Six lessons learned through moving my creative work from Mac to PC.
After thirty years of using Apple computers in my creative endeavours, I recently shifted to the PC. My previous post explained why after staying with Apple through thick and thin I finally moved to a Microsoft environment. This post outlines the lessons learned.
My objective became to have an affordable high-powered consumer-based computer that could easily run any of the creative software in common use today. That was to include all the Adobe creative suite of applications especially the more demanding After Effects and Premier. Along with a raft of current 3D software and more specialised 2D illustrative and photographic software.
Lesson 1 – Build your own with someone else.
At first the thought of building your own computer for a non-technical person appears daunting. So ironically there are several companies that offer a tailored build-your-own service. In simple terms, you choose and buy all the hardware components from them and they put the final computer together for you. Along the way they check compatibility, “does this chip work with that motherboard”? etc and then they test the machine before packaging it up and sending it to you with the guarantees and warranties. There is in most cases a small fee for this service but I found a company called CCL computers that look to be making their money on the component costs. In other words, I priced up the total cost of buying the parts on Amazon then compared these with CCL and the price was the same but with the build and warranty included. Lesson one; build your own using someone else.
Lesson 2 – What type of computer to build?
For me the shift to PC was all about choice, this is both a strength and a weakness. It is brilliant to be able to fix a budget and match parts to meet that cost but also the vast amount of choice in the PC world can be bewildering. I looked at the performance speed of the top end iMac pro as my guide. At the time of my purchasing they cost between £9k and £13k. Having done my research I realised I could build a PC with the same benchmark results for about a third of that price. With budget set I bought the fastest and most reliable components I could afford. In truth I could have purchased a much cheaper PC that would have been adequate for most creative tasks but I wanted this machine to last a good few years running very demanding 3D software. Lesson two; check the creative software benchmarks and choose hardware accordingly. These sites are a good place to start. https://www.cgdirector.com/ and https://browser.geekbench.com/
Lesson 3 – The operating system.
There is no escaping that I still believe the Mac operating system to be the best for creative types. It has always been the friend to the creative community, intuitive, efficient, slick. For me Windows has always been a compromise, a less efficient way of working and quite often a genuine slow down on productivity. Thankfully Windows 10 has levelled the playing-field somewhat. Even the scourges of the PC environment viruses and malware have been seriously addressed not only by a third party software but at last by Microsoft themselves. Sure, the threat is still there but then Apple is no longer the safe haven it used to be. Out of the box Apple has it nailed for the creative person but with a few additional utilities installed Windows 10 comes a much closer second than it used to. So far the impact on my creativity has been minimal. The strength of the PC is that whatever tool you were accustomed to on the Mac there will almost certainly be several alternatives for Windows. Lesson three; embrace the differences of Windows but match the functionality of the Mac.
Lesson 4 – The peripherals.
The first problem encountered swapping over to the PC completely caught me off guard. What were these strange outputs from my video card and how do I connect them to my old monitor? My trusty 30” monitor has stood the test of time so of course I wanted to hook my PC up to it, but what was this Display Port (DP) connector? A quick search showed DVI to DP connectors were ten-a-penny but wait they didn’t support my high res monitor, for that you needed a more specialised beast (A dual link active convertor to be precise. See here) at a cost of over £100. Then there was the keyboard. I swapped over the Mac keyboard which kind of worked except the keys were mapped differently and some didn’t work at all and of course there was no windows key. So, I thought okay I’ll just buy a PC keyboard. Oh boy! To say there was a large choice would be an understatement but finding the right choice was far from easy. After being distracted by the PC gaming community’s vast choice of led lit keyboards, I came back to matching as closely as possible to my trusty old Mac keyboard. Surprisingly that seriously narrowed the choice. I wanted a cable connected ultra-thin, full, UK mapped keyboard. Eventually I found what I was looking for, Cherry make a very close match to the Apple style keyboard and the price was good. Thankfully all of my other peripherals connected without a hitch, Windows recognised them and automatically installed drivers. Lesson four; your old Mac peripherals will connect to your PC but you might have to spend time and money to get what you want.
