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Archive 2022 · Creatives on a Mac ...

  
 
airfrogusmc
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p.2 #1 · Creatives on a Mac ...


I have used both and I have had a lot less issues with Macs especially when working with creative programs like PS. When working with photographs and/or graphic programs Macs are more stable. They way Macs function, are for me, more intuitive. There are still some issues across platforms so when working on projects with other creatives like designers there are just less issues.

But it really is if you like Harley or Honda. Or like someone else said 1911 45 or Colt Python. Only right answer is what works best for you.



Jun 15, 2022 at 01:54 PM
RustyBug
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p.2 #2 · Creatives on a Mac ...


airfrogusmc wrote:
There are still some issues across platforms so when working on projects with other creatives like designers there are just less issues.


OIC

I assume that means it was even more so, in times past. Which, would explain, why I haven't noticed that specific advantage ... because I haven't experienced cross platform issues, per se.



Jun 15, 2022 at 03:17 PM
airfrogusmc
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p.2 #3 · Creatives on a Mac ...


Lets put it like this why own a Harley when you can own_____for less. They both are motorcycles and the ______ is a lot faster. On paper no reason to go with a Harley. So why pay more for it? I know why I prefer the Harley. I have expereince on both the ______ and the Harley yet I prefer the Harley. I prefer the Mac. I have a lot less issues with Mac when working in creative programs than I have with PC's. If I were a gamer or an accountant I wouldn't own a Mac. But Macs are more stable with creative programs. And they way they operate is more intuitive to the way I work.




Jun 15, 2022 at 03:32 PM
rattlebonez
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p.2 #4 · Creatives on a Mac ...


I dumped Windows due to Windows 11 and the crap Intel CPU's that get hot, throttle performance, and sound like an airplane

to each their own - use what you prefer and are productive with




Jun 15, 2022 at 06:54 PM
RustyBug
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p.2 #5 · Creatives on a Mac ...


airfrogusmc wrote:
Lets put it like this why own a Harley when you can own_____for less. They both are motorcycles and the ______ is a lot faster. On paper no reason to go with a Harley. So why pay more for it? I know why I prefer the Harley. I have expereince on both the ______ and the Harley yet I prefer the Harley. I prefer the Mac. I have a lot less issues with Mac when working in creative programs than I have with PC's. If I were a gamer or an accountant I wouldn't own a Mac. But Macs are
...Show more

Yup, I get the diff vibe thing. I took a lot of test rides (over multiply years) on Harley's before I finally found one I liked. Then, it kinda "stuck" with me, as I grew with it more over time. The rangefinder is kinda following suit, and I suspect that the Mac may do likewise. The 1911 was more "instant". The shutter release on the CL was "instant". Some things reach out and just grab you. Other things, they kinda grow on you a bit more slowly.

I'm definitely NOT a gamer ... but, I I do have a strong use for Excel. If I could have only two programs, it would likely be PS & Excel. That said, are there any concerns I should have about using Excel on a Mac?



Jun 15, 2022 at 07:20 PM
RustyBug
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p.2 #6 · Creatives on a Mac ...


rattlebonez wrote:
I dumped Windows due to Windows 11 and the crap Intel CPU's that get hot, throttle performance, and sound like an airplane

to each their own - use what you prefer and are productive with



+1 for whatever works for ya.
Just trying out the Mac realm to see if it would fall into that category.

TONS of stories about folks switching to Mac from PC. Obviously, if they had been on PC, but not Mac (pre-conversion), then they had to have had a certain level of familiarity and productivity with PC before they went to the Mac. So, to that end, there is going to be a baseline of preference and productivity that gets brought to the comparative table. The question is whether the difference goes up, down or about the same.

From the anecdotal stories of the TONS of folks who found GAIN in going from PC to Mac, (imo) it begs a reasonable consideration to explore and see how it plays out. Where I land, is TBD ... but, I'm making some familiarity progress with the Mac. What will be most interesting, is AFTER it gets returned to the store ... will I miss it? Or, will I be glad to get back to the PC only.

I can pretty well say that in this short time of using it ... I haven't fallen in LOVE with it. But, I'm coming to get to know it well enough (simple stuff) that if someone said, no more PC for you, use this. I think I'd get used to it. There are things that aren't going quite the way I expect ... but, it isn't pi$$in' me off, just yet.

Bear in mind, that's even after that whole debacle about nobody knowing how to read an SD card.

