Limitations of a Mac

[Fancuku]

I showed fusion to a friend who uses inventor on the PC, he wasn't particularly impressed.

Fusion has come a long way since it was first introduced. They made a lot of improvements and added a lot of features that it didn't have in the beginning. I see no differences between the Mac and Windows versions.
And the CAM plugin of Fusion is the same as the one in Inventor, HSM Works.

 

[bluespark]

Fusion has come a long way since it was first introduced. They made a lot of improvements and added a lot of features that it didn't have in the beginning. I see no differences between the Mac and Windows versions.
And the CAM plugin of Fusion is the same as the one in Inventor, HSM Works.

Yes, the recent versions of Fusion are very good. To the OP, as some others have said, you *may* find the Mac superior for your needs; it just depends what those needs are. As for Microsoft Office, I am a legal and academic user with fairly advanced requirements and I'm just fine with the Mac versions. When you add in some of the Mac's file preview features, better printing, etc., the Mac wins overall even for my enterprise-type Office use. The same is true for my use of Excel, which is also demanding. That said, if I were, for example, an engineer with particular requirements that the Mac version didn't do (I have no idea what those might be), then that might be a deal breaker. OP, I suspect you will be just fine, and probably extremely happy with a Mac. But if you're really worried, make sure to purchase from Apple so you can return it if you get everything set up and you run into an issue.

 

[ErikGrim]

They're actually a bunch of them - google is your friend.

I found this article fairly easily rating the twitter clients and the first one on the list was an app from twitter itself.

Just going to give a big LOL to that list. Notice the key phrase here being decent. There is no equivalent of the polish of Mac apps like Tweetbot, Espresso (or Coda), Logic, FCPX on Windows.

 

[throAU]

Fusion has come a long way since it was first introduced. They made a lot of improvements and added a lot of features that it didn't have in the beginning. I see no differences between the Mac and Windows versions.
And the CAM plugin of Fusion is the same as the one in Inventor, HSM Works.

Fair enough, this was within a few months of the initial Fusion release.

 

[kohlson]

I agree with many of the comments wrt MS Office. If you're a power user - and if you wonder if you are, then you're not - Excel really demands Windows. Each of the core 4 programs has a small set of features available on Windows and not on Mac. For most people, this isn't an issue. My background on this is working in a large corporation, where it's about 60% Windows, and 10s of 1000s of Macs deployed. Excel always pops up in internal discussion forums as a sticking point, but Outlook and Powerpoint do, too. One way to see if this is an issue for you is to take the most complex spreadsheet you have to an Apple Store and see how it works. Many of us at work use Fusion for those times when only a Windows-something will work. At the retail level, this isn't very cost-effective (2 versions of Office, plus Windows plus Fusion licenses), but in my experience Fusion works well.

 

[ignatius345]

Not sure if anybody's mentioned this yet, but you can dual-boot and just install Windows on a Mac -- then you get the best of both worlds, right? Unless there are hardware issues, I guess. Anybody here use a Windows partition for work? I'm curious to hear about it.

 

[throAU]

I agree with many of the comments wrt MS Office. If you're a power user - and if you wonder if you are, then you're not - Excel really demands Windows. Each of the core 4 programs has a small set of features available on Windows and not on Mac. For most people, this isn't an issue. My background on this is working in a large corporation, where it's about 60% Windows, and 10s of 1000s of Macs deployed. Excel always pops up in internal discussion forums as a sticking point, but Outlook and Powerpoint do, too. One way to see if this is an issue for you is to take the most complex spreadsheet you have to an Apple Store and see how it works. Many of us at work use Fusion for those times when only a Windows-something will work. At the retail level, this isn't very cost-effective (2 versions of Office, plus Windows plus Fusion licenses), but in my experience Fusion works well.

+1 to this.

