I remember watching a show on facebook and if I remember correctly they use macs. Now for web I can understand why you would use a mac but what about for gaming. What do companies like Infinity Ward, Treyarch, EA, Dice, Ubisoft, etc. use? And what do you use?

This is a very sensitive subject I like Windows primarily because I am used to it. I do appreciate the workmanship of Macs, but I wouldn't change my typing habits. People use Macs because they are very well built, they are very beautiful, and they have grown to be a kind of lifestyle. More technical people that don't really care that much about aesthetics (like me) would pick whatever makes sense at the time of purchase, regardless of brand.

I met a gal that used to work at Ubisoft, and if I remember correctly, they use Windows. I can't imagine that this is for everybody there.

I worked at a medium-sized company that didn't do games. There are a few reasons why Windows was chosen:
1) it is fairly easy to become a golden partner (just need to have a lot of people with certificates), which gives you a special MSDN license. That license more or less gives you all Microsoft software for free.
2) the sys admins were more familiar with Windows. It is fairly easy to manage. Microsoft does everything, and even if it is not the best, it does integrate in a nice, manageable way.
3) huge part of the business was extending Microsoft software and frameworks

Designers tend to like Macs. I guess this might have something historical, as Macs were marketed as the meeting point of liberal arts and technology. With products like iPod, iPhone and iPad, Apple built a kind of culture. Technology to their fans is more than gadgets, they really *like* them - like an emotional connection.

Another thing to consider is price. Apples computers are expensive. With PC manufacturers like Lenovo, you usually strike a deal that covers not only the hardware, but also support and some liability in case of hardware failure. I do not know if Apple offer wholesale discounts outside of academia, but in any case, their computers are more expensive. Also, up until very recently, OS X updates cost a lot of money, while service packs for Microsoft products are free, and, in case you are not a gold partner, you can have MSDN subscription, which greatly reduces the price of Microsoft software for big companies.

Art and audio people tend to like Macs.
Programmers usually use PCs, unless programming for an Apple-based platform.

Everyone here uses a Mac since we do all cross platform stuff and with a Mac you can install Windows 7 and then boot into either OS.

I much rather run on Unix for programming. It depends what technology you are using, but if you are an advocate of open source development it is the only real choice. Installing trough the package manager is a snap and gets you started on things instantly.

I don't want to generalize, but from what I've witnessed most companies use Windows for the Visual Studio suite, Visual C++ and C# usually mean using Windows. There's probably an artist department running on macs depending on their preference.

Under the hood, the hardware is all the same these days... So it's a question of which OS.

As for art -- pretty much all the popular art software is available on both PC and Mac OS's, so there's no difference there.
All that's left is which file manager (Windows Explorer vs Mac Finder) you prefer....

This is my own experience with both operating systems, and my own opinion on the subject at hand.

Mac is a more "closed" when it comes to it's programs. Trying to find compatible, and functional programming tools, is difficult at best. Running Wine or some other Windows emulator, just bogs down the system, and produces many problems .
I prefer Windows XP, due to all the tech toys I have accumulated, and for me, it's easy to produce cross platform compatible programs. On a Mac it is much more difficult for me.

DZee's comment interesting, and very misinformed. C# is a Microsoft property, so it's only going to work on Microsoft devices untill some one developes a framework free compiler and library.

Actually in regards to this it is you that is misinformed. There has been a C# and .Net implementation called Mono that runs on linux, osx, windows, iOS, android and quite a few other operating systems. It has actually existed since way back in the .Net 1.0 days and is used in quite a lot of products. One large example in game development is Unity as they use C#/.Net for cross platform scripting.

Programmers use both (out of necessity more than anything; Mac is required to develop for iOS/OSX but existing engine and toolchain is Windows based), artists and everyone else use Windows exclusively. This from standpoint of an iOS/OSX developer.

Main issue for developers is usually development environment + tools. Everything else you adapt to pretty easily. XCode does some things better than VS and vice versa, but overall I prefer working in VS and with the tools available to me on Windows. This is probably more because of familiarity than anything else though.

This is a bit off-topic, but the way people say this really bugs me.

Macs vs PCs?[/quote]
Are you implying Macs are NOT Personal Computers? Do they still belong to Apple even though you just paid $5,000 for it or something?