MacBook Pro for a Windows Developer – Would I do it again?

January 19th, 2008

I bought a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro about 5 months ago. The specs are in the original post describing my machine. I use this machine every day and travel with it. I develop with it, I do demos with it, I do all of this on Windows Vista 32 even though I have 4G of RAM in my machine.

I use Boot Camp to dual boot the machine between Windows and Leopard. I spend 10 sessions in Vista for every 1 session in Leopard.

The Mac has the best display I have ever seen on a laptop. It is gorgeous. It has the cleanest form factor of any piece of hardware I have ever owned. It is light. It is fast.

I carry a keyboard with me to do coding demos in public because the keyboard layout is tailored for Mac and cutting and pasting in Windows ties my fingers in knots.

I cannot get a full compliment of drivers for Vista 64 that will drive the machine to its fullest, so I run Vista 32, leaving 1G of RAM on the table unused.

I even use Audacity in Windows to publish the Elegant Code Cast, so I don’t use the multimedia love of the Mac.

So, what’s the bottom line? Did I make the right choice?

No. There are too many other decent hardware form factors out there on which I could love the keyboard and get my 4G of RAM. They are heavier machines than this one. They are often louder.

They are, however, more practical.

 

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David Starr

  • Sergio Pereira

    Here’s my take. I think that if you don’t see yourself using OS X as at least your leisure or learning OS, then you’ll eventually skip it, which would make the mac purchase not-worth. Some of the Apple hardware are pretty good but there are great things happening on the PC side as well.
    I my case, I do have a mac laptop that I use at home to learn some stuff. I run windows (xp, vstudio, sql) on a virtual machine and I do not plan to use bootcamp because I’m afraid I could get sucked back into the comfortable windows world and skip the learning aspect of buying a mac.

  • http://elegantcode.com dcarver

    I own a MAC mini, an I must admit it soured me on MAC’s in general. As far as I can see it is just anither WIMP interface and I prefer VISTA. I am a unabashed windows guy and there is enought cool hrdware for windows to keep me happy.

    That being said, I love my IPOD and am glad apple is around to keep the Windows vendors moving forward on new and cool technology. I can’t wait for the windows clonw of the MAC air.

  • carl

    i agree with Sergio. You have to use it and need to use it to make it worthwhile. Why buy a piece of elegant hardware to run what 2 excellent premium machines could run for you at half the cost? That just exudes elitism. Now if you wanted to show interoperability between the two machines / OSes that would be a more dramatic story.

    Personally, I run a 2.6 MBP w/ 4GB and dual boot between osx1.5.2 and windowsvista-x64-bit-sp2 … sometimes i even run VMWare on the Mac side. But usually, If I need to run windows I boot natively from Bootcamp. It goes back and forth. Depends on what mood I’m in and how I want to instantiate a new project. What are my staff going to need to run, what will the client run to best communicate her ideas?

    You have to judge these two amazing technologies on the merits of the solutions they give you for the task at hand. Strategically, we got you covered by servicing all the topology permutations.

    – love, C

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