Should I Buy a Mac

Mr. Skeffington

I am thinking of buying a mac book and Im wondering is it the right choice, Im an engineer and use some cad progammes etc which I have been told may not be suitable for a Mac? I would like to also start my own business, will the machine be good for that. Also does XP work well on the mac, does anyone have any reccomedations for my purchase

Thanks

Urban Weigl

There's lots of computer-aided design (CAD) software for the Mac, however if you need to run any Windows-only software, you can install Windows XP via Boot Camp. It will run just as well as on a Dell, for example.

Also check out Parallels if you need to run any Windows applications; it uses Intel's virtualisation technology to run Windows XP, or indeed Windows Vista, and Mac OS X at the same time, without needing to restart.

Mr. Skeffington

Thanks for that, I knew about Boot Camp but not about the other one, sounds better than Boot Camp because you dont have to restart.

One other question, I was thinking of waiting for Leopard OS, are there may really good new features on this OS, should I hang on? I guess if I went ahead and purchased the macbook with Tiger I could upgrade to Leopard later right?

Urban Weigl

Parallels is fantastic. I use it to test if web pages will render correctly in the latest versions of Internet Explorer for Windows. With the exception of games, it runs Windows at nearly native speed, thanks to the virtualisation technology that is present in Intel's new Core Duo and Core 2 Duo chips.

From what I have heard, Leopard is probably coming in March 2007. You can of course upgrade; Leopard will run on any Mac bought in the last few years. At most, the upgrade will cost €129.

Weather you decide to go ahead now, or wait a few months, I recommend upgrading to 2 GB RAM. Thanks to the advanced caching that Mac OS X uses, it can really speed things up, especially when running multiple applications at the same time. It's very easy to install in the MacBook (takes literally 30 seconds). I'd buy the MacBook with the default configuration from Apple, and than purchase the RAM separately from the likes of Crucial.

Urban Weigl

Before I forget, you can check out the new features in Leopard here:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/

merritt

Ok, I'm a Mac user by choice, but a Windows user professionally.

Ask yourself what you want to use the computer for. If you primarily want to use Windows applications, then get a Windows machine. XP and indeed Vista are robust and reliable. If you want to go 'underneath the bonnet', Windows is a better option. Many popular applications are not availale on the Mac, and emulation software such a Parallels or even Boot Camp (I know it's not emuluation) are simply not as fast.

If you want to use the machine mainly for wordprocessing, email, web, making home movies and organising your music, then the Mac is an excellent option. It is a very good platform for photos, movies and audio. It also has great features such as the ability to create Zips (archives), intelligently remember and switch between network sources, automatically identify and work with whatever you shove into an USB port (yes, it knows what a digital camera is and you generally don't need to faff about with drivers etc), and avoid viruses, malware etc.

There are plenty of Mac-evanegelists who will tell you that Windows is the devil and Mac is the solution to all ills, ignore their well-intentioned enthusiasm. Macs are beautifully designed, and I'd be very reluctant to use a Windows machine personally, but as an IT person professionally, I have no difficulty working with Windows at work and Mac at home.

If you are primarily using your computer for CAD and you are familiar with a particular application, why change platform unless there are enough benefits to compensate?

Hope that helps.

Urban Weigl

merritt, Boot Camp runs at full native speed. It is just as fast, with absolutely no performance hit. At one point, the new MacBook Pro was tested as "the fastest PC out there", beating Dell and other laptops with identical specs running the same applications under Windows. Not by much obviously, but my point here is that it is the same speed, it's not slower at all. Again, there is no performance hit.

As far as Parallels, thanks to virtualisation technology, it no longer has to emulate. It runs natively. That being said, there is still some loss. It will run at "near native speed", with the exception of 3D acceleration for games. Even that is coming in a few months, according to the Parallel developers. It is not noticeable, whereas with with emulators like VirtualPC, it wasn't just noticeable, it was significant.

Since you got the basics wrong, that puts the remainder of your post into doubt, which I think is a pity because there's probably some good advice in there. Of course one advantage of Apple hardware that is pretty big to me is that you can run virtually any operating system you wish. With standard PC hardware, you cannot properly run Mac OS X.

In the interest of full disclosure, I work with various flavours of Linux, as well as Windows and Mac OS X regularly. I've also built my fair share of PC's for gaming and other purposes, and am quite a technical person. Sorry if my post seemed a bit hard on you, I shouldn't have assumed you knew about Boot Camp etc. Than again, if you didn't know about it, you shouldn't have claimed to know about it and made a wrong statement.. Sorry, rambling. At the end of the day, I enjoy using a computer that "just works" and never presents me with any problems (software-wise, Mac's and PC's share the same hardware, so hardware failure rates are the same as a high quality PC, e.g. if an Intel motherboard or hard drive can fail in a PC, it can also fail in a Mac, I hate it when people think Mac's hardware is more reliable, even though it clearly uses the same components), which neither Windows XP nor Linux has been able to deliver. I always have to "work" to get things running exactly the way I want.

merritt

Ouch! That told me!

I didn't know the difference between emulation and virtualisation. But you must accept that even though Parallels is good, independent testers have found that apps run about 2/3rds as quickly, whether that is 'noticeable' or not is up to yourself. And with Boot Camp and Parallels there are things that just don't work, unless you are willing to do some fiddling.

There's a good article here: http://www.macworld.com/2006/06/reviews/parallels/index.php

But I shall defer to your superior knowledge so!

Urban Weigl

Again, I apologise about the way I came down on you. It didn't even have anything to do with Mac versus PC, if you'd gotten something basic wrong about Windows, I'd have done the same thing. It just really annoys me when someone is giving advice on a forum, and hasn't done the research to confirm what he's saying, especially if it's something basic that 30 seconds of research could have determined correctly.

I'm not sure what you mean by having to tweak Boot Camp. I didn't have any problems using it, including playing the latest Windows-only games on it, though technically Boot Camp is a beta right now, and the final version will be released as part of Leopard. All it is, is a pretty user interface to allow you to partition your hard drive so you can install Windows easily, and a CD image of drivers so Windows can take maximum advantage of the hardware. The CD includes drivers for the Nvidia and ATI graphics cards used in current Mac models, as well as the iSight camera drivers, etc.. Windows actually booting is handled by Apple adding Intel's legacy booting support to EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). This is what Mac's use instead of the really old BIOS system. Unfortunately even though it's an Intel technology, Microsoft has been slow to support it, hence the need for legacy booting support.

Urban Weigl

I know this kinda defeats the purpose of owning a Mac, and I'd never want to run Windows as the primary operating system on mine (I actually removed Boot Camp, and only use Parallels now), but this is an interesting article:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/78CDDBA5-60D3-4AA7-8C24-3375B070A5DD.html
That article is about deploying MacBook's as Windows laptops in a Windows IT environment.

There's a second one about why having EFI is a good thing, which I can second due to the many BIOS related problems I've had. It really amazes me that something that came from the Intel/Microsoft side of the equation still isn't used on Windows PC's, especially when Apple is already using it:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/7CC25766-EF64-4D85-AD37-BCC39FBD2A4F.html

Both articles make for good reading, though I don't agree with using MacBook's as regular Windows laptops... Just seems wrong somehow.

merritt

Apology accepted!

The only thing I got wrong though was the bit about Boot Camp not being as fast. I think the rest of my post was fair enough.

[Runs away to corner of room, shielding head]