Thursday, June 19, 2008

Buying a Laptop: Mac or PC

For the first time, I find myself in the market to buy my own laptop. I've been going back in forth in my head about this. On one hand is the Macbook Pro with all it's sexiness. On the other hand is the fact that I don't know a damn thing about using a Mac. I could buy a PC laptop and install Windows and Ubuntu on it easily and have the best of both worlds.

Then a friend of mine at work (Thanks Ross!) pointed out that the Mac can do this too. Apparently the Leopard OS comes with "Bootcamp" which allows you to run Windows natively. Then I can do my Windows only stuff (like my beloved Tivo-to-go) without much hassle.

I'm all in now. I'm buying a Macbook Pro

(oh look, my first post with a "Mac" label)

6 comments:

Raghu Kashyap said...

Hi Ray,

I was in the same boat year and a half ago :-).

I made the smart decision of buying a MAC. I use parallels to run my windows applications.

Pro:
I can run OS X & Windows at the same time

Con:
Parallels cost money :-)

-Raghu

Ray Krueger said...

Raghu!
I'm pretty geeked about the idea of running Windows XP with bootcamp so that I can see how well Call of Duty 4 plays :P

I'm not really down with paying $50 for Parallels. Hopefully I won't need to run Windows and Mac stuff at the same time. Really I just want to be able to run Windows for my Tivo-to-go videos :) (yeah, and games hehe)

Unknown said...

I was in your boat over a year ago too. NEVER owned a mac. I'm a software engineer by trade. In fact my wife never used one either so that was another factor.

I absolutely love this machine and my next machine will be a mac too. Since I have a unix background osx is great.

Parallels was absolute hell for me and I bought vmware. vmware is a solid piece of software and I only bought it because I didn't want to re-purchase quickbooks for the mac.

Unknown said...

oops ... I didn't mention what machine I bought :) I have a macbook pro. I used it for development with eclipse and it's blazing fast.

Ray Krueger said...

I figured you meant the Mac :P
Thanks for the comments!

I am still a bit leery about the price of the Macbook Pro. I've priced out a few equivalent PC laptops and can easily save a bunch of money. That's my only hold up now honestly, I'm a cheap ass :P

Ray Krueger said...

Dear god, seriously. Is it still a one-button mouse? Or is it just one button with two click points?