"I know people think Mac is the designer's platform, but that has not been the case for quite some time."
Maybe you should send out a memo to set them straight, the entire creative industry is still using those overpriced toys. Surely designers don't need high quality type display, font and color management, and built-in multi-language support.
Look, this is not a Mac vs. PC issue. It is merely Mac's target demographic not being designers any more. It has not been designers for a very long time.
Mac displays are not very good. Their color range is poor. It is the middle-top end of consumer displays, but it is by no means a professional display. I wouldn't even dream of doing anything requiring accurate colors on an Mac display. Their 30" is about as relevant as Xserve. It is not their target demographic any more.
I am not knocking Mac hardware. Their mobile hardware is the best on the market. However, the perception that Macs are design machines came from when Photoshop was a Mac exclusive. This has not been the case for a very long time and I would say the PC version of Photoshop is significantly better than the Mac version as it stands. I have a MacBook, but I also have a PC largely because I use Photoshop many hours each day and Photoshop on OS X is bad.
Color management, besides being supported by Windows, is more applicable to print design and pretty much irrelevant when it comes to design viewed on a screen.
Designers were never Apple's target demographic, even though Apple and Adobe started the desktop publishing revolution. Education and home use have always been the Mac's target demographic.
Ofcourse, the creative industry has always preferred Macs, and they still do. That's why it's the designer's platform, not because Apple targets them.
As for Apple's displays: you're right, they're not as good as high-end monitors from Samsung, Eizo or Barco. Apple's displays are not made for print designers, they're made for multimedia. This has been the case ever since Apple switched from CRT to LCD. However, the price is right: $999 for a 27" screen with LED backlighting and IPS is hard to beat.
As for Photoshop performance on Mac vs Windows: are you using an older version of Photoshop for Mac? Those weren't 64-bit, didn't utilize the GPU and didn't make use of multiple cores well. Try CS5 on Mac, it's stable and fast.
Actually Mac monitors are OK for print since print doesn't have the range of colors that a display has. What they are not ok for is designing for designed intended for screens.
I wasn't really talking about performance on Mac vs Windows. Photoshop on Mac is buggier, designed poorly, and very flakey overall. I have used both platforms. I own both platforms.
Yes, most designers do just fine with them. Most workspaces of high end design firms I've seen, or you can see photographed on the intertubes, are using Macs with Mac displays.
And they tend to do just fine against the competition at reviews too.
Did I forget to add sarcasm tags to my previous comment? My apologies.
Anyways, in most settings in the creative industry, the software on a workstation is more expensive than the hardware, no matter whether that's a Mac or a Windows machine. And yes, if the person operating the machine earns more than minimum wage, a couple of thousand for a computer really isn't the biggest business expense.
Actually, the fonts on the computer are generally more expensive than anything else. It's better with opentype, but a lot of agencies still have a ton of mac-only fonts that would be prohibitively expensive to update.
Plus, really good designers are like really good developers. If they don't get to work on the machines they like, they'll walk. Which is just too bad for anybody in IT that wants to push Windows.
Maybe you should send out a memo to set them straight, the entire creative industry is still using those overpriced toys. Surely designers don't need high quality type display, font and color management, and built-in multi-language support.