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Is Mac Or Pc Better For Photoshop 2021?
Some Macs find it incredibly challenging, or almost impossible, to upgrade components. For starters, the all-in-one iMac is so packed inside that even an accomplished techie will have a hard time switching simple components like a hard drive. PCs are much more customizable but graphic designers still prefer Macs over PCs, why is that? Let’s find out.
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Now some people may claim that Apple computers are a long-term investment, that updates are not required, and that devices will usually serve longer, which makes it worthwhile to pay the premium on them. If we just want to step up to something quicker, our PCs are also designed to last for at least five years, making them worthwhile, long-term investments.
Price of resale
When it comes to resale value, Apple can still win hands down. Whether you’ve only designed a PC, or you’ve been using it for a year or two, good luck attempting to sell it – PCs have almost no resale value! we can’t recall the last time we sold a PC that we made, so nobody really wants it. Many PCs out there are either tossed away or recycled for that purpose. we personally end up recycling, too, or even use it as “museum elements” (hard drive plates and magnets are particularly fun to play with). I’m finished with collecting a stash of hard drives, RAM and CPUs – it all ends up going to junk/recycling anyway.

Apple devices still have a better resale value and this extends to all Apple products, not only to Macs. People offer old MacBooks, iMacs, Mac Pros and Mac Minis all the time and get surprisingly decent deals on the used market. Our reasonably used Surface Pro 3, worth $2K at the time we purchased it, is selling dirt cheap today after a year of usage – less than half of what we charged for it. And it’s a very solid commodity with a very strong consistency and a high degree of desirability. we wouldn’t really dream about wanting to sell our used PC desktop. we will actually make more money selling specific pieces than attempting to market the entire package, and even then it will typically not be worth the effort.
But if resale value for Apple goods is higher, doesn’t that make them a better option for long-term investment? Isn’t it worth paying the high price in advance? Ok, if you’re the sort who doesn’t mind selling tech equipment before updates, then it could be a valid assertion. However, most of us also wind up either leaving machines in position before they malfunction and have little resale value, or turning them over to our family members, acquaintances, or assorted gifts. As the point of the resale value can be appealing, unless you have actually done so and you realise that you would do it in the future, we will not consider that to be a legitimate claim.
Photoshop and efficiency of the Lightroom
Like we mentioned earlier, Macs have no special benefit in operating post-processing applications like Adobe CC. Buggy launches are almost as poor for all channels. If a piece of software contains memory leaks, there’s a big risk that such memory leaks would be displayed on both Mac OS and Windows. And this has been our exact experience of operating Adobe apps on our iMac—it can be just as stressful and sluggish. Occasionally, there are platform-specific concerns and issues of consistency.

For eg, the notorious menu bug we’ve seen on almost every version of Lightroom is more a PC issue. Adobe really can’t work out a way to resolve it, even if the marketing team has come up with a few tricks to try to solve the problem. On the new edition of Lightroom, if the programme finds malfunctioning menus, it throws an error and requests Lightroom to restart. This specific bug is not present on OS X. There are several other bugs that are present on Mac OS which are not usually present on Windows. In certain instances, there may be an operating system library conflict. As Apple moved El Capitan, there were a number of issues with Adobe applications. It took Adobe a few patches to render their applications functional again. Obviously, these issues did not arise on the Windows network.
In brief, there is not much variation in efficiency when running programmes such as Photoshop and Lightroom on both Mac OS and Windows operating systems.
View Consistency and Calibration Performance
Though Apple releases quite impressive, high-resolution displays/screens for Macs and puts quite a bit of marketing tone in showing their displays as photo-friendly, most Apple monitors are not ideally equipped for correct colour reproduction and calibration. Although things have certainly changed over the last several years, rendering Apple’s displays more or less appropriate for picture work (after the business began promoting IPS panels), they still lag quite a bit as compared to competent monitors. But if you’re dealing with colours every day and you need the highest precision, you’re going to have to invest in a high-quality display that can be accurately configured.
Colourimeter Dell UP2720Q
Dell’s UP2720Q is a competent high-end display that comes with a built-in colourimeter.
Speaking of calibration, that’s probably the drawback of most of the Apple monitors. For eg, the only change control you have on all iMacs is brightness. There is no way to adjust the contrast or fine-tune any display parameters. Setting the desired brightness settings for proper calibration can be painful, since there are at most 16 brightness levels opposed to the usual 100 that you get on good monitors. On top of it, nearly any Apple display has a shiny surface, rendering it painful to deal with in bright environments.
This does not mean that these displays cannot be adjusted – though Apple does a great job of colour replication from the manufacturer, you can also invest in a good colourimeter like the X-Rite i1Display Pro and calibrate every display for the best performance.
So bear this in mind when you look at the Apple monitors. Although those displays definitely look gorgeous, they’re not exactly the right ones to deal with for photography.
This one is a drawback to iMacs and Apple laptops. You’ll need to use additional displays for something else, much as you buy for PCs, because there are common considerations for all of them.
Support for 10-bit programs
For years, Apple has failed to have adequate 10-bit support for Mac OS at the level of the operating system, rendering it unusable for colour-critical jobs. On PCs, video card manufacturers like NVIDIA have been offering 10-bit support for years as long as you buy the correct pro-level card, such as NVIDIA QUADRO series devices.