The Mac versions of various MS applications including:
- outlook 2016
- skype for business 2016
- excel 2016

All most definitely have issues with regards to missing or broken features compared to the Windows version. There's a very good chance you won't run into these issues, but if you do, they're deal breakers.

Off the top of my head, the issues I ran into are:

Outlook 2016 for Mac: no way to control cached mode, and the amount of email it stores or retrieves for local storage

Skype for Business 2016: no way to manually specify server settings if your auto config is currently either broken or you want to connect to a different server. yes the boxes are there to fill out server settings, those boxes do nothing. Discovered this whilst trying to use my personal Mac to test external reachability of our new SFB server deployment...

Excel 2016: Macro compatibility with previous office versions is very poor. I've seen excel spreadsheet graphical rendering bugs, macro errors, etc.


If you're working in a Windows environment, unless your company has gone 100% cloud via 365 or similar, you may find things that need a VM or Bootcamp of Windows to work properly. They may be things you can live without, but maybe not.

home use: no real issues.

 

[kohlson]

One more thing - the large company where I work lets employees choose either very nicely configured MBPs, including 13- and 15-inch; or somewhat less expensive Lenovo's. The reason they do this is that in their experience, Macs require much less from the company in terms of support. So much so that even though the Apple laptops cost more, the total cost of ownership is less. For individuals, YMMV, which is true in any case.

 

[theluggage]

Not sure if anybody's mentioned this yet, but you can dual-boot and just install Windows on a Mac -- then you get the best of both worlds, right?

For most purposes, its better to get VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop and run Windows in a virtual machine. Then you can effectively run Windows apps alongside Mac apps on the Mac desktop - its not quite seamless but pretty good. Your Mac files show up in Windows & vice-versa, cut & paste works, plug in a USB device and you choose whether it connects to MacOS or Windows, and performance is good enough for anything up to casual gaming.

Dual boot is only really needed for pro graphics apps, more demanding games or hardware that won't play nice with virtual machines - or as a last straw "Oops, I should have bought a PC" scenarios.

 

[StrawberryX]

For most software you can find an alternative, use a VM or dual boot.
The software problems come when you need OSx Mountain Hill,
but your machine isn't supported by Mountain Hill and you are stuck on OSx Ocean Wave.
The hardware is very limiting and in most mac's today you can't upgrade the ram or hardrive.
If your software likes nvidia mac is bad choice or other special hardware needs like VR.
My old symbian phone is more compatible than my android phone.
If you want something closer to a workstation, you have to wait a couple of years,
buy flexible vintage or very expensive less flexible hardware.

Mac software can take weird turns, like aperture gone.
Logic and final cut also have a hystory.
My Pro Tools DAC works perfect on Yoshimite but is not supported anymore in El Capitan.

I don't know if a mac today is cheaper than a pc overal,
they cost a lot more than 5 or 10 years ago and support a lot less hardware.

 

[BayouTiger]

I tried to move to a PC as it would make my work life so much simpler as I use lots of apps that are windows only, mostly for configuring control systems. I also spend a lot of time in Autocad LT. I can say that for CAD, I greatly prefer the MAc version of Autocad as I HATE the single window interface and ribbon implemented on the windows platform some versions back. The latest version for Mac has moved that way so the Mac version is catching up I guess you could say, but not necessarily in a good way. If you are looking at getting into CAD for the architectural world, Autocad is a dying breed anyway, the professional world is now BIM based and Revit is the key app.

All that said, it's the little things you take for granted on the Mac platform. It was not the big applications that brought me back, but Quick Look and Spotlight. Windows search has come a long way but is still not even close. The preview window in Explorer is still not even in the same game much less league as Quick Look. These are two areas where windows users will tell you that they now have the same features in the OS as Mac users have bragged about, and I can assure you that they don't have any idea unless they have actually lived with a Mac for awhile how poor the windows equal is. Add multiple desktops and Expose to that list as well.

