Anybody use Mac?

[Gino]

Pictures...... pictures......... pictures or it didn't happen.

 

[brycesteiner]

Thanks, I'll give it a shot. I was reading that it might be to do with the NAS SMB setup, that was gonna be my next attempt.

Did you also find that Adobe products didn't run very well? The latest updates helped a bit but they crash a lot more than they do on the Intels.

I don't know about the Adobe products. We no longer use them on any of the typsetting stations that run M1. I have Indesign and Acrobat on my M1Pro and don't have issues either, but I don't use Indesign hardly at all except to merge pictures with data merge. Affinity really has replaced adobe for 90% of our work. The only app for productivity we really use is Acrobat.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

Coke and porn? Nothing political about that

 

[Joseph44708]

I currently use pc's to rip & print on the Seiko's and Roland's.
On my sheet fed printing I use a 2002 emac not an
imac.
Had to purchase the programs (quark express, illustrator, photo shop) $1300 just for the quark Suite.
Ten years later the programs stopped working (aged out, no longer supported) so I took that computer off line and reset the date back 10 years and the programs started working again, and still working today.
I now make pdf files on everything I do, just incase this Mac dies.

 

[ADVANCED DISPLAY]

We have 4 Macs, one of them is the M1 chip and while it's fast, the computer has issues with our network. Disconnects randomly and when saving large files onto our NAS.

The 3 Intel macs are fine, I'm tempted to return the M1 for an Intel.

wow I can't imagine why anybody would want to DO THAT! but hey, I bet you could get a intel Mac for a STEAL, go for it!

 

[ADVANCED DISPLAY]

I just got my new Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra and it is awesome!! I have been all Mac for the past 10+ years, other than a few PC's I have to have for specific programs to run certain equipment.

yea? how long have you had the M1Ultra? what all do you run on it?

 

[ADVANCED DISPLAY]

Mac mini m1 is fantastic…load up on storage or use apple cloud like me. I just added a studio..2k version to support 3 monitors…honestly the max mini is more than enough with m1

So what kind of work do you do on it exactly? I figure for a lot of cases the Mac studio maxed out is overkill but, well I'm a fan of overkill lol. Honestly lately with both our custom PC workstations we've had issues with coreldraw (our program of choice) after working for a bit with big files I've had it unable to even move an object or do ANYTHING because it says it's out of "resources". I never want that to happen.

 

[greysquirrel]

Tons of illustrator, minor photoshop, for work. In design acrobat. Remotely connect to other computers to drive printers..the. The norm mail, QuickBooks, office, etc

 

[ADVANCED DISPLAY]

Tons of illustrator, minor photoshop, for work. In design acrobat. Remotely connect to other computers to drive printers..the. The norm mail, QuickBooks, office, etc

REALLY?? And you don't have any issues with it getting bogged down, slower'n hell or crashing ever? I just priced it out and for $1,900 it's definitely worth it to get one and try out before I dump $4 or so into a Mac studio...... Thanks, this is news to me but I learned something!

 

[JamesLam]

I have both. Mac for the tough stuff using Adobe(but drifting into Affinity) and a PC with Flexi for the RIP and basic layouts.

Maybe one of these years I'll get ambitious and do a VM to run Flexi on a Mac. For right now though everything is humming along, just the way I like it.

I thought Flexi now runs on Mac?

 

[rjssigns]

I thought Flexi now runs on Mac?

Looks like it does now, but I'm not doing the subscription thing. I bought Flexi Pro with my last printer.

 

[ADVANCED DISPLAY]

Not a fan of the new subscription model everybody has these days. it's like they don't want us to own ANYTHING anymore....... tin-foil-hat-guy may have a point! lol

 

[caribmike]

So, I've been really drooling over the Mac studio, I don't know how many nerds we have and how many of those are in the Mac camp, I LOATH windows. Seeing as how coreldraw and I believe the adobe suite runs on the new M1 chips (ultra, ughhh makes me tingle) Im seriously flirting with the idea of getting one.

The two main workstations I have here now are windows machines mad and while they're doing their job...... they do have a tendency of acting LIKE WINDOWS MACHINES and **** will freeze from time to time etc.

Just looking to get some opinions if anybody's tried one.

I've never owned any Apple products (except Apple stock!!!) and probably never will. I dislike Apple because of the high degree of control they have on everything in the Apple universe. When I started out 20 years ago, I couldn't afford an Adobe license for every workstation needed, etc. and with a PC software cracks were plentiful. Today, I can deal with any PC tech and networking issue myself with ease. Oh, and I do have a paid subscription to Creative Suite.

