I’ll go with your post except the last sentence. No noticeable difference in end result. In that respect Macs are not better, not for my money.
You talk about Macs in your original post from 10 years ago. Now you want me to believe you just got rid of a Mac a year ago. Was your Mac an antique? No, it doesn't fly. You are the outlier here. Been too long in the industry and too many professionals use Macs for what YOU claim to be true. It IS the gold standard in publishing, not PCs. You don't know what you are talking about. . . or your people simply did not know what you were doing.
I've even explained what was happening when there was a font problem, because I KNOW WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. You could not, because YOU DON'T. All you can repeat is your litany of Macs bad. PCs good. That is nothing.
It is the PC that does not handle fonts correctly. You've heard that from another professional in the field as well, not just me. Look where your problems occurred and your fonts disappeared. . . and on FR on YOUR machine where things don't appear on screen, where you asked me about a font YOU COULD NOT SEE! Your vaunted PC didn't have a complete font set, otherwise, there would not have been a blank box there. Typical. Macs ship with complete font sets. They were and are built from the ground up with typography in mind.
I have had over 35 years of working with both platforms and not have not had fonts drop as you've describe since MacOS9 and the junk amateur fonts I described above. You obviously do not have matching font sets between your machines. . . and I really suspect your external ad makers were using SCREEN fonts to make their ads that did not have printer fonts attached. Amateurs. Alternately, the ad copy contained a licensed font that the copy did not carry with it. When it was loaded onto the Mac, the Mac had the licensed Font set, but apparently the Windows machine did not, and the font was not encapsulated in the ad. . . and your people weren't smart enough to load a licensed copy of the font onto the Windows computer, or to include a print set from the Mac. These are all things I would check in diagnosing your claimed problem. A Mac will handle either of those situations at printing with font equivalent substitution tables, a PC does not.
I will cut your people a break that maybe they didn't know the font existed, but your error checking should have caught it at several points. Where were your EDITORS???? How about print proof copies to your customers?
My thoughts about you are beneath comment because of your trollish behavior. Enough said.
Incidentally, when that event with the magazine took place 20 years ago, PCs were not even in the running for quality of post-production in publishing. . . or pre-press. The screen issues were abysmal on Windows.
Representation of WYSIWYG on Windows made accurate typography and layout ridiculous. It was a fact of the geometry of screen display. Macs, again, designed from day one for typography literally displayed on the screen what you would get when printed. Apple used square pixels while Windows had rectangular pixels. Made for a mess.
Today, the Quartz Graphic Layer that Apple uses to display the screen on Macs is in reality Display PDF. . . and it makes it very easy to see WYSIWYG for typography and font rendering. It also means that if you can see it on the screen, you can make a PDF of it for importation into a publishable document. . . and you can define the resolution to be what you need. Not so on PCs.