I do NOT want to re-ignite the no-win discussion of pc vs mac.
Now that CS5 is announced, yet again as I preprare to upgrade from CS4, I ask if I should convert fromWin7 64-bit on a PC to MAC Pro running OSX.
any comments or help??
Mike
I am reluctant to jump into this discussion, now that it has grown to 7 pages, much of which seems to be PC vs. Mac rhetoric. However, I recently had a similar choice to make: I hope that my reasoning may be of some value to others.
I use the same hardware to run a variety of operating systems: Windows XP, Windows 7, Mac OS 10.6, and Linux Ubuntu (I have a Mac Pro, and a Macbook Pro). Alhtough I have the technical expertise to build my own systems, I choose not to, for reasons which are outside the scope of this posting.
I have Photoshop for both Mac and Windows. In general, the two are about as similar as Adobe can make them. However, I upgraded Photoshop to CS5 on the Mac OS, but not on Windows 7. My personal reasoning ran like this (and please remember that these were my personal reasons - others may have very valid reasons for making a different choice under similar circumstances):
I use a DTP-94 and ColorEyes for monitor calibration. I've found monitor calibration under Windows to be more problematic. This is probably because there are a lot more video cards to support under Windows, plus I think that the Windows API for colour management is a bit less mature than the Mac API. On the other hand, if you should happen to have a problem with a video driver under the Mac OS, there's not a lot you can do about it.
In general, colour management has made significant strides with Windows 7, but still seems to lag a bit behind the Mac OS for system-wide colour management.
On the other hand, support for older hardware seems to be better under Windows. For example, I recently resurrected my old Epson 2200 to print some 44" panoramas. Under the Mac OS, only the latest Epson driver would run, and the latest vesion of Epson's Mac driver limited the print length to 37" (even though the older Mac drivers didn't have this limitation). But under Windows, I had no problem running an older Epson printer driver, which didn't have the length restriction.
In general, Apple seems to quite readily drop support for older hardware, while Microsoft seems to maintain more backward compatibility. This makes the OS interface cleaner with Apple's OS, but forces you to keep your hardware newer.
Adobe uses an obnoxious activation scheme with both Windows and Mac.
I find font management to be cleaner under Mac OS than under Windows.
I can't help contrasting my Windows 7 upgrade experience with my Snow Leopard upgrade experience. Not only was the Snow Leopard upgrade far less expensive, but the Snow Leopard upgrade doesn't burden customers with silly checks for previous versions of the operating system, or onerous activation procedures. The Windows 7 upgrade ate up hours of my time. The Snow Leopard upgrade just worked. Microsoft's stupid activation software, together with their draconian activation policy, guarantees problems for people who want to upgrade their boot drives, or who suffer from a catastrophic disk drive failure.
As always, your mileage may vary...