ARR and Mac

[Millerna]

Do you know What you can build with that money ?! Dont waste your time with hi spec apple cuz your gonna have to run Win on a virtual machine @ half the ram

Virtual machine at half the ram? You're quite clueless on the whole Mac thing aren't you? Bootcamp allows you to run Windows natively on a Mac, no VM, no hardware limitations. Pretty much the same as a dual boot Windows/Linux using Grub for example.

[Carzilla]

Virtual machine at half the ram? You're quite clueless on the whole Mac thing aren't you? Bootcamp allows you to run Windows natively on a Mac, no VM, no hardware limitations. Pretty much the same as a dual boot Windows/Linux using Grub for example.

Well yea I am clueless on macs, They are nice machines but I dont think they are worth the money. What if you want to upgrade your video card can you open it and change it out? or do you have to spend another 2k for a new one? I like pcs better cuz I know an upgrade wont cost me an arm and a leg.

[Millerna]

Well yea I am clueless on macs, They are nice machines but I dont think they are worth the money. What if you want to upgrade your video card can you open it and change it out? or do you have to spend another 2k for a new one? I like pcs better cuz I know an upgrade wont cost me an arm and a leg.

Depends on the Mac. For their laptops, they're going more and more for a closed design with no easily user replaceable parts. Of course, upgrading a GPU on a laptop isn't easily done on most laptops in the first place. Things like batteries are also no longer replaceable.

iMacs have also been getting more difficult to upgrade parts, and currently I believe only the 27" allows adding RAM (it's a well known fact that buying RAM at Apple is stupid, and very few people do it). In reality though, iMacs are nothing but a laptop pasted on the back of a big screen (a very nice screen though)

Mac Pro is easy to add hard drives, GPU, RAM etc.

While I do have quite a few Apple products, I'm not really an iSheep. I don't HAVE to have every new iPod, iPhone, iPad and whatnot. I have an old Macbook Pro (approaching 7 years old now, my mother still uses it for gaming of all things ...) which I got as a bonus from work. I have a Macbook Air which I carry on the train to work every day and use as my main machine for coding. I have an iMac, which I also got as a bonus from my new employer and which is used in the hobby room for the most part, and I have a 5 year old Mac Pro, which I use for 3D modeling/rendering when needed as well as for gaming. In those 5 years I only added more RAM (it has 10Gb now) and a new GPU, and it runs the games I play just fine with high settings.

Before I bought the Mac Pro, I build my own machines. The last one I built I spent about 2 months just researching and gathering hardware that was proven/designed to work together, With the various upgrades over the 3-ish years I used it, it actually cost me a lot more than the Mac Pro. These days I just don't have the time to keep up with all the hardware and build my own machines, although I've been thinking of giving it a go again if the Mac Pro decides to call it a day.

Personally, I've used DOS, Windows since 3.11, Linux since before popular distributions made it easy, I even used BeOS and OS/2 for a while. In the end, for the work I currently do (and have been doing for quite a while), I feel most comfortable working in OSX, which is why I use it. On the other hand, I'm really interested in one of those Surface Pro tablet from MS, with it's Wacom licensed pen input, it should be great for quick sketching

[Laraul]

Well yea I am clueless on macs, They are nice machines but I dont think they are worth the money. What if you want to upgrade your video card can you open it and change it out? or do you have to spend another 2k for a new one? I like pcs better cuz I know an upgrade wont cost me an arm and a leg.

Here's an old video showing a video card upgrade on an older model MacPro. It shows just how easy these things are to upgrade. If you choose to boot into Windows it doesn't matter if you use a card from Apple or a card from anyone else as Windows runs naively. The cards firmware doesn't need to be designed for Mac Intel EFI. The same is true for MacOS X versions 10.7+.

If you do choose to use a video card intended for use in PCs in a Mac, you will see nothing on the monitors (connected to that card) until either Windows or OS X boots.