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Mellofello808

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 18, 2010
934
1,662
I have used mac primarily for over 20 years now. I have always been aware that there was a premium price to pay, and that I would need to forgo nice to have things like gaming, and access to certain programs.

To be honest it was never really an issue since I mostly was using my computer as a web browsing/word processing/media consumption machine.

Macs were years ahead in design and materials of other laptops, and there really wasn't much of a gulf in performance.

Well now I am beginning to get into more demanding tasks. I like to shoot 4k video, and my GF moonlights in engineering consultation needing to use Arc GIS, and other heavy lifting programs.

Apple just doesn't have anything in their lineup to handle real work until you are well North of $2000.

I just got a laptop with a 17 inch screen, 6 core i7 processor, added 32 GB or ram (myself), 512 GB SSD, and another 1TB SSD (added myself), plus a 1660ti 6GB discrete GPU. Total cost was $1100 buying everything on good sales.

The first time I fired up premiere, and started editing I knew it was over.

Not sure how high I would have to spec a 16 inch MacBook to run with this thing, but it would easily be knocking on 300% the price, if not more.

I still.much prefer the look and feel of OSX, and the MacBooks have legendary reliability, but the pricing is just so disconnected from mid-range windows computers that it is just untenable if you are actually doing work on your computer.

First it was iOS, now OSX, pretty much the only 2 apple products that I will use daily from here out is my iPads, and apple TV 4k.


Not really going anywhere with this, it is just a heady moment for me, since at one point I really tied part of my identity to being a apple evangelist. This is long before the iPhone when they became the status quo.
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BigMcGuire

Cancelled
Jan 10, 2012
9,832
14,022
I grew up a Windows kid (Dos, 3.11, 95, etc....). I had my first Mac given to me in 2008, and finally took the bite in 2014.

While I still love my MBP 2017, I recently (few days ago) splurged and got a Dell XPS 8930. I was at Costco looking at a windows PC I needed for some side work (was tired of Parallels). $950 for an XPS 8930 to use with my 4k monitor at home... took it home.

This is the first time I've used a Windows machine for a personal PC (I work on Windows all day) since 2014.

Absolutely loving it.

Blew $350 on upgrades -- 32GB of ram ($108) (for a total of 48GB) and a 1TB M2 NVME disk ($150). I put my Sonnet EGPU's Radeon RX 580 in it and I can play games again (Age of Empires II Definitive Edition, Starfleet Command III, etc...) and WoW/Starcraft run at ultra speeds with ease. The 8 core Coffeelake i7 is a dream. Added $99 for Windows 10 Pro so I could Bitlocker the OS drive. Not bad for $1300 total.

This thing flies. My Logitech Bluetooth mice/keyboards work with it without lag (unlike my MBP).

Looking forward to getting some work done over the next few years.... and some gaming. :)


Watching Task Manager is sick... 8 cores at 4.42+ Ghz constantly (no cooling issues), 36.2GB of Ram available with 30+ apps running, and terabytes of disk space...

All for less than half the cost of my 2017 MBP. It is nice to be home again.
 
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hajime

macrumors 604
Jul 23, 2007
7,728
1,216
I grew up a Windows kid (Dos, 3.11, 95, etc....). I had my first Mac given to me in 2008, and finally took the bite in 2014.

While I still love my MBP 2017, I recently (few days ago) splurged and got a Dell XPS 8930. I was at Costco looking at a windows PC I needed for some side work (was tired of Parallels). $950 for an XPS 8930 to use with my 4k monitor at home... took it home.

This is the first time I've used a Windows machine for a personal PC (I work on Windows all day) since 2014.

Absolutely loving it.

Blew $350 on upgrades -- 32GB of ram ($108) (for a total of 48GB) and a 1TB M2 NVME disk ($150). I put my Sonnet EGPU's Radeon RX 580 in it and I can play games again (Age of Empires II Definitive Edition, Starfleet Command III, etc...) and WoW/Starcraft run at ultra speeds with ease. The 8 core Coffeelake i7 is a dream. Added $99 for Windows 10 Pro so I could Bitlocker the OS drive. Not bad for $1300 total.

This thing flies. My Logitech Bluetooth mice/keyboards work with it without lag (unlike my MBP).

Looking forward to getting some work done over the next few years.... and some gaming. :)


Watching Task Manager is sick... 8 cores at 4.42+ Ghz constantly (no cooling issues), 36.2GB of Ram available with 30+ apps running, and terabytes of disk space...

All for less than half the cost of my 2017 MBP. It is nice to be home again.

why tired of parallels? Anything wrong?
 

BigMcGuire

Cancelled
Jan 10, 2012
9,832
14,022
why tired of parallels? Anything wrong?

Parallels was better than VMWare Fusion in my usage case.

Not a complaint about Parallels just too slow for my specific projects where there were many thousands of code files - checking in, getting latest, etc. took forever vs a natively run Windows desktop/laptop. Dealing with Oracle DBs in the 100s of GB got slow (testing). I did use it for 6-7 months tho as my primary dev machine.

One part of my job is to test the latest build vs production side by side for hours on end so any slowness is noticed. While Parallels was ALMOST as good as native in UI, it was not as fast as native on my MBP.
 
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