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Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

Most don't. Some audio workflows require it, and if you're locked into a certain applications like... uh... Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Xcode?

Then you have articles like these: https://techjourneyman.com/blog/great-macos-exclusive-apps/

> Despite having a version of it in Windows, there’s a good reason why people preferred using Photoshop / Illustrator on Macs. First and foremost, Photoshop was developed on the Macs first. Color is more accurate on the mac out of the box than on windows. macOS is more stable than Windows. These reasons make Macs the preferred platform for graphic illustrators around the world.

wut?

Color is more accurate on a Mac if you don't pay attention to the display you purchase with/attached to your device. Yes, Photoshop was first developed on the Mac... 33 years ago.

I get if you like macOS, but the marketing behind it has done a really good job to paint it as if it's the only option out there. It's insane.

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I’m not a photographer, nor a creative expert, but my understanding is that colour work is one place that that MacOS actually excels, fundamentally, at at the operating system level.

It’s able to handle colour profiles correctly on a per app basis, rather than per display.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2313...

I only know a bit about color profiling, but I don't understand why you'd want a color profile on a per app basis? I see it for device-level... like a printer would have a profile, a camera would have a differently calibrated one, and multiple monitors with different color profiles to make sure they're uniform.

I mean if they have that feature and it's used for something big I'm not privy to, cool, but otherwise it's something that most large OS's handle.

Again only going on off hand knowledge. But colour is one of those things that seems straightforward to begin with, and soon becomes insanely complex as you start peeling the layers back XD.

Different files, applications, media can be encoded in different colour spaces, as can different displays, printers, dyeing processes take them as inputs - and the conversion isn't always straight forward.

For most consumption activities this doesn't matter, but if you work in colour and your job is to make sure that that signiture 'Pepsi Blue' is consistent in print media, television advert, merchandise, and the product, some finer treatment of them in the OS becomes necessary.

To iterate - not a colour expert, but I just thought I'd politely enlighten you as why macOS is so highly regarded for this kind of work, it isn't just marketing. Though no doubt, there is plenty of that too.

replied to the wrong person?

Nope, just continuing your thought process. "Most don't" should probably be "Most [work] doesn't."

In that case: indeed.

As someone involved in both, most people don't work in commercial audio production or photography. And even for audio and photography, Windows has similar or even the exact same applications available, with perfectly fine performance.

Ableton, Kontakt, Lightroom, Premiere and Resolve all work fine on "not macos"

As for color accuracy, I have a plenty expensive monitor (bought on black friday, of course, never pay full price for expensive hardware) and a Spyder calibrator because factory calibration is a nicety that stops being true a month into using the thing. Although of course the mac mini doesn't even have a display, so it can't even get points there =D

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