Help with Mac Decision

This may be what you don't want to hear, but try the mac apps first. there are similar programs out there for outlook. also check out M$ office:mac. Also, check out Safari, or firefox, camino, opera instead of IE7... or you can get IE for mac, just search the web for the site. For some reason I googled it, and there is only version 5 out, i dunno about that.

 

Definately plan on using Mac software first unless there is something you absolutely can't get- which is few and far between. I no longer have hardly any web sites I can't use except for an occasional one. In fact, I think the last web site I couldn't use was over a year ago and I do a ton of surfing. For any of those sites I have been able to use Firefox or an old version of IE to make it work.

I would say go for the MBP if you are a power user and max out your memory!

 

IE development for Mac was halted with IE5. There are no IE6 or IE7 releases for Mac.

As far as Windows apps, I didn't notice too much of a difference at all between my older Dell running XP and Parallels. If anything, I notice a slowdown on the Mac side of things. The one thing you will notice is a drain on your battery, the whoosh of your fans, and the heat you'll get from the laptop.

 

I hate using windows with a passion, but unfortunately I am a design major forced to use solidworks for 3d rendering which is only for the windows OS as of now. That program is definitely more intensive to run than office programs, yet I find little IF ANY lag or slowness compared to running it on the dells in our design lab at school. I have an older cd macbook pro and I still don't find problems. I tinkered in word and such on parallels too just to see how things ran for friends of mine who were considering running windows more predominantly and I saw no difference there either.

Like everyone else here though, If you can I would suggest to use all the mac apps first. I have IE 5.0 which i bring up VERY rarely as pretty much everything runs fine on safari (safari 3.0 beta is out now too.. which i've heard is even more compatible) and if not that then Firefox... all for the mac os

Office for Mac ... while not native to intel yet, thanks to the wonderful world of microsoft being horribly slow at updating things (sorry I can't contain my hatred) is still really fast and I find little or no lag in that (except starting up.. as it's not native yet) or excel or any of ms office for apple.

The apple Mail program is great, calendar I feel is better then other programs for simple tasks, and you can find a large variety of really great programs for layouts and basic business tasks (even iwork.. with pages and keynote have options to make your files openable in powerpoint and msword etc) and are easier to use (IMO)

Parrallels shouldnt' be a problem at all with XP on a macbook pro... specially the new ones. I have yet to have my fan go on for more then a few min even on my older model, but I can bet that you will end up spending a lot more time in the native mac OS after a few weeks.

Good luck!

 

Apparently, with Parallels 3 now supporting 3D acceleration, you can now run Solidworks using Parallels and Coherence. I'm intrigued by this, and I'm looking forward to getting myself a new MBP, as I use Solidworks, too. I'll theme WinXP with a Tiger theme, then run in Coherence, and it'll look almost like I'm running Solidworks in OS X! That'll be cool!

 

-NC03M3

I use Parallels to run XP in Coherence mode on my MBPC2D as seeing the XP interface has simply ceased being importan.

Essentially, I use XP as simple an application layer anymore.

Verdict: Seamless, and fast as heck. Since you do 3D, you could try Parallels, but at least you have the option of a boot-to Bootcamp partition which would eliminate any incompatibilities.

In other words - no worries.