Ever Hire a Mac Consultant?

[Ken Lee]

"What do you need to do on a Mac with CS (photoshop) that you can't on a Wintel machine?"



Perhaps I have just taken the bait, but as a software engineer who uses PC's all day, I can tell you that one of my better days was last year when I got a Mac PowerBook. To quote Ken Rockwell's article Why Professionals Use Mac:



"Why do we use Mac? Simple: It just works. We get more done in less time without the aggravation".



Some people disagree with Ken Rockwell's (free) advice. I have followed it often (if not to the letter, then in spirit) and it has never steered me wrong.



Apple controls the software and the hardware, and thus has greater control over quality: When you install something, it really just works out of the box. The Windows world, on the other hand, is more like a free-for-all of providers and vendors, where price is king, rather than quality and useability. Some think they save money with a PC, but if you factor in the endless time spent fiddling around to get things to work, you actually save with Apple products.



Over the years, I have spent countless hours on support lines with PC vendors of one kind or another, and have had to reformat the hard-drive and reinstall Windows to fix problems. I have spent no time at all with Apple.

WHen I got the PowerBook, I didn't bother to purchase their Apple Care support, because I knew it is just a gimmic to make money for their retailers, who get a different margin on it. Neither did I purchase the store's own in-house warranty - another high-margin item for the store. In the Apple world, there are no discounts allowed: you pay the same price wherever you buy something, either from them or in a chain store. (Some prices vary by nationality)



As my grandfather used to say: "A poor man buys a cheap coat and has to replace it every year, while a rich man buys one nice coat, which lasts a lifetime".

[Henry Ambrose]

I've never paid for one because I used to be all those things "back in the day". It was a sideline to my already fully digital photography business. (I lived on the bleeding edge then - the other side of the cutting edge) : >(

I consulted on digital studio set up, workflow and archiving, selling the gear, training, Macintosh & Photoshop work - all those things together did not make a full time job. It was a couple of days at a time on site and/or maybe a bunch of phone conversations and not much more than every month or two. I mostly worked for large corporations, the state and some federal government contractors.

This was ten or twelve years ago when not that many people knew how all that "computer photography stuff" worked. Color management was proprietary, very expensive and only worked in closed loop environments. CDs were $25 per disk and hard drives were considered absolutely huge at 500MB. I think today lots of the answers are available on-line and in books and magazines or simply as part of the -vastly- improved and simplified gear we enjoy these days.

Currently there are a couple of sharp guys here in town who do such things as you mention and work as digital assistants for some photographers. I don't think the Mac/PS/Imaging consulting makes a real full time job for them.

[paulr]

"Some think they save money with a PC, but if you factor in the endless time spent fiddling around to get things to work, you actually save with Apple products."

This doesn't even take into account the endless troubles that plague windows computers from the outside ... viruses, trojans, worms, hacker intrusions, etc. etc..

Mac OSX has yet to be breached by anyone anywhere. Not to suggest that it's immune, but it's a whole lot more secure at its core, and doesn't require extensive computer knowledge just to keep it reasonably safe.

It's a long way from perfect ... I yell at my Mac daily. But every time I'm forced to work on a PC, I end up running home and kissing and making up with the mac.

[Bruce M. Herman]

Andrew Rodney, www.digitaldog.net. I have not used him, but he is well respected within the commercial photography world.

Bruce

[Daniel Geiger]

Re paid consultants, some people at work have taken PS classes where they learned such things as that you should edit in RGB, not CMYK, even if your final product is print. Have seen a bunch of different IT support people at various work places, including some "mac experts". Some have been great, other not so; it just depends on the person. I am more of a RTFM person and I like to truly understand what is going on, as opposed to have someone else set it up for me in one particular way. I have seen advertisement in View Camera magazine on digital printing workshops.

Re Mac/PC. I recently installed 3GB of RAM in a Dell XPS 650 with XPpro with /3GB boot option. Windows told that the hardware was installed, but found that only 2GB was available. Took me and a friend who works at MS a couple of hours to figure out that this is a Windows glitch by checking with an application (amira: 3D reconstruction CAD) in comand line mode what it sees.

I have a G5 with 3.5 GB RAM and no problems. Plug and play. I put a 1TB RAID5 NAS box on with a gb ethernet (must be PC administered), and loaded it up with some 4000 image files in the root directory; there the Mac had a few problems, that got solved by moving a few files in different directories. Tried to put an external Mac FW hardrive on a PC, no go. Some USB memory sticks do not work on a PC, but just *some*. At meetings I see people with PC laptops fiddle to get the powerpoint projector to display. Plug in a Mac and there it is even without shutting down the machine.

So I have and use both, but my platform of choice is the Mac. It just works. Period. I resort to wintel only for applications that solely exist for the PC.

my 2c from the trenches.

[Eduardo Aigner]

My Apple Cube G4 from 2000 still works like new after all these years! Love it.

[paulr]

The delayed obsolescence of the mac is really comforting. Up until a few months ago I was using an imac from 1999, underpowered in every way, to work on photoshop files that swelled to over 800MB with layers and channels. I couldn't be in a hurry, but the thing just worked. I could surf the web, come here and spout off on innane topics, write email, all the while the little mac was chugging away in the background. Not a single crash or memory or scratch disk error. OSX likes to have a lot of resources, but it can make do with very little and still be rock solid. And todays version of the OS will work on macs that are over a half decade old.

[John_4185]

And todays version of the OS will work on macs that are over a half decade old.

Wow! Half a decade without becoming obsolete! You could have said a 1/20 of a Century! Whew.

Time - a student reminded me some time ago that I was "born in the first half of the previous century!" I coulda smacked him, but I was too tired.

[paulr]

"Wow! Half a decade without becoming obsolete! "

sounds ridiculous, but it's actually an accomplishment ...

"born in the first half of the previous century!"

forgive my math ... that makes you what, like 150?

[John_4185]

forgive my math ... that makes you what, like 150?

Previous century = 1900 to 1999

First half = 1900 to 1950