How is Mac any better for media work?

background:
When the Mac first came out, Apple had two primary computers on the market. They had the Apple II line for hobbyist and consumers, and they had the more expensive Lisa business model. The Macintosh was designed to fit in between as a high end consumer and small business machine.

Because of it's cheap price and library of wysiwyg (What you see is what you get) applications such as the Mac exclusive Adobe Illustrator, it became a staple for desktop publishing, taking up the majority of the market. In 1987, Apple introduced the very customizable Macintosh II, finally adding color to the Macintosh and having an optional dedicated video processing card allowing, for the first time, dual screening on a PC. A very popular add-on was a secondary portrait monitor for previewing a final form of a photograph, magazine page, newspaper, or for other needs. This increased Apple's popularity in the media market. In the same year (1984), Apple invested in a new company called Adobe for their PostScript technology. Apple invested $2.5 million dollars setting a 15% stake in the company. PostScript would later become the main driving engine of the GUI for an OS that evolved into Mac OS X, Mac OS X replaced PostScript with the free and open PDF API for drawing and compositing it's user interface and vector graphics (on top of OpenGL).

In 1987, Thomas Knoll and later, John Knoll of Industrial light and magic, would find away of properly allowing photographs to appear on a Mac's monochrome display. Originally called Display, a year later it was turned into a full fledge editor and renamed it Photoshop. This was a turning point, after a demonstration done for Adobe and Apple, Adobe bought it. Photoshop is still the preferred choice for photo editing software, though later ported and released on Windows, it lacked some functionality only found in the Mac software such as Apple's ColorSync and AppleScript technologies.

OpenGL:
Mac OS X's graphics system is entirely built on top of what's known as Core OpenGL ( or CGL ). It is Apple's implementation of OpenGL. OpenGL is a general purpose graphics API for rendering 2D and 3D vector and bitmap graphics developed by SGI originally for the IRIX platform. it's an industry standard for high end professional use and is preferred over Microsoft's Direct3D. Direct3D's development and focus is much different than OpenGL, as much thought revolves around video games. OpenGL on the other hand is not about video games, but all general markets. It's said that out of the over 250 API calls of OpenGL, only 100 of them are useful in game development.. the others are useful and even needed in high end graphics systems such as molecular modeling and professional CGI graphics, both of which are almost entirely done with OpenGL, there are a few Direct3D CGI modelers, most of which are consumer based.

Quicktime:
In 1992, Apple introduced a revolutionary product, a hardware accelerated A/V library called Quicktime allowing video and audio to play in realtime through direct access of hardware rather than through much slower (normally software based) graphics APIs of the time. It didn't take long for Avid, a pioneer in desktop video, and Adobe to release Quicktime editing software. Apple had the video publishing market in short time. Down the road Intel and Microsoft pirated Quicktime code and developed an alternative called Video for Windows, bringing to the front formats like the AVI container... Apple threw a $3 billion dollar lawsuit at them and it was later added and investigated in the 1998 Microsoft trials. Microsoft later threatened to destroy Apple's Quicktime and had bribed Adobe and Avid over to WIndows, to save themselves from losing market, Apple bought Micromedia's new QT editor called Final Cut Pro and developed iMovie in 1998, this was around the same time Apple bought a media manager later rebranded as iTunes. Final Cut Pro is now the top dog of the industry, while Avid has slowly slid behind the times.

The Development Platform:
Mac OS X and iOS have an application environment called Cocoa. It's an Object Oriented system that has many many pre-built libraries and frameworks for developers of media and workflow driven software. There are services and features in Mac OS X like it's ColorSync, AppleScript, and global application services that other platforms just lack. Mac OS X, itself, comes with a PDF based graphics API and tons of high quality frameworks that do everything for a developer. Things such as layer based compositing, shadows and gradient shading, image correcting and manipulating, anti-aliasing, GPU acceleration, etc etc is all built in and done for the developer. Pixelmator is a good example, it's a $69 photo editor primarily using built-in Mac OS X technology. it very well competes and even surpasses Adobe's Photoshop in many areas. Pixelmator was the first GPU accelerated image editor, even before Photoshop.

Those are just a few small snippets of why Macs tend to be the standard platform in many media driven industries. By the way, you can also store files remotely on a server with Macs as well just like with Windows, so you can access them on any machine. In fact, you can have the entire installed OS on a network drive or server and run it on a remote Mac.

I wouldn't say a Mac is really better for editing, because both platforms have hardware and software that allow you to perform the same tasks. The main reason (in my opinion) that most graphic designers and editors use the Mac are because the editing programs are easily accessible and easy to use. That way, the designers and editors can focus more on their work instead of taking time to go through the complicated options that are usually involved in Windows software. Not so much better, but definitely more user-friendly. I have used both Mac and PC and enjoy both, but I do my editing on a PC because I'm able to build them myself and personally prefer the Windows OS and hardware customization options.

For me personal : Macs run Final Cut Pro, and I LOVE Final Cut Pro.

Oh, and about losing your work : it's a school computer. Loads of people use it, and that leads to problems. In al honesty I can say I have never lost anything on my Mac, on the 10 + years of working with Macs. If I can't find my files it always turns out to be my own fault because I deleted the wrong folder and dindn't make a back up....

Don't blame the school computers that have been abused by other students. Blame the IT Department of the school for not maintaining the computers.

Macs have been the computers of choice for many Graphics Designers. Final Cut Pro doesn't even run on Windows PCs. Hollywood has a strong fondness for Macs, as you can see in many movies. There's some differences with the Windows version & Mac version of certain software packages.

I wouldn't say Macs are better per say, but rather ... Many Graphic Designers choose Macs over PCs.

Because a lot of the really good software is either cheap or free. The freeware that is available for Macs is more than enough compared to Windows.

Codecs and Programs. Macs come with a lot more codecs pre-installed than Windows. They also have a lot of editing software choices, with Adobe Premiere/Photoshop/AE as well as Apples Final Cut Pro being some of the top favorites.

1. There is a ton of momentum back from the days when the Mac was the only GUI in town and desktop publishing, photo manipulation, etc. were non-existent on a DOS machine. Just as Macs will never be preferred by accountants, PC's play second-fiddle to Macs with creative-types because of past momentum.
2. OS X does its best to get out of your way. Windows "needs it's diapers changed" more often than OS X does. Any time the OS requires your attention for something it risks breaking you out of that creative "zone" we get in when we do our best work. The Mac is less annoying this way.
3. There is far more consistency with UI paradigms for Mac apps than Windows apps. By not having to switch gears when you switch apps helps keep the creative muse in place. Case in point: FTP. Take a look at the Transmit UI and workflow compared to WinSCP.

From a technical standpoint, there is little difference. Sometimes Premiere is faster on a PC, sometimes Photoshop is faster on a Mac. These measurements are more affected by hardware than by OS. Both OSes are quite capable of pushing pixels around. It is the subjective qualities that are hard to quantitatively measure that make OS X a no-brainer for many creative professionals and is exactly why there are many PC to Mac switchers than there are Mac to PC switchers.

Mac is a very organized filing system and downloads applications faster and easier.

and since Mac doesn't allow you use third-party software....

Please don't say things about computers you clearly have never worked with. My Mac is full of third-party software.

They're not. They do have some better programs than Windows, or at least the ones they come with, but eventually iTunes, iMovie, and stuff like that will stop satisfying you, and since Mac doesn't allow you use third-party software like Camtasia Studio(My personal favorite) and other programs, maybe like Sony Vegas and stuff, where as with Windows, you can download just about anything you want. I say Windows would be a better bet if you want to get really intimate with your computer's programs.