I think taking all the above into account, the one key fact to remember these days, in that a Mac uses the same parts as a PC. So the comparison isn't the hardware but the price, the software and how the software uses the hardware.
For instance, is Mac OSX better at using a Core i7 than Windows 7? And what about 3rd party software in these environments?
A real world situtation for you is that I had to make this decision this time last year. This will take into account all the above opinions, but in reality is me making a business decision over which OS to use.
So, Mac or PC? My decision boiled down to having my first opportunity to really upgrade my graphics teams capability, speed and last but not least, making them happy with the the technology they would have to use for 3 years. (3 years is the general term the business writes off the cost of the machines against tax and while a minor point warranties are usually only good for 3 years.)
My team is split over 3 sites, Warwick, London and Amsterdam. We'll ignore the IT infrastructure side (networks, etc) as that is already - although poorly - taken care off. The team covers a lot of discplines, from Print, to Web, to Video, all to support our client facing teams. We use the Adobe Creative Master Suite. Last year Adobe released version 5 (V5.5 is out now) and this had some major imporvements over the previous versions. For the sake and length of this piece I'm going to cover video and Premiere.
Adobe had finally moved the platform to 64bit and had introduced major improvements to Premiere with the Mecury playback engine. Essentially if I edited a video in a previous version I would need to 'preview render' at various stages to see any effects or filters I'd added in realtime*. This isn't to say it wouldn't play - it just struggled greatly with multiple effects and mulitple clips. It also allows various different types of clips to be used in the same edit, but that's also another story.
What Mercury did was to take the graphics card and use the huge GPU's on them to play the video(s) in realtime.
So knowing the above I had decided that I wanted an Intel Core i7, as much ram as you could shake a stick at, an SSD - we went with dual 128GB SSD's on it's own 6Gbps bus and a secondary hard disk array with 2TB - run off a 6Gbps raid card. I could have got larger hard drives, but it's important that any member in my team be able to quickly pick up a job from someone else, so having a small amount of local storage helped me make them use network storage! Finally I needed the special graphics card that would let me run MERCURY. This turned out to be a nvidia Quardo graphics card (sorry ATI, but Mercury is nvidia only).
Now problem one is that Macs didn't do Nvidia. You'll notice that all the Adobe marketing material showing Mercury, runs off Windows 7 -but let's not rule Macs out for a silly thing like that shall we? Let's assume they can run nvidia cards.
My next fight was to convice IT that we HAD to run Windows 7. The company as a whole is still stuck on 32bit XP. So I stretched the truth and insisted that we needed 64bit windows 7 and not just 64bit. But I could have run Macs if I wanted to (and if the graphics card issue wasn't an issue) and let's remember I manage designers - they're a fickle bunch who usually sleep with macs and won't entertain any other machine - so I had to think about what environment they'd want to work in. I didn't get macs. But why didn't I?
The reason is actually fairly simple. I had a BUDGET. My PC's cost me £3.5k each, (with a the 27" montior, but excluding VAT). They had the above spec with a Quad core I7 960 (overclocked) and 12GB of ram. A lovely company called Workstation specialists built them for me (and you wouldn't believe the battle I had NOT to go DELL).
Anyway - I'm being specific about the spec here because if you go to this page...
http://store.apple.com/uk-business/configure/MC560B/A?mco=MTg2OTUwMjE
...and build yourself a similar Mac Pro you'll find that even though you can't have the much more expensive graphics card I got, you'll still be over £1700 dearer - and this is a year after I've been using these machines. In fact a year ago the price difference was more like £4000. In the end I've bought 2 workstations, and 3 laptops (all similar spec). I must thank Apple though. If it wasn't for their silly pricing, I wouldn't have got away with the high spec I did.
So Mac or PC. Forget everything else. In the real world, with a budget, I'd buy PC every time. Does a mac run the same programs a few percent faster? Most probably. Is it worth the extra money? No.
(I do apologise for the long post!)
*so on this basis along my team were saving HOURS per job, just through a hardware upgrade, only available to the PC.
