[glypo]

Craig - I don't disagree with much of what you said, but I think you misread my post.

I said industry use supercomputers with Linux for special effects. Which you will find they do, rendering some effects (particularly when CGI is involved) takes serious serious power. The applications or the power does not exist for Mac. Of course I totally agree that the public and prosumers don't need supercomputers to edit video, or indeed neither does industry (although they need powerful boxes when they start dealing with production quality material – but certainly not mainframes).

General video editing, for sure stuff like Premier is widely used, particularly on a prosumer level. But as you also say these apps run on Windows or on Mac... which do not give a compelling reason to buy a Mac system over Windows.

As for Mac's being backbone of creative industry, I disagree to an extent. At prosumer level yes, but that's more to do with Macs popularity with the creative type. But Linux really is the backbone of the creative industry in terms of movies and television. 3D and special effects is almost exclusively Linux, I hope you agree there. ILM, Pixar etc etc all use Linux or UNIX machines on large mainframe computers. But even for video editing and video tasks that don't require the computational power, I know of companies in London that have 500+ Linux (CentOS, RHEL and Fedora seem popular, anything Red Hat based I assume) boxes for editing and compilation and the same is repeated all around the world.

I know very little about the graphical design/image manipulation/etc industry. So I don't know what's widely used here, and I don't care much to comment on what I don't know. But I wouldn't be surprised if Mac's were the norm here however.

Just for my general interest, do you know what kind of Mac boxes that the 3D companies use that you said XP runs better on? In theory it's impossible for XP to run better on a Mac than a normal machine, as Mac is a normal machine. Unless of course the Macs were slightly older when they were running PPC chips rather than x86's, which is basically what I'm thinking maybe 3D software runs better on PPC than x86? Which could explain why I always tend to find video industry running Red Hat based Linux (RH supports PPC as well as X86 and X86_64) so maybe video companies using RH based as they use PPC that maybe works better on 3D? Just a curiosity on my part if you happen to know. Thanks.