Glad to here Michaels statement about Beta3.
Sorry Peirre but I strongly disagree with your statement.
What evidence did you base this on??
There are many many many more PC users out in the big wide world than Mac users by quite a long way- and belive me many of these are photographers (both pro and ametuer alike)
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I've owned PCs since the first IBM PC. Two years ago I bought a Mac, but still use PCs and now also use Linux machines (I teach CS). While I'm an amature digital photographer, I do spend a lot of time reading newsgroups, and over the years I've dabbled in Photoshop and other similar tools and have a bookshelf of manuals on their use. I've talked to the art professors on campus who do photography as well as student majors who focus on graphic arts and photography. I can't point you to a definitive survey, but (as a then PC user) I was always taken aback when the majority of writers, users, students, etc. were Mac users. (At least that was my perception.) It was as if I suddenly found myself in the minority - a strange feeling!
Yes, there are many more PC owners out there, but the Mac was definitely the machine of choice for graphic arts and, appearantly, photographers a number of years ago (just read any older book on graphics and you'll see) - although that distribution has been shifting in recent years.
An aside- usage trends in colleges:
As for trends among the college youth - many years ago, the distribution of Mac vs PC users was about 50-50% on our campus, and reports were similar from other institutions. Then the Mac took a nosedive (which was fine by me - at the time I felt having one universal platform would make life much easier - so you can say I was a PC zealot). But in recent years, I've noticed a surge back to the Mac among our students. This has been backed up by our IT department, which keeps records of platform use and connections to the campus backbone. Especially in the computer science program, I now find a clear majority of students using Macs - which posed a problem for us, since the software used in our courses was PC based - in fact our lab was a Wintel lab. With the switch to Java, we now use multi-platform software and this has solved problems our students had. I'm told the campus distribution is now about 40-60% in favor of PCs, quite a resurrection for the Mac. Not only that, but many CS students who own PCs are running Linux on them. This year we opened our second departmental lab - a Linux lab, which is used in the CS program. (The rest of campus has a mix of PC and Mac public labs.) So much for a universal platform.
Why did I switch to the Mac? It runs Unix.
- Pierre