Ye Macce Threade

[Dreadhead]

^^^ Damn, that's good advice. Where did I hear that before?

He's considering being a mac user so I wanted to make is simple and so it required a limited amount of thought

[Hopstretch]

He's considering being a mac user so I wanted to make is simple and so it required a limited amount of thought

Basement. Now.

[n_maher]

He's considering being a mac user so I wanted to make is simple and so it required a limited amount of thought

Because if you were trying to explain why to get the winpc it would have taken at least 3 CRTL-ALT-DELETE/END PROGRAM cycles and a few reboots to relay the same message.

[penger]

Interesting... I have friends who are in electrical engineering and most of their work is done in the lab because it's just too slow to remote login to do stuff otherwise. But they do like the fact that macs can just ssh from the terminal, though this is easy to get around on a PC. Dunno if that helped. Hopefully it at least made a little sense.

[grawk]

Mac laptops at least have the legal option of dual booting. While it's also possible on a non-apple laptop, it's of questionable legality. If that matters to you, you get more flexibility with a mac than a non-mac. But modern mac laptops are very comparably priced to comparable, name brand non-macs with similar specs and size.

[JBLoudG20]

Interesting... I have friends who are in electrical engineering and most of their work is done in the lab because it's just too slow to remote login to do stuff otherwise. But they do like the fact that macs can just ssh from the terminal, though this is easy to get around on a PC. Dunno if that helped. Hopefully it at least made a little sense.

All the work I do is remote. Most stuff is done via command line, but physical layouts are done in GUI just fine remotely.

[Dusty Chalk]

What about just having a virtual machine inside that runs Windows, just for the CAD software?

[grawk]

you don't want to run cad in a vm

[manaox2]

you don't want to run cad in a vm

I've verified that.

[uberburger101]

Thanks for all the great replies. I'll be studying accountancy, don't think there's any funky software that requires Windows to work. Though I'm a little worried that there might be some compatibility issues for group projects/presentations if the other members are using Windows. Would there be such an issue?

[EdipisReks]

you don't want to run cad in a vm

i bet it would be just fine in an 8 core i7 xeon system.

[grawk]

depends on how the vm handles graphics card translations I guess

[n_maher]

(un?)happily the refurb 24" iMacs that I was looking at are sold out for now so my wallet can breath a little easier until the lists get updated again with more options.

[grawk]

If those prices are in the range of what you were hoping for, let me know

[n_maher]

Thanks Dan, I almost have to go refurb in order to get something with dedicated video RAM. I don't like shared, non-discrete video memory.

[grawk]

Seems like that's met by the 2 on the right

[n_maher]

OOB

Out Of Budget

[penger]

Thanks for all the great replies. I'll be studying accountancy, don't think there's any funky software that requires Windows to work. Though I'm a little worried that there might be some compatibility issues for group projects/presentations if the other members are using Windows. Would there be such an issue?

Sorry if this is making an unfair assumption but I believe the mac version of Microsoft Office's Excel does not feature the formula support that the PC version has. Dunno if that's something you'd take into consideration.

Edit: I think it might actually be Word.

[grawk]

I'm not sure why you think that, Microsoft's differences page doesn't mention it.

[penger]

Mmm I think so because the MS Office on my mac doesn't have it (2008 )? And my PC does (2007)?

I've looked for it on Word many times and never found it.