Mac vs. PC, christ will it ever end. Whenever people I know get into this crap and ask my opinion, I always tell them to get their work done by the deadline, and I don’t care if they use an abacus and a retarded midget with ESP.
Price hasn’t been an issue for about a decade now, funny it always seems to pop up early in these arguments. If you are in need of a pro workstation, you’re going to spend thousands regardless. you may spend $500 more here or there no matter which machine you buy. Quadro card, 32GB of RAM, 8-cores… it’s all going to be very close on either side. Stability, productivity, and support is what I pay attention to because I use these machines to put food on the table and run a business.
Personally, productivity flies through the roof when I use a Mac so that’s my choice. I can be simulating in RealFlow, composing a song in DP, while After effects and Maya render and 40 other apps are open and my system doesn’t come slamming to a halt. It’s been more stable, I have no driver problems, the OS doesn’t alert me every time I try and do something, and the OS itself rarely crashes, it just works. 95% of my friends and colleagues use PC and they agree that stability is their biggest gripe with Windows. Since developers started porting to Mac, I’ve witnessed a number of studios switch over because the software was now available and that was the only thing holding them back.
ALL people I know who have switched to Mac were amazed. Once they got over their fears of a new OS and decided that spending more on their laptop than a $400 piece of **** from Dell had it’s reasons, they went for it. The stability alone makes them happy enough never to pester me again with silly arguments when I could be spending that time figuring out a bizarre workflow in ZB.
That being said, I also have 64-bit windows XP Pro installed on my Mac because apps like Maya are only 32-bit on the Mac side still and certain plug-ins are only made for Windows. I had a project last year where I needed 30GB of RAM to render each frame for a TV spot (200,000+ objects and over 30,000,000 polys) so I built it on the mac and jumped onto XP and rendered it there. Then one day for no apparent reason, windows started doing weird crap out of no where and would stop launching things after a few minutes. After much toil and prodding the brains of my PC-using colleagues, the only fix was to reinstall the system, apps and all, something that I’ve never had happen on a Mac in 20 years of using them.
So from personal experience and 25 years using both, Mac just works better has less problems and conflicts and that’s what I need to stay in business, meet deadlines, keep clients smiling and also manage to continually learn to stay on top of stuff in these industries. I use Windows for what I need it for and then dump it for Mac like a dirty little tramp. But who cares what I do? Go make Windows you’re lovely bride if you want and grope her sensual boxy hips. Doesn’t bother me one bit. My viewpoint is not based on empirical data, or the friggin dow jones, or any other nonsense. It comes from trial and error, huge sums of money spent and more hours than I’d like to admit learning and using these systems in professional applications. They both have their strengths and weaknesses but windows is not as stable and that’s where I must draw the line, but I still use both. Mac is just my main platform.
If windows works better for you, by all means use it. If Linux does, use that. Whatever gets the job done in the best way in the least amount of time while meeting the deadline is what should be priority here. These are two corporations and I leave my personal ties at the door. There will be no Mac flag flying from my house, just like there will be no Pringles flag on the hood of my car, nor a Sean Jean logo plastered across my chest or a Honda logo tattooed on my forehead. I really am amazed at how personally people seem to take this as if they own shares in Apple or Microsoft and somehow the discussion may lead them to losing money, or better yet that they invented the damn thing themselves and feel personally insulted. Because in all honesty, I’ve seen the most venom come from the PC users defending their precious gray boxes of joy… maybe it’s because I live in NY though, we have a tougher brand of Nerd.
These things should be seen as what they are, tools. lifeless masses built for us to beat the hell out of them and force them to work on whatever we want.
But… Maybe I’m wrong… maybe Da Vinci and Machiavelli used to argue over the best ink manufacturer or quill maker and brand the logos into their horse’s ass cheeks like throwback bumper stickers. :rolleyes:
Truthfully, I wish Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would just blow each other already, have a secret sexual escapade with a touch of gene therapy which results in a deformed bastard child that grows up to crush both companies so the world is forced to adopt linux which is the most stable of all 3. 
P.S. the one thing I must say though that does touch on this, is that Pixologic is the only company I’ve seen blatantly lag behind with Mac support after they decided to develop for the platform(which it does seem like they are changing now… kind of). I remember it was over 1 year before Z3 came out for mac. Just imagine if Adobe held off on CS4 for Windows users for a year while Mac users got to use it, or if Autodesk did that with Maya. If you choose to develop for an OS I think it’s only right to keep things even, released at the same time with the same features.
Just my 2.5 cents.
. I can say that with the new UI stuff in v3 and with the tools fixed and stability better I was able to come an amazingly long way in 1 week of learning where I’m sculpting anatomy, have the texture workflow down for the most part and can get things into maya and mental ray no problem. ZB just clicks with me the way maya did when I first started using it.
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