Is A Mac Essential For Marketing?

[Ornery]

OK! So, their concerns are COMPLETELY unfounded, right? They save $500.00 buying a PC over a Mac, it's just as fast and can be handed down to a secretary later. The files it creates can be used by ANY newspaper, print service or graphic studio in the county. Am I missing anything?

 

[RossMAN]

Macs can easily read PC files. However PCs can't read Mac files as easily.

Don't get a Mac.

Call the print service and ask them to e-mail you (or the bank employee) specifically what kind of file type they require ...

I know that you could do it on a PC for faster and cheaper, it's definitely NOT cost effective to get a Mac.

If they MUST buy a Mac make sure it's a real Mac not an iMac, or eMac, or iBook, or even a PowerBook just get a G4 tower with at least a G4/800MHz processor and the best graphics card you can buy.

http://store.apple.com/

 

[Ornery]

Aaaaaarrrgh, STOP! Under what circumstances would they HAVE to get a Mac? I'm currently under the impression that a PC with Photoshop can save to anything the Mac based printing service could ask for! No?

 

[hoihtah]

Originally posted by: Ornery
Aaaaaarrrgh, STOP! Under what circumstances would they HAVE to get a Mac? I'm currently under the impression that a PC with Photoshop can save to anything the Mac based printing service could ask for! No?

dude... before asking any more questions...
go talk to the print service people.

unless you know what you got to work with...
it's really pointless to be continuing this conversation.

i'm a mac and pc user. there's nothing that my mac can do that my pc can't.
both can get the job done.
but with mac, you can get it done and look yuppy at the same time.

 

[RossMAN]

Originally posted by: hoihtah

Originally posted by: Ornery
Aaaaaarrrgh, STOP! Under what circumstances would they HAVE to get a Mac? I'm currently under the impression that a PC with Photoshop can save to anything the Mac based printing service could ask for! No?

dude... before asking any more questions...
go talk to the print service people.

unless you know what you got to work with...
it's really pointless to be continuing this conversation.

i'm a mac and pc user. there's nothing that my mac can do that my pc can't.
both can get the job done.
but with mac, you can get it done and look yuppy at the same time.

I agree. Without knowing specifically what the printing service needs we cannot address your concerns adequately.

 

[db]

"but with mac, you can get it done and look yuppy at the same time"
...yeah, you could be an artiste with a black turtleneck, and move in exclusive self-admiring circles.

 

[Ornery]

Well, I have no idea who prints their stuff. My wife says various places print for them.

So, WTF? You've got a Mac with Photoshop suite and a PC with Photoshop suite, and that's all either one has. There are file versions that the Mac can save to that the PC version can't? If that's true, I see room for concern. That means they HAVE to buy a Mac to remove all doubt? Swell... :frown:

 

[RossMAN]

Originally posted by: Ornery
Well, I have no idea who prints their stuff. My wife says various places print for them.

So, WTF? You've got a Mac with Photoshop suite and a PC with Photoshop suite, and that's all either one has. There are file versions that the Mac can save to that the PC version can't? If that's true, I see room for concern. That means they HAVE to buy a Mac to remove all doubt? Swell... :frown:

If my iMac and PC had PhotoShop then I could test this for you ... It just seems like a waste of money to buy a Mac. Assuming the printing place only has Macs (which is usually the case) or has predominantly Macs they should be able to read PC files just fine.

 

[hoihtah]

Originally posted by: Ornery
Well, I have no idea who prints their stuff. My wife says various places print for them.

So, WTF? You've got a Mac with Photoshop suite and a PC with Photoshop suite, and that's all either one has. There are file versions that the Mac can save to that the PC version can't? If that's true, I see room for concern. That means they HAVE to buy a Mac to remove all doubt? Swell... :frown:

i give up.

 

[hoihtah]

Originally posted by: RossMAN

Originally posted by: Ornery
Well, I have no idea who prints their stuff. My wife says various places print for them.

So, WTF? You've got a Mac with Photoshop suite and a PC with Photoshop suite, and that's all either one has. There are file versions that the Mac can save to that the PC version can't? If that's true, I see room for concern. That means they HAVE to buy a Mac to remove all doubt? Swell... :frown:

If my iMac and PC had PhotoShop then I could test this for you ... It just seems like a waste of money to buy a Mac. Assuming the printing place only has Macs (which is usually the case) or has predominantly Macs they should be able to read PC files just fine.

as i said earlier... i use both... mac & pc.
and as far as photoshop is concerned... there's no difference.

i can go on about the difference in pc rip and mac rip. but from what i'm understanding...
you won't use it... the print service people will... since you won't have a direct accss to printer.

so why worry?

 

[RossMAN]

Originally posted by: hoihtah

Originally posted by: RossMAN

Originally posted by: Ornery
Well, I have no idea who prints their stuff. My wife says various places print for them.