Lesson 5 – The software.
Virtually all of my creative software was available on the PC with very few exceptions. Adobe allow you to swap across using their creative cloud license so no problem there, as do many other license-based applications. Even non-subscription software often allows you to swap over at no additional cost. The only applications missing that were present on my Mac are the ones from Omni, Omni-graffle etc. and my trusty backup software Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich. After careful research I settled on PC alternatives that appear to do the same job and didn’t break the budget. Fonts on the other hand are a different story. Many of my fonts on the Mac were of the ancient variety and could not/would not port across. To compound the problem some foundries these old fonts came from no longer exist. Thankfully Adobe CC comes with a pretty good range and I am getting there with sourcing alternatives. However, if your creative world revolves around legacy fonts, then do your research before moving over. There may be a font-porting/converting application but as yet I haven’t found one. (If you know of one, please let me know.) Small things that Mac people take for granted like controlled screen capture and previewing images threw me to begin with, but again a quick search gave me suitable alternatives in the shape of the built in “Snipping tool” and a free download “Quick look”. Lesson five; Most of your creative software is available on the PC but check out legacy fonts in particular.
Lesson 6 – The PC advantages.
Having spent my time getting the PC to behave much like my Mac did I have finally had some time to see what the PC has to offer above and beyond the Apple environment. First and probably the most important and the real reason for me to move in the first place was the raw power of the new hardware. My PC is fast. It’s benchmarking puts it alongside Apple’s top iMac pro for CPU activity and way ahead for GPU usage at considerably less cost. More than that though, new creative software is now available to me. I am also discovering that the communities built up around creative software are greater in number on the PC and those that develop plugins and utilities target the PC environment first if not exclusively. I am also coming to realise that some creative software is optimised to a Windows environment, though not all. The Adobe creative suite is a good example where the Macs still give a more efficient performance and if it wasn’t for sheer grunt power of the PC’s hardware, the Mac would perform better. I think what I am enjoying most is the sheer variety of utilities and extensions offered on the PC, along with the weird and wonderful and somewhat esoteric applications that often do that one special thing you need. Lesson six; embrace the difference and take advantage of the variety.
Conclusion
I try to stay away from the nonsense arguments setting Mac against PC. I am specifically looking for the most cost-efficient way of producing creative work. In the past I have always argued that the Apple ‘environment’ was the most efficient way to produce creative work. The minutes saved on start-up and functional execution of creative applications meant that although the Apple computers cost more than the PC equivalents, the time saved by a creative person using a Mac quickly outweighed that initial saving through being more productive. While I think this argument is still worth investigating my own experience leads me to see the difference is much less than in the past. Productivity on the PC is now very close to that on the Mac.
Even more, in certain creative areas where the shift from CPU to GPU for creative processing has taken place the Mac is now seriously disadvantaged even taking into account external GPU options. The promise of a new modular Mac Pro has yet to be realised and in the meantime Windows 10 has greatly narrowed the differences between Mac and PC for the creative community.
In truth I waited nearly two years before moving from Mac to PC and it was no small undertaking for someone that has remained loyal to the Apple environment for thirty years. In the end the creative innovation was increasingly happening on the PC, the raw power offered by the GPU in particular meant Mac were falling behind even on their top-level machines and the premium cost could no longer be justified based on productivity gains. This may all change when the new Mac pro is finally revealed but for me ‘it’s too little, too late’. I have moved over to the PC and I am actively seeking the advantages that can offer.
Would I move back to the Mac? What I am now questioning is my brand loyalty, I doubt I will ever be a Microsoft fan in the way I was an Apple advocate. All of my other devices remain firmly Apple for the time being. However, returning to a Mac desktop/laptop will take something very special indeed.
The important thing for me is that my productivity and workflow are no longer compromised by being on a PC. I have the modular computer I was hoping for and I saved money and had fun in the process.
You can see my previous post on why I moved to PC from Mac here.
I would love to hear what experiences other creative folk have had moving from Mac to PC.