Intel Corp (INTC)

[mmoy]

Our MacBook Pro runs Windows and Mac OSX dual boot. The reason for the dual boot mode is that the kids wanted to run games on it.

I have coworkers running parallels or vmware on their Mac Pros and MacBook Pros. The advantage of VMWare is 64-bit support. One of these guys runs a few VMs include Linux on his Mac Pro.

Setting up dual-boot on a Mac is pretty easy compared to other machines. Boot Camp provides all of the drivers for you so you don't have to hunt and peck all over the internet to find drivers.

Apple is an easier choice to make if you're looking for a nice notebook and can spend $2,000 for the hardware. If you want to look, drop by your local Apple Store and play with the hardware. Then come back and play with it a few more times. The folks at the store will show you their hardware running Windows in a VM. Parallel's latest software is pretty neat in that you can run Windows applications as Windows in the Mac OSX environment. The other VM products don't allow you to do this. You run the VM as one big desktop.

In many cases, it is hard to describe why Apple customers like Apple products. The best way to see why is to use one. Apple stuff isn't cheap. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. HP and Dell seem almost afraid to make expensive stuff and when they do, they seem to not do a great job. One of my HP desktops that's 18 months old has a power supply problem. I'm pretty disappointed with HP on that model. All of my Dell equipment for the last seven years still works.