Mac is NOT better!

Okay, so I'm at a job interview and the guy says they're mainly a Mac shop, but they have a couple of PCs for when jobs come in on a PC application, and he wants to know if I can handle a PC.

I'm like, well, yeah. I've worked on them as the primary machine for 16 years now. I've worked with Macs as well, we had both in my last job.

But then he's skeptical that I can handle a Mac. I point out that the applications are identical, with minor differences in font management. He still wasn't sure.

I pointed out that I've seen dozens of people who had never worked on the PC side hit the PCs at my former employer, and that it was a minor adjustment. Learning office procedures and the corporate culture is far harder.

Plus, I said, new software comes out every so often and makes beginners of us all. Operating systems revamp, or in the case of Pagemaker to InDesign, the application itself changes to a completely different setup, and the work still has to get done. If I couldn't learn this stuff quickly, I'd never have kept a job at all. For crying out loud, I learned to do this as a one-man art department in an office where no one had time to teach me anything.

I know it's unusual for an artist to be primarily familiar with the PC. Maybe even more for the PC to be preferred, but the main reason I prefer the PC is because it's familiar. Hire me to work on a Mac and in about 45 minutes I'll start getting used to it. Do anything 40 hours a week or more and it gets to be like breathing.

But the thing that struck me as oddest was his comment about the superiority of Macs. He asked me why my previous employer had leaned so heavily to the PC side. Economics, I said, they are cheaper. Plus, the IT guy we had was biased against Macs, so we weren't likely to have more of them than we needed. And once you have an archive of legacy files, you don't want to switch because the font issues and whatnot become pretty hairy. At least in a shop with a lot of repeat orders.

But he said, 'Well, yeah they're [I]cheaper[/I]. But Macs are better.'

I didn't correct him, but having worked with both, I can say he is wrong. Unless you define better as a pretty box and a lot more money for the same thing.