Switched from 2 x MacBook Pro to Windows Desktop + MacBook Pro

[pshufd]

I'm in Work From Home for the immediate future so I brought home one of my 4K monitors from the office and had 2 4K monitors at my desk from home. One was hooked up to my 2014 MacBook Pro 15 and the other to my 2015 MacBook Pro 15. One for work and the other for trading and personal stuff. I have been thinking about a Mac Pro or Mac Mini instead of the laptop for better performance, more RAM (trading programs use RAM) and saving desk space. The headache with the Pro and Mini is the sheer cost of the hardware. Yes, macOS is nice and my preference but $6K to get a system that you can get with Discrete Graphics? What I'd like is a mini-tower Mac Mini with GPU options.

So I hauled out a 2008 Dell Studio XPS desktop that was purchased refurbished for $573 (I have two of them) and put in 6 4 GB DIMMs for 24 GB of RAM. The old video card wouldn't drive 4K resolution so I ran it scaled (by the monitor) for a while. I ordered 32 GB of Corsair Vengeance 8 GB DIMMs along with a GeForce GT 1030 and popped them in as an experiment. The desktop says that max RAM is 24 GB but a lot of the specs only report what they tested with. 40 GB showed up in the task manager. Today, another 16 GB arrived and I replaced the 2x4GB with 2x8GB and it has a total of 48 GB of RAM.

I find that this system outperforms the 2014 and 2015 MacBook Pros - the CPU is a Core i7 running at 2.6 Ghz. The MacBook Pros run it bit slower but they are mobile chips and that may account for it. It appears that the huge amount of RAM results in a lot of the SSD that's used normally getting cached.

So I'm just going back and forth between Windows and macOS and it's working out well. There are things in Windows that I miss from macOS but I can find workarounds. I am amazed that this old, cheap machine is quite nice, even at 12 years ago. I would like to do a build someday with 128-256 GB of RAM. I did a nice Sandy Bridge build in 2010 but my daughter took that system. I was tempted to turn this into a Hackintosh but I'd rather not take the risk. I do wish that Apple made something in-between the Mini and the Pro that came in a box, not an AIO. I don't like AIOs after the video card in my 2010 iMac 27 died and it appears that it's not practical to repair it.

 

[xraydoc]

I’ve been Windows on the desktop for better part of a year now. Started with a fast laptop and a dock, and bought a new high-end machine about 6 weeks ago for 1/3 of what a similar Mac would have cost.

While macOS has good points, I’m no longer missing it. Windows 10 has plenty of power-user features that can be configured and added on, and in many ways it’s much faster, even on similar hardware.

My work does not depend on specific Mac apps (like Final Cut), so there’s nothing holding me back anymore. There’s only one Mac-specific app that I still miss (an app that’s open source but depends on macOS, so it can’t be built for Windows), but there are paid alternatives.

At this point, I don’t see myself going back to the Mac for desktops or laptops.

Still firmly entrenched in iOS for mobile, however. Love my 11” iPad Pro, my iPhone 11 Pro and my Apple Watch series 5.

 

[pshufd]

I’ve been Windows on the desktop for better part of a year now. Started with a fast laptop and a dock, and bought a new high-end machine about 6 weeks ago for 1/3 of what a similar Mac would have cost.

While macOS has good points, I’m no longer missing it. Windows 10 has plenty of power-user features that can be configured and added on, and in many ways it’s much faster, even on similar hardware.

My work does not depend on specific Mac apps (like Final Cut), so there’s nothing holding me back anymore. There’s only one Mac-specific app that I still miss (an app that’s open source but depends on macOS, so it can’t be built for Windows), but there are paid alternatives.

At this point, I don’t see myself going back to the Mac for desktops or laptops.

Still firmly entrenched in iOS for mobile, however. Love my 11” iPad Pro, my iPhone 11 Pro and my Apple Watch series 5.

I use iCloud Apps a lot on my PCs and Mobile Devices: Numbers, Notes, Reminders, Calendar. My solution was to run them as Chrome Apps on Windows. If I need to run macOS Apps off the work MacBook Pro, I can just grab one of my other MacBook Pros and put it at the side of my desk or VNC into it from the Windows desktop. I don't have any power programs that must run on macOS so that makes it easier. Windows 10 has come a long way since launch - I found it to be a dog back then. Today, it's fast, efficient, has copied a lot of stuff from macOS and the UI is decent.

 

[xraydoc]

I use iCloud Apps a lot on my PCs and Mobile Devices: Numbers, Notes, Reminders, Calendar. My solution was to run them as Chrome Apps on Windows. If I need to run macOS Apps off the work MacBook Pro, I can just grab one of my other MacBook Pros and put it at the side of my desk or VNC into it from the Windows desktop. I don't have any power programs that must run on macOS so that makes it easier. Windows 10 has come a long way since launch - I found it to be a dog back then. Today, it's fast, efficient, has copied a lot of stuff from macOS and the UI is decent.

I'm on Microsoft Office since that's all we use at work and I need to be able to collaborate with other people around the world (I'm in academics). I stopped using iWork a long time ago. Google Calendar/Gmail/Google Contacts work on both Windows & iOS, so that's easy. Handbrake and MakeMKV work fine on Windows. Drawboard is a great PDF markup app and I have a subscription to the Pro version of Acrobat DC. EndNote works better on Windows than on the Mac, in my experience. So I'm all out of excuses.