I am pro-PC, but anti-Windows.
In other words, I'm all for the cheaper cost and wide availability of parts, freedom of components, etc. that goes with "PC" -- you can build or buy whatever kind of machine you want.
But when it comes to software, it's LINUX ALL THE WAY. I recommend Linux Mint, an Irish distribution that is currently #1 and is based on Ubuntu, which is #2.
Everything "just works" on Linux Mint. All the old wives tales about Linux might have been true in 2000, but not in 2014.
If you haven't tried Linux in more than 5 years, you owe it to yourself to give it another shot. Microsoft is overpriced crap and you don't need any of it.
I've been using Linux for many years now. I switched full-time to Linux in May 2011, though I had been using it near-full-time for a couple years before that.
I can play Youtube videos, burn CDs, and all that right out of the box.
I can't recommend it highly enough. Just think -- all the software is free! If you need something new (say, a Japanese dictionary) you just bring up "Software Manager" and type in what you're looking for. Click-click and it's downloaded and installed on your PC for free!
Mac might be OK for some, but it's a walled garden and everything (hardware and software) is super-expensive. Not very Catholic family-friendly.
I'm sorry, Matthew, but in the context of what the OP is looking for, I very much disagree with you. Sure, Linux distros have become much more stable, vanilla and non-power user-friendly, but in most ways the software availability limitations are still pretty severe. You can emulate a lot of things to a degree with Wine, but that requires that you have a pretty substantially powerful tower in most cases, and when you're talking about content creation, that's over and above what you need as a baseline.
And the OP isn't looking to look at YouTube or download Japanese dictionaries. He's in content creation and that means he can't toddle along using GIMP or Blender; if he's a pro, and working with others, that means Adobe is a must. Then there's the fact that Adobe CC, being a subscription service, pushes updates pretty frequently; I recall updating just this week, and there is little guarantee that any particular update won't throw a bunch of errors because something new that's added isn't compatible with the Wine emulation, assuming that he can get it to work in the first place.
Apple
is a wall garden, but for the OP, who appears to not be a power user with content creation requirements, that's probably precisely what he needs. Yes, the hardware is expensive, but it also subsidizes the cost of OS development, and allows a yearly OS update that is either free or, at worst, between 2 and 10 times less than a Windows OS update, and can be used on an unlimited number of computers. Nor is Mac software any more expensive than x86 software, in the main. Basically all major software suites are subscription-based now and the cost is the same regardless of platform. And I can't really thing of any major productivity or professional software app or suite that has a premium attached to the Mac version.