Genuine question as I have a friend starting her own business and I'm starting to spec up the hardware for a variety of purposes.

Why does she keep getting told that Macs are better for photographical work? Is there some software you can't get for PC, or something else I'm missing. Need to know whether to look at Mac. My understanding thus far was that it was a preference, ecosystem and cost thing more than anything else, when deciding between the two...?

I'm not certain there is a genuine advantage, really.

Macs ship with iPhoto as standard, which is a pretty decent basic photo editing and organising program. Generally speaking, the screens are pretty good at colour rendition and are fairly easy to calibrate for better accuracy. All the Apple apps are well integrated with the OS, meaning you can preview RAW images without launching any software - which is handy for a quick overview of an image.

I use Aperture, which was Apple's response to Adobe Lightroom. Both non-destructive editing/catalogue/database programs run on the Mac, but only the latter on Windows as well. Which to use is entirely down to personal preference in the end. Lightroom integrates well with Photoshop and most of the other Adobe pro packages; I know some pro photographers swear by Adobe's RAW support over Apple's.

Aperture integrates nicely with pretty much everything, I've found. One thing I like is I can be working in a page layout app or word processor and still access the Aperture and iPhoto libraries without needing to export any images to use them in the layout.

If at all possible, I would suggest a visit to an Apple store and get proper hands-on demo time with the hardware and software, and the same with the equivalent PC side of things. In the end, it'll come down to personal preference and what is comfortable to use.

There's pros and cons to each, I'm sure.
However, I don't know anybody who uses Windows professionally for photo work.
I'm a Mac person. It makes sense to me and the way I work.
What I will say is that the iMac display is great.

Just look at a photo or an HD film on a mac screen and you will know why. Photography and film work is done on a mac for good reason.

Software is secondary as far as I'm concerned. it's all about the quality.

When I joined Discovery it was 95% PC with only creative and IT having macs. Now we have about 150 as people appreciate the quality and durability (macs tend to have a longer life than PCs). We rarely install Photoshop on PCs. I have worked in the creative (publishing, design, & TV) industry for the last 17 years and they all use mac.

C

So from that, I'm getting:

Blind preference (fair enough, each to their own)
Quality (which rather depends on where you buy, or if you build PCs. But I imagine if you're a large corporate, Apple are more attractive in that regard.)
Screen (which surely there are epic panels available for PC. Well I know there are. Dell for a start and plenty more money buys you even better.)

Am I missing anything else?

Software? Some people swear by things like Aperture and Pixelmator, for example. Certainly with video/music I think this is a key factor. Personally I use Lightroom for most of my photo work, which runs on both Windows and OS X.

i see good reviews for Eizo monitors popping up every now and again, they are really expensive, but supposed to be very good if you are into photo editing/that sort of stuff

(he says using a 22" CCFL TN monitor/TV hybrid )

I have a Dell screen hooked up to my mac laptop at work and the quality is nowhere as good as the mac.

Just saying.

Which one though, there's quite a disparity between the Dell models...

Do you know what software your client is wanting to use? Does she already have this purchased? What OS is she comfortable using?
If she's wanting to run a business and she's never used OS X before, then that's just another hurdle for her to get over, if she's used Windows before then at least she wouldn't have that particular learning curve infront of her.

Mark

She has never used OS X. She would prefer Windows and is currently using Lightroom and CS2. But she's consistently told by everyone she asks that "nobody" uses PCs in the professional sphere. I wanted to ask in here as to why that is. So far, it seems habit is the largest factor. If a Mac is genuinely better for that kind of work, then I'll start researching those and she's up for getting one if they are better. I'm just not seeing it at the moment and I'm really interested to understand the "industry standard" perception out there.

As for Dells, Jon's right. The ten-a-penny business screens they throw out are shash. Their more expensive panels (one of which I'm currently looking at) are far superior and covered by a 3yr NBD on site warranty.

From what I can make out, the hardware in current Macs is the same/slightly worse than current PCs. So it comes down to preference/price/build quality (if buying a prebuilt PC).

But I'm really keen to understand what I'm missing. "Everybody" must have a better reason than they like it - surely?

Caz, aside from screens and durability (which I would say is relative to what PCs you were buying before and the knowledge of the operators in not screwing up the OS over the years) can you tell me why?

I wouldn't be surprised if it's habit...

When many companies started using computers for design Mac may well have been the best. As these people because good at it they continued to use what they know. These people then trained/employed new designers who got used to use Macs to do this stuff. Add to that the fact that 'everyone' tells ever new designer to use one....

It's not hard to see that 20 years or so ago (early '90s), people designing on Macs because they were the best then, might have made the industry biased even now.

Look at those game/movie clips where they go and talk to the guy who's just designed a character, or a mug, or something, a lot of them use Macs, but a good number use Windows too...

I may be imagining this but in the dim and distant past Macs had far better system level colour calibration control (ColorSync) than was built into Windows. Whether this is still true (I somehow doubt that it is) I honestly can't say although I couldn't find the equivalent when I was trying to improve the picture on my Dads PC (Vista).

With a good screen (Eizo, LaCie, NEC, SpectraView e.t.c), calibration software and the like I personally can't really see that there would be that much difference. Unless you really want to use Aperture or any other specific Mac software then all the industry standard stuff is available on both platforms (and it's taken until CS6 for Adobe to return feature parity to the Mac and PC versions of some apps - 64bit support for example).

I gather Tom Arah who writes for PCPro uses PC's for his work (he writes the creative RWC section) so there definitely are creatives out there who do use PC's.

I'm a Mac user by the way but I don't earn a living from it.

Just get her a PC. If that's what she's used to and the apps she'll use she already has then just get a Windows box. If you get a Mac then you'll have to add the cost of licences for software to the overall price, and that's gonna be expensive.

Mark