 

[RabidOne]

The thing about the whole PC vs Mac debate is that PC can mean a junk HP from Best Buy with all of the lowest quality parts, or a top of the line self built PC with all the bells and whistles. People with experience can build a PC with Mac specs for around the same cost or cheaper in some cases. There's no such thing as an economy Mac. In my opinion, most Mac people have only experienced the HP Best Buy scenario so they're tainted.

Have to disagree with that comment. I have been in the business for 30+ years and have always worked with Macs and PC's side by side. There has always been a requirement for PC's for programs like Corel Draw. Even our PC evangelist IT guy admitted that there was way less maintenance required for the Mac stuff.

 

[DL Signs]

If it's coming out of your pocket I'll take a Mac Studio, if it's out of mine, nah... pass.
I use both Mac and PC, they're all good today. Back in the early days when digital graphics was a new emerging technology Mac was hands down the best, but today the playing field is pretty level. A Mac will run circles around the budget "off the shelf" PC's, but for a fraction of the cost you can spec/ build a PC that'll run circles around most of them, plus have more (and cheaper) upgrade and add-on flexibility, more software/ hardware compatibility. For hard-core video editing the Mac Studio may have an edge, but for most things, including graphics, a good spec'd PC will do it all just as good today.

I looked at the studios, and impressive as they are spec-wise there were too many things I didn't like. Even their storage isn't SSD's as we know them, it uses FSM's [Flash Storage Modules]. Basically just the memory modules of an SSD without the controller, that part is hard-wired on the main board, the part that knows where everything is on an SSD, meaning you can't even upgrade or replace something as simple as storage. As they reach their cycle limits, or if you have a failure, you can't just swap in a hew one and go. To even restore the OS you need a 2nd Mac.... Really? These are the reasons I've switched to PC's, if my storage, memory, or anything else reaches end of life, or fails, components are affordable, readily available, and just swap it. I don't need another expensive computer just to re-install an OS. I mean really, why do companies do this?

 

[Johnny Best]

Mac people are just cooler people.

 

[GAC05]

Mac people are just cooler people.

Here we go again

(sorry WildWestDesigns)

 

[ADVANCED DISPLAY]

I swear I didn't mean to start THIS age-old squabble. I get both sides I was just curious about any newer M1 hardware being used for production and how the people using them liked them. THANKS!

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Here we go again

View attachment 161155
(sorry WildWestDesigns)

Hahh. That's what happens when jealousy rears it's ugly head

But I'm not just on Linux, but I run Arch BTW. Be thankful though I'm not one of those zealots that will go after anyone that just says Linux by itself. Akin to calling Windows NT or Mac Darwin.

Although I will say this, it takes a lot of effort not to point out that Macs are PCs as well (PC as in terms of personal computers, at least until we are fully transitioned back to the dummy terminal days and even worse manifestation compared to the first time, but I digress, or wait, did I just....).

One thing that I have always liked about Macs has been the screens (for sure within recent memory, of course as I get older that time frame is more modern/closer to today than I care to admit to), but outside of that not so much (and yes I have used them sporadically with varying degrees of satisfaction since the 80s(although if talking about production that doesn't start til the 90s), and if we are just talking about any device, this also includes yesterday as well, although not for production use at all). They have had stumbling blocks along the way and that's to be expected, but I have far more sympathy for systems that have a large 3rd party hardware/software ecosystem and have to play nicely with those (although that sympathy is dwindling when they got rid of the internal QA team), which isn't Mac as they have control over every bit of production.

But I'm too far gone. I have become too corrupted with being able to control every facet of my computer's OS (although one doesn't have to if one doesn't want to, but that level of control is there), that I doubt I could give Windows or Mac a fair chance.

 

[netsol]

Agreenbutbdont run a rip via VM. Tried. Not a great experience. Stops suddenly etc. Easier to get a small dedicated PC for rip with Window Pro and RDP

nothing at all wrong with running a rip on a vm
you just have to use proper hardware
we have a vcenter, with 3 hosts, (6 cpu's 72 processors)
this is the way many really large shops do it

virtualization allows you to allocate resources WITHOUT having to shut down operations
you can add cpu's, ram & disk space as well as network resources on the fly

anyone that has had to replace hdd's with larger ones in a raid array can appreciate this