Apples & Onions

On a PC, I type, for instance:

j:\6503\650305.eps

On a Mac, I have to take the semi-useless one function mouse (don't these assholes know about right-clicking???) and climb up from 'Desktop' to 'Network' to 'J alias' and scroll down to folder 6503, and then if I don't type the extension Illustrator should already know 650305 is not even visible on the PC side.

The customer supplies their fonts, and I load them into Suitcase, and Quark launches and maybe acknowledges that I have the fonts, but I save the pages as an EPS and it tells me to update all their links. I can't select everything and hit 'yes to all' because there is no such key. I have to wait for it to ask me to hit 'OK' twenty eight times.

Fuckers.

Then, when I open the EPS in Illustrator, on the same goddamn machine with the same fonts loaded, it tells me it doesn't have any of the fonts and makes me (with too much mouse action, no keyboard shortcuts) reassign these fonts to themselves. For Arial MT, use Arial MT. For Arial MT Bold, use Arial MT Bold. For Adobe Garamond Book, use Adobe Garamond Book.

And then, after all that, the spaces are replaced arbitrarily by question marks in the whole document.

And the Mac-fan next to me says I have to hand it to the Mac people, the font handling is far superior to the PC.

In what universe???

I try to play nice with the other kids, and PC fans in the graphic arts profession are rare birds indeed, but Macs just suck.

Plus, Macs are way more expensive and I'd have to get new software across the board, no upgrading anything, which would add an easy $1000 to the already ass-raping price.

Don't try to tell me otherwise, I've got access to both platforms at work, have had for a decade and whatever advantages a Mac offered when 'Pentium' might have been part of a Robert Ludlum title, are long, long gone. For that matter, those Apple-heads can't even point to a fictitiously superior chip, because new Macs ship with Intel Inside. And that's not even the best chip on the PC side.

Macintosh is for people who don't want a computer. Because the one advantage I have to give them is styling. There are gaming-oriented towers out there, sure, you can find sexy PCs, but basically a PC comes in a tan tower that looks about as appealing as an open running sore. Macs look great, but when you use your computer, do you want it to look good or get the job done?

Why are there Apples? There's just no excuse anymore. I'd rather have an Onion.