Speaking of which, I forgot to Eject my card before removing it again ... what kind of issues / problems does that create / why the need to Eject before removal? I remember doing that LONG AGO with PC's, but it hasn't been a requirement for a very long time for me. Not a complaint, just need some better understanding to help me remember, WHY that needs to be done, before removal (or unplugging the dongle, with card still in it).



Jun 15, 2022 at 07:26 PM
bjhurley
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p.2 #7 · Creatives on a Mac ...


RustyBug wrote:
Speaking of which, I forgot to Eject my card before removing it again ... what kind of issues / problems does that create / why the need to Eject before removal?


The Mac's approach is to apply the Windows "safely remove hardware" eject option to everything that really should be ejected before it is removed. For whatever reason, Windows allows you to remove SD cards without ejecting them first, which seems risky, especially when using built-in SD card readers that don't have an activity light. You can easily think your SD card is finished transferring one way or the other and yank it out before it's done. Could that corrupt data? Possibly. But the Mac trains you to eject SD cards as if they were any other kind of external volume (hard disk, SSD, CD-ROM, DVD, etc.). That seems a much safer approach to me.

As for Excel: just be warned that the Mac versions of Word, Excel, etc. are not the same as the Windows versions; everything is compatible but there are differences in the user interfaces and not all things are where you expect to find them and I don't think the Mac versions have all the functionality of the Windows versions. Just a few weeks ago I remember I tried to do something on the Mac version of Word that I do in Windows and it literally wasn't possible; I had to go to my Windows laptop and work on the file there instead. But everything is compatible in the sense that you can seamlessly work on an Excel file on the Mac and then open the same file in the Windows version. There may be some limitations with respect to Visual Basic or macros on the Mac version. Office is one reason why I always keep a Windows machine, it just works better on Windows in my experience.



Jun 15, 2022 at 07:50 PM
RustyBug
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p.2 #8 · Creatives on a Mac ...


bjhurley wrote:
The Mac's approach is to apply the Windows "safely remove hardware" eject option to everything that really should be ejected before it is removed. For whatever reason, Windows allows you to remove SD cards without ejecting them first, which seems risky, especially when using built-in SD card readers that don't have an activity light. You can easily think your SD card is finished transferring one way or the other and yank it out before it's done. Could that corrupt data? Possibly. But the Mac trains you to eject SD cards as if they were any other kind of external volume
...Show more

Okay, thanks.

As to SD card removal on PC (sans eject), I've always been very surefooted about delaying any removal until I was reasonably certain that no active operations should be going on ... owing to my recall of the Eject days.

Yeah, I kinda wondered about Excel and Mac. I don't know enough about how the PC vs. Mac thing works under the hood, such that it influences the programs. I do recall eons ago something about the Intel vs. AMD ... one being better for number crunching, the other being better for something else (dead brain cells, to what that really was).

If there really is an "under the hood" difference regarding how the hardware / software integration / application ... it kinda sounds like a number crunchin', creative could be destined for dual platforms ... or accept the concessions of one for the preference of the other.

For me, number crunching power doesn't require the same "mental flow", as creative work. Which kinda segues to my dialogue with the store ... regarding the myriad of functions / operations that can be setup as "less disruptive" to the creative process (in the old days, at least), more so than the PC. In that regard, it became the tool of choice ... then, the defacto standard, and now that the gap is smaller, there still remains some cross-platform issues. Thus, the "Mac is for creatives" ... well, that's about the best I've got so far, coupled with any hardware / software efficiency gains to given tasks.

How accurate that is / isn't ... idk, but it's kinda the summation of what I've come to understand over the last few weeks of exploration into the Mac realm. I'm open to revision, but I'm about to the place that if it hasn't been mentioned by this time, then there probably isn't that much more to mention on the "Mac vs. PC" or "Mac is for creatives" front.



Jun 15, 2022 at 08:10 PM
bjhurley
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p.2 #9 · Creatives on a Mac ...


RustyBug wrote:
Thus, the "Mac is for creatives" ... well, that's about the best I've got so far, coupled with any hardware / software efficiency gains to given tasks.


"Creatives" covers quite a large territory, though. My brother is a biochemist and his lab is all Mac; I used to do some work for a chemistry department in a large university that was largely Mac, and I work with statisticians, modelers, and physicists who work on Macs. Scientists are very creative people. :-)

When I go to conferences I see atmospheric physicists running computer models on Macs, and some government agencies that require high security run on Macs.

For basic number crunching you can probably do everything on the Mac version of Excel that you can in Windows, but if you're doing a lot of VBA or macros and creating complex models in Excel you're better off with the Windows version.



Jun 15, 2022 at 08:40 PM
ytwong
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p.2 #10 · Creatives on a Mac ...


A lot of software developers, AI guys use Mac, mainly because it can be purchased off the shelf, it's core is BSD (Unix) with a polished UI yet it is very similar to Linux which most server use, and that is important when one need to automate tasks. They can have all stacks of web servers, database servers, application servers, dockers run in the Mac. While M1 mac is great it's also a big issue for those kind of developers. Those tools are mostly for x86, and since there won't be M1 server those tools are not gonna optimise for M1. (Amazon has ARM servers but I don't know if that helps). But then many developers are using clouds and have infra of the development environment moved to cloud.

I use Windows and Mac (and a little bit Linux), both have pros and cons. I think the latest batch of Mac are great for works like photo/video editing, illustration, 3D. Unable to upgrade/repair is a big concern. With PC if anything happened I can easily get the SSD/HDD, get the data and continue to work with another machine. Mac? You can't get the data out on your own, and Mac repair guys often (claim) wipe out the drive. (but do you want your possibility sensitive data in their hands while it's getting repaired?)
Yes I know backup but getting data from backup still means data loss since you don't run backup every hour every minute.

Regarding Excel .... Mac has "Number" app which is fine for simple tasks and I use it a lot but I once use it to edit a ~300MB dataset and it just freeze. I later tried to edit a ~80-100MB file and it still freeze. Excel works with the larger file just fine.



Jun 15, 2022 at 09:19 PM
Ray Swindle
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p.2 #11 · Creatives on a Mac ...


When I was a safety engineer one of my jobs had me assigned in the Space Life Sciences Projects building at NASA JSC in Houston (~1990). Every NASA employee in the building and every contractor used a Mac. Every other building at JSC used PCs. When I quit that job, the guy who replaced me was a PC guy. When they told him he would not use a PC, he would use a Mac, he told them to not give him a computer he would provide his own. He brought in his own computer, but they would not let him connect up to their servers, he had to use it as a desktop computer. I might add the building was full of Mac fanboys, including the IT guys. After he had been there a couple of months, one of the project managers told me they had the IT guys disconnect his computer and set it outside the front door (there was an enclosed foyer between two sets of doors) with a box of his personal items. They also terminated his cypher lock card so he couldn't get in. The contractor moved him back into their building and began looking for a new safety engineer.


Jun 15, 2022 at 09:21 PM
ytwong
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p.2 #12 · Creatives on a Mac ...


Those are likely Intel Mac.

R, which many people use for crunching numbers, doesn't have a M1 version yet. While some tests show Rosetta2 works but not sure which package works and which doesn't, and we use a lot of packages.

bjhurley wrote:
"Creatives" covers quite a large territory, though. My brother is a biochemist and his lab is all Mac; I used to do some work for a chemistry department in a large university that was largely Mac, and I work with statisticians, modelers, and physicists who work on Macs. Scientists are very creative people. :-)

When I go to conferences I see atmospheric physicists running computer models on Macs, and some government agencies that require high security run on Macs.

For basic number crunching you can probably do everything on the Mac version of Excel that you can in Windows, but if you're
...Show more




Jun 15, 2022 at 09:24 PM
RustyBug
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p.2 #13 · Creatives on a Mac ...


ytwong wrote:
Excel works with the larger file just fine.


I assume you mean the Mac version of Excel.

I don't do a lot of macros or VBA. My "push" is more database (SAP export, etc) oriented and multiple Pivot Tables in Excel, vs. an actual database.

Does the switch from Intel > M1, M2 have any relevance / concern for Excel on a Mac (vs. Intel)?




Jun 15, 2022 at 10:54 PM
airfrogusmc
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p.2 #14 · Creatives on a Mac ...


Once you go Mac you'll never go back


Jun 16, 2022 at 09:50 AM
bobby350z
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p.2 #15 · Creatives on a Mac ...


My workplace, way back, only options were Mac or a Linux laptop. You got Linux desktop by default. Using windows required VP level approval with an explanation as to why you needed windows. That's when I started using a Mac. Mac does have a lot of issues for us as various hardware drivers are not available at all unlike PCs. So all real work is on Linux with some using windows where the instrument driver won't work on linux. But this is mostly engineering work.


Jun 16, 2022 at 01:22 PM
RustyBug
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p.2 #16 · Creatives on a Mac ...




bobby350z wrote:
My workplace, way back, only options were Mac or a Linux laptop. You got Linux desktop by default. Using windows required VP level approval with an explanation as to why you needed windows. That's when I started using a Mac. Mac does have a lot of issues for us as various hardware drivers are not available at all unlike PCs. So all real work is on Linux with some using windows where the instrument driver won't work on linux. But this is mostly engineering work.


You mention drivers ... any issues or concerns with printer drivers to be aware of? I suspect that area is solid, but it raises the question to quirks, etc.



Jun 16, 2022 at 02:08 PM
rji2goleez
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p.2 #17 · Creatives on a Mac ...


To the OP, this is clearly my own opinion. I migrated to Macs back in 2008 and have not looked back. Along the way, I've used PCs for work and play as well. My opinion is that, for me, Macs and Mac OS X just work more smoothly and intuitively. I find that windows eventually bogs down for one reason or another. My macs have not really slowed during their use. Eventually, I may choose to do a reinstall of my mac but it takes so much longer for me to get that point versus windows. I find that Mac hardware remains functional way longer than Windows machines. I'm still using a Macbook Air 2012 edition and it works very smoothly for daily non-photographic tasks. My son has my old 2008 Mac Pro that he still uses for music recording, editing and mastering in a professional studio. Also, I equate this question with the iphone versus samsung . . . Samsung phones on google OS can do everything iPhone can do but iPhone does it more fluidly and integrated. Again, this is my opinion and I know others may not agree.


Jun 16, 2022 at 02:21 PM
RustyBug
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p.2 #18 · Creatives on a Mac ...


rji2goleez wrote:
To the OP, this is clearly my own opinion. I migrated to Macs back in 2008 and have not looked back. Along the way, I've used PCs for work and play as well. My opinion is that, for me, Macs and Mac OS X just work more smoothly and intuitively. I find that windows eventually bogs down for one reason or another. My macs have not really slowed during their use. Eventually, I may choose to do a reinstall of my mac but it takes so much longer for me to get that point versus windows. I find that Mac
...Show more

I'm finding the fluidity to be "noticeable", but nothing dramatic ... my biggest difference right now is the controls diff. I'm accustomed to "right click" and "left click" for diff things, and I can't seem to find the equivalent operations. For a while, I was trying to click and slide (two diff gestures), before I came to realize that it is a combined press down, and keep the click down while dragging. I seem to keep letting off the pressure and losing my point. Getting better at it, so it'll likely be a muscle memory thing, in time.

Haven't bothered with very many diff things ... just working my way through my life here on FM, Bridge and a little bit of ACR so far. Going to do some PS stuff next, I think. Brushwork may be interesting if I have to keep holding pressure down (vs. left click), but there may be a way to "lock it down" that I haven't found yet. So, I'm open to tips for brushwork gestures on the Mac.




Jun 16, 2022 at 07:22 PM
dordek
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p.2 #19 · Creatives on a Mac ...


I haven't used a Windows machine in over a year now and think I'm fairly well adjusted to the Macs....but -- I cannot stand the Apple mouse. Maybe I'm too used to a two button mouse, maybe I should spend more time learning jesters, but it seems like a process that I really don't need to get into. I think the thing that finally did it for me was finding out I couldn't adjust the speed on the mouse movement. Took many sweep to edge of mouse pad, return to center, repeat, repeat, etc. to get from one side of the screen to the other.

My solution is a Logitech mouse. Two buttons, adjustable sweep speed (acceleration) and a scrolling wheel, plus many other buttons if wanted. My Apple system had no problem seeing the mouse and it works just like I want it to. Maybe, if I ever get my Studio display, I will find my Apple Pencil more useful, but for now my mouse isn't an Apple mouse and it doesn't look like it ever will be.



Jun 16, 2022 at 09:51 PM
Peter Figen
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p.2 #20 · Creatives on a Mac ...


The Apple Bluetooth Magic Mouse is simply the best, most elegant mouse I've ever used. I love how it works and, more importantly, how it feels in your hand. I turn off all the options except scrolling and have no problem hitting the Ctrl Key for Right-Click. And it co-exists with the Wacom very happily. I use the Wacom left handed and the mouse either right or left depending on what I'm doing.


Jun 16, 2022 at 09:58 PM
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