Westcoast M5

Agreed that virtually all laptops will work for office applications. When comparing the various models you might want to make a list of what is important to you to help narrow the choices. For example:

1. Battery life - if you work on airplanes, etc. this is hugely important. If it's always at the office or home with a plug handy then less so.

2. Graphics Card - you may not use it for gaming but if you plan to "dock it" to nice 20 inch screen at your office make sure the video card can output the resolution you need.

3. Weight - something just a bit lighter makes a big difference if you haul it with you all day long and makes no difference if you don't

By making a list of what is important to you, you will narrow the field and end up with something that meets your needs.

(PS: I am getting a Dell XPS 13" notebook - not that will neccessary suit your needs.)

KnIgHtCoM

Yes, OS X is basically an eye-candied version of UNIX and it is possible to install OS X on a non-Apple hardware, but it's not for the faint of heart. Mac's are the industry standard when it has anything to with work in media. Apple has spent big bucks developing their own production software and it shows. Other applications such as Adobe products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, etc.) were born on the Macintosh and continue to flourish. OS X is also very user friendly for the technophobes.

But I digress because I will always be a Windows guy at heart with an affinity for Apple. I own both systems, but predominately use my Windows box. Now maybe if I had a MacPro w/ quad-core processing power instead of a G5... I'd be singing a different tune.

BetterMakeWay

Yes agree, but how do you Mac guys best see the difference between OS X and a proper linux distro (whatever it is)?

ipp

Compatibility support for hardware and software. As far as I know, you can't run MSOffice or Adobe CS3 with Linux.

BetterMakeWay

And you can in mac OS X? How? Does Mac support .exe files? What kind of file system does it use? Is it package oriented like .deb or .rpm?

On the othe side, you can run both adobe cs3 and MS Office and pretty much any windows program in linux using an emulator called 'wine'

swajames

You can run pretty much any Windows program on an Intel Mac using an emulator called... Windows

There are also programs such as Wine on OS X but the most effective thing to do is to run Windows within OS X using VM Ware Fusion or Parallels. Windows can run concurrently with OS X, if effectively acts like any other program within OS X. I use Fusion, it's just phenomenal, it's also possible to virtualize other operating systems such as Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD etc with Fusion.

http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/overview.html

The Mac of course lets you dual boot into either OS X or Windows and for stuff like Half Life 2 you'd probably want to run Windows natively, but for everything else Windows (XP or Vista) runs incredibly well in a virtualized environment within OS X.

BetterMakeWay

And that's new in Mac? I mean the same thing can be done in Linux. In fact vm ware if i remember correctly can be run in windows also as an emulator for linux or ther os but it's kind of weird. Not to mention that the whole windows system slows down to snail speed. So again why do you mac guys, or better yet how do you see the strong point of OSx versus linux distro. Tell me things mac can do and linux can't.

swajames

Who said it was new? The thing with the Mac is integration and user experience. Personally, I think you quite simply don't get the same experience on any other platform. OS X runs over FreeBSD so like Linux it has roots in Unix, but in my view the UI and the overall integration of hardware and software are what set it apart. No Linux distribution comes close. As for speed, virtualization with VMWare isn't at all slow. On a Core Duo or Core 2 Duo Mac, and in every day use for most tasks, there is no discernible speed difference between Windows running within VMWare or running natively on the Mac hardware.

ImolaRedM

Its not new but since Apple went with the virtual-enabled Intel CPUs the performance hit of using VM Ware Fusion or other programs is almost nill. You could use Virtual tools like Virtual PC on the Mac for years (decades) but there was always a huge performance hit. VMWare Fusion (and Paralles) makes it seamless and a pleasure to run virtual environments as long as you have enough memory with no noticable hit to performance. It's reasonable to run OS X and two virtual OSes (XP and/or Linux) at the same time with minimal performance hit on a dual core MacBook Pro with 4GB or RAM. XP natively can't even fully address the full 4GB itself on most hardware.

Until I made the switch to OS X for my desktop OS a few years ago I was a fairly heavy Linux (Fedora Core and RedHat Enterprise Linux) user and I was someone who also used Solaris, HP-UX and even Irix (years ago). Under Linux I would dual boot my PC back to XP or Win2K to run certain programs and back to Linux for everything else. It worked fine but it wasn't perfect. In 2004 I made the jump to OS X and I now use it exclusively for desktop computing and if I need to sandbox something I'll jump into a Virtual machine. I still use Linux for servers that run primarily Apache or Sendmail but I could even run those from my Mac and I probably will when I have enough legacy Apple hardware built up.

What OS X can do that Linux can't is offer easy integration of daily life with all the power of Linux under the hood when you want to get your hands dirty. Media support for applications like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop CS3 is simple under OS X. You can do many of the same things in Gimp or other applications but it generally takes a little more work. Many of the print drivers in OS X are the same as Linux too. Its just easier and more tightly integrated on the Mac. I like to tinker in the OS but I guess I get enough of it in my work to HAVE to tinker in the OS when I just want to use it or just relax and maybe even play a game. But I have even compiled Linux distros on OS X when there are good open source applications that I just have to use.

All that and I can still create an account on my Mac for the wife and kids to use and they won't be intimidated by what the OS can do. In fact I get a lot fewer calls at work asking for help because the computer 'crashed' or asking for help to perform a simple task.

BetterMakeWay

Thanks for the great input. That gave me something to think about. So i assume probably that the hardcore linux users still prefer linux over anything else since they are very experienced and don't put much attention on the GUI. In fact i met a guy like this a few weeks ago who said: who needs pretty gui? In fact whenever i see a flashy or corky GUI i remember of windows. All he needed was a console and multitasking. At least that's what he was doing, and still edited the text files in VI. So linux is better if you like to get dirty most of the time and for servers also. That's what i think at least.

Question now: When you buy an apple do they give you all the stuff like CS3 and other full edition adobe products or just the OSx?