I'm looking for opinions from those in the graphics field on whether or not Macs are still the "industry standard" for designers.

Those of you still in school, or just out of school -- are classrooms still Mac-only environments? Those of you working -- are your companies providing Macs or PCs? If you freelance, which do you prefer?

Thanks in advance for any insight you can provide on this.

I am Mac-centric. Being a CS geek from way back, there's nothing better than running Unix on your desktop (MacOSX is a BSD/Unix Kernel). You have more stability, and more control. I also have PCs, but generally only for things like gaming.

As far as design stuff goes, and graphic design specifically, I think Mac may have lost some of the edge in the past 10 years - but only because PCs do it every bit as well as Mac.

If you're trying to make a decision between the two, I would urge you to think of getting a new Mac that is Intel based, so it can run both MacOSX and Windows Vista. I've actually been rather impressed with Parallels on Mac, which allows you to run Windows in a MacOS window. Seems to be rock solid, and as fast as booting the machine up in Windows. It's the best of both worlds.

Pete

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Reverend Pete
Code Of Paint
Learn to program using Flash

I would say the mac. Today i was trying to code a website with windows and it just took so long. Trying to get the file paths right for intranet was a nightmare and took more time than building the site.

From what i understand macs are nothing like that

One of the nice things about doing web design on Mac is that you can just turn on Apache (webserver), PHP, and MYSQL, and basically have a full-blown staging environment on your Mac.

This is assuming that your webserver is UNIX based (like all good webservers should be)

I do this on my laptop, and it makes my life much easier - I don't even have to be online when I'm working on web stuff, because I can test off of the webserver on my laptop.

Pete

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Reverend Pete
Code Of Paint
Learn to program using Flash

I have to disagree. There are more pc's than macs out there and designers have to take that into account. There are fonts that are not cross compatible so on and so forth.