It was by far the best computer I've ever owned, and 10 years later it still runs fine and its still snappy. I've only had one mac that I bought in 2007 because I was tired of getting viruses and having laptops that broke in 6 months. The end result is that windows software on a mac can often vastly outperform expectations based on simply comparing 'spec' which is why mac users almost always LOVE their computers and windows users often hate theirs. Many windows machines also subsidize their costs by allowing software developers to load their computers with very questionable 'freeware' that often interferes with performance.

More importantly tremendous performance can be had by matching all of your components to work together as a system and not allowing them to be mixed and matched with any old thing. Memory, hard drives, and virtually everything else can vary tremendously in speed irrespective of the number of Gigabytes you have. Processor ratings for a '2.6 Mhz CPU' can vary by several orders of magnitude depending on lots of factor. There is a lot more involved in performance than simply 'specs'. Particularly with more complex (and let's face it, ArcGIS is not the most efficiently written program on the market) applications.Ĭomparing 'specs' is a windows game and apple doesn't play. Parallels does work in some cases, but it does have enough issues that I gave up on it. Your computer will be slