Apr 24, 2007  Best Mouse for a Graphic Designer? Discussion in 'Design and Graphics' started by RojoLeo, Apr 17, 2007.

Why is it that graphic designers more often use an Apple Mac? I am studying graphic design and I am hoping to do some freelance work in my spare time. I have a unit in my studies to discover why Macs are used so much in the graphic design industry. I also want to purchase a MacBook Pro to start off with, but my brother (a PC user) is adamant that I am wasting my money and that I'm only buying it for show, as he says: 'Macs are just expensive because they're stylish.'

I want to give him a number of valid reasons as to why it will help me in the graphic design industry. As he studies games design and he is adamant that a PC can do just the same as a Mac. What a ridiculous unit for studying Graphic Design. Mac does not beat PC on anything but price and style. If you compare an equally priced PC to a Mac it's likely that the PC will have more power.

Mac is more a guarantee of high quality components all packaged nicely together and not prone to hardware issues. Also, there are less viruses. Unless you're rich it would be foolish to spend that money when you're just starting out, my own goal is to earn enough money through graphic design to buy a state of the art mac at some point. – Apr 2 '14 at 11:07 •. There's a seperate question on which is better: For the question of why Macs are more popular, there's a very simple answer: • Almost all art colleges and design schools bought Macs back in the days when Macs were unquestionably better for design ( and answers below detail how) • Art / design teachers got used to teaching using Macs. How to change scaling in excel for mac.

Many top teachers are veterans of the pre- computer days, and would not willingly suffer learning a new operating system • So, most designers use Macs in their formative college years, and get used to Macs Art/design colleges are unlikely to change to PC-first as it would be expensive and difficult (not just the cost of buying new machines, but the cost and time of re-training staff and re-writing course materials, and the cost in popularity among senior staff for whoever made the decision.). Many do now have PC suites as well as Mac suites, but they're usually smaller and linked to specialist areas (e.g. Video/games/fx design, ). Designers are seldom keen to change tools.

We're not techies, our tools are a means to an end - 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'. We usually have a similar attitude to technology as musicians have to the craft of making instruments - 'magic happens here - don't mess with the magic you need to do your job'. (there are many exceptions - e.g. Designers who write scripts, like there are musicians who make their own instruments - but they are exceptions, and the reaction to both is often similar: 'What dark sorcery is this.'

With a mixture of awe and suspicion) So, most designers prefer to stick to the tools they know, which will more often be a Mac. You could make a Windows machine that is 100% designed for designers, like - but when any crafts professional knows that their existing way works and is considered normal and correct, they usually won't want to risk invoking the wrath of the Technology Gods, smiting them with the curse of 'It fails when you need it the most!' For deviating from the familiar, true path. These days, familiarity, comfort and preference are a bigger factor than any objective difference between Mac and PC, and PCs seem to be becoming slowly more popular in design than they were as more people start design school having already done design on a PC. I personally use a Mac at work and a PC at home, and the practical differences are tiny. If you're already comfortable with one, there's no real reason to switch, unless you fancy a type of machine that is only available to the other (e.g.

Windows pro pen tablets like, or, ). If you do, there's no real reason not to switch, so long as you don't mind re-learning a few things and risking a little frustrating unfamiliarity at first.

I think Macs did have one advantage in the early 2000s - they were the first to only crash one application at a time. PC designers could have a doc's layout open in InDesign, placed graphics open in Illustrator, edited photos open in Photoshop, then they'd open a Word doc to copy some text, Word would crash bringing everything else down with it, and they'd lose all their recent work in everything. Then Windows sorted that out (can't remember which version), and the differences have been tiny ever since. – Apr 5 '14 at 11:23 •. @RandomO'Reilly You're about fourteen years late on that, MS-DOS was dropped when Microsoft switched to the NT kernel (the core of the OS) for consumer versions of Windows starting with Windows 2000.