Don't even get me started on how Windows and Windows apps handle multiple screen resolutions especially with high resolutions. This was the real deal breaker. Using screens with different resolutions in Win10 will make you crazy.

The thing that the Mac does not do well besides gaming for me (I don't game anyway) always revolves around printing to networked printers. You can get it working, but it's a lot more of a PITA than it should be. Of course, it's gotten more problematic in Windows as well. Printing is just something that has not gotten better in the work setting. I spend more IT time on that than anything.

 

[adib]

RE:
"You mention Excel...It is not as good on the Mac, and probably never will be since it is made by Microsoft."

Ummm.... seems to me that Excel originally debuted on the Mac, back when there was no "Windows" yet at all. Or is my memory faulty?

You're right – Excel debuted on the Mac. However priorities change, and now Excel for Windows still has "exclusive" features not available on the Mac.

 

[throAU]

For most software you can find an alternative, use a VM or dual boot.
The software problems come when you need OSx Mountain Hill,
but your machine isn't supported by Mountain Hill and you are stuck on OSx Ocean Wave.
The hardware is very limiting and in most mac's today you can't upgrade the ram or hardrive.
If your software likes nvidia mac is bad choice or other special hardware needs like VR.
My old symbian phone is more compatible than my android phone.
If you want something closer to a workstation, you have to wait a couple of years,
buy flexible vintage or very expensive less flexible hardware.

Mac software can take weird turns, like aperture gone.
Logic and final cut also have a hystory.
My Pro Tools DAC works perfect on Yoshimite but is not supported anymore in El Capitan.

I don't know if a mac today is cheaper than a pc overal,
they cost a lot more than 5 or 10 years ago and support a lot less hardware.

The software issues you mention above are not exclusive to Mac.

Windows has its own compatibiiity issues between versions.

 

[techwarrior]

Not sure if anybody's mentioned this yet, but you can dual-boot and just install Windows on a Mac -- then you get the best of both worlds, right? Unless there are hardware issues, I guess. Anybody here use a Windows partition for work? I'm curious to hear about it.

Boot Camp is how Apple delivers drivers for Winders that are compatible with the HW it installs on. But, really the question is if the HW on the Mac is adequate for the PC tasks. A high end, custom PC will often be more capable than Macs in the same price range, but this is typically only an issue for the most demanding of power users. Hopefully, Apple will return to a more modular approach and support third party HW upgrades to higher end Macs in the near future in order to fend off this unfortunate disadvantage.

I have several Mini at work that dual boot using Boot Camp, Win 10 runs great on these but I don't really use them for intense graphics tasks like CAD.

A lot of talk in this thread re: Office. To re-iterate what others have said, Mac version of Office is more than adequate for 95% of users. I do have some automation in Excel VBA that works just fine on Mac (Office 2016), but understand there are some gaps. But in my experience, I have been able to do everything I need on Mac Office.

For me, the kicker was frustration with maintenance issues on PC, I was always battling virus\malware, slowdowns, crashes, you name it. How many times I re-installed Windows to clean things up. I tinker with *nix and Windows machines all day at work (from my Mac) and I prefer a personal machine that just works. On several occasions, I have replaced HDD, migrated to new machines, or simply rebuilt my Mac using Time Machine backups. My experience with PC was frustrating as I would typically have to re-install all the apps (and find the license keys). With Macs, Time Machine has cared for that very well, within minutes of completing a restore, I am up and running as if nothing happened.

There are alternatives for virtually anything available on PC. It may be a different publisher, it may work different, but it often is a more pleasurable experience. So, if you go this route, the best advise is get used to Google searches for "Mac alternative to [insert PC program]".

 

[MaraviRasmussen]

As far as I´m concerned , the hardware is to be considered ´equal´ , MacBooks tend to use slightly underclocked versions of cpu/gpu compared to commercial hardware found on the pc world(im specifically referring to laptops and not modular desktops),but these variables are so marginal they shouldn't be considered 99% of the time