad.

Behind the software you buy for your computer, there is the OS you have to navigate through to make things run. In my opinion there is much less of a learning curve to a Mac than there is to a PC, which is what I think is the big difference between the two these days. Apple tightly controls the hardware that it's software runs on, so things "just work." Meanwhile PC's are much more upgradable if you buy a desktop tower. However, how many users make many upgrades to their systems, other than additional ram? And if you need more hard drive space you can always get an external hard drive, which you probably should do anyways if you're seriously going to get into digital photography.

So if you want to open the innards of your computer, upgrade the motherboard, overclock the processor, etc, then get a PC.

If you just want to enjoy working on your computer to review and enhance your digital photos, then buy a Mac.


Oh, Microsoft Office is available for the Mac, and I prefer it over MS Office 2003 for PC's. When I look at the Mac version now, I see how they took ideas from that and used them in the new MS Office 2007 for PC's. A new version of MS Office that is a universal binary should be out sometime soon, which means a faster working version of Office on Macs.

Also, the last refresh of the iMac line was quite some time ago, so if you're willing to wait a month or two, there should be a new release of iMacs (faster processors, bigger hard drives, more ram standard, etc), and apple almost always keeps the same price points for their models; although the rummors I've read recently imply a major change for the current iMac form factor since there was very little change to the desktop design when Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel. Once you seriously get going with photography, definitely invest in a good RAM upgrade for whatever computer you purchase; it will make everything run more quickly.

I hope my advice has been helpful. Happy shopping.