So, WTF? You've got a Mac with Photoshop suite and a PC with Photoshop suite, and that's all either one has. There are file versions that the Mac can save to that the PC version can't? If that's true, I see room for concern. That means they HAVE to buy a Mac to remove all doubt? Swell... :frown:

If my iMac and PC had PhotoShop then I could test this for you ... It just seems like a waste of money to buy a Mac. Assuming the printing place only has Macs (which is usually the case) or has predominantly Macs they should be able to read PC files just fine.

as i said earlier... i use both... mac & pc.
and as far as photoshop is concerned... there's no difference.

i can go on about the difference in pc rip and mac rip. but from what i'm understanding...
you won't use it... the print service people will... since you won't have a direct accss to printer.

so why worry?

I'm worrying because he's worrying which is making you worry.

See it's a vicuous endless cycle of worrying.

 

[Ornery]

Thanks loads for the input, but this is how it now stands:

My wife said the last thing she told the guy to do was call all their print services to find out. She'll know tomorrow what the outcome is.

I'm quite disgusted that there is any doubt. Seems like a new version of Photoshop for the PC ought to be able to give ANY print service what they want. As it is, they KNOW 100% for sure that a Mac based system will work for them. Nobody can say whether that PC based suite is a 100% sure bet. BALLS! :disgust:

 

[DJP]

I'll take a stab at it since I used to work for a print shop way back when. The reason they still use predominantly macs is because.... everyone mostly still does. Nearly all magazines and newspapers are still done on macs. Strange huh?

There are 4 reasons for this:

1. Color Correction/management

Microsoft never until very recentlyquite figured out how to make designers happy with the output and the color they'd get. I can remember all the stuff we'd get and send to the printer only to have the greens turn out pink and the blues turn out greenish-yellow. Yeah that's an extreme example, a lot of stuff did come out "almost right" but almost right doesn't cut it in the pro printing biz. If the colors are not 100% exactly matching the pantone swatches the client picks out, its a redo. That's expensive.

2. WYSIWYG/Font management

A lot of problems with early PC software was related to the fact that ms/hp chose pcl and the printing community chose postscript. HP printers have peculiar behaviors-- Pick an hp printer with "built-in" fonts. Amazingly they suddenly show up in your fonts menu and you use them. Naturally when you give your document to someone else with a different printer, the helvetica font on that printer is slightly different than the helvetica font on that other printer. Consequently all the lines don't match up anymore and the whole document is ruined. You just couldn't give printer fonts to other people-- you were stuck with the "built in font" and that was that. The other thing was WYSIWYG issues. You could have the document look great in the "print preview" but when you go to print it out, it looks different-- for example I've seen a lot of one page documents that when printed, ended up with another line on a second page for no apparent reason other than maybe the font issue I pointed out earlier.

Macs do a few things very well and printing/color management is one of them.

3. Applescript workflows-- apple made everything in the os scriptable and many of the apps vendors did too quite a while ago. So, a lot of newspapers have these scripts that suck stuff out of databases, clean them up in word, match the item in pshop, crop all the photos, send it off to the classified ad section, lay it out all pretty in quark, then force it out for preview all in one script. You could probably do this with wsh or vb but the newspaper people already have it all set up in applescript. Good luck getting them to change.

4. quark - everyone who published real stuff uses quark. Quark uses Xtensions. Many of these used to be mac only. So there you have it.

Anyway, these are 4 reasons. I'm not sure any of them are completely valid anymore. The first two have been greatly improved with opentype and ms eventually buying the same color matching technology that apple uses. As for the applescript and quark, well there is quark for the pc but I have no idea regarding the Xtensions.

The big unknown is how designers will move to OS X. Apple has pretty much abandoned the print crowd for the dv crowd these days. They've recently purchased a lot of high end video and 3d companies which create pc products (ie:shake). You can assume that the pc versions will be killed off as they killed the pc version of final cut pro (purchased from macromedia).

 

[Ornery]

Thank you DJP, for an outstanding history lesson. BTW, 35 posts since April 2000, WOW! Way to keep a low profile! :Q

I'll tell ya, if I had gotten that marketing job, I'd be using a PC. If any of those print services gave me the least amount of trouble, I'd tell them to go pound salt. We have a LOT of print services around here for competition, so just try to force me to use a Mac and see our business disappear! The more I think about it, the more I'd like to see her bank buy the PC and tell the print service to either get with the program or shove off!

 

[Ornery]

She said the results are that a couple of the print services prefer the output in Mac format. So, I guess a PC isn't going to be purchased. I told her what I'd tell those print services to do with their Mac preferences, but she said it isn't up to her. I said, if they have money to throw away like that, ask for a raise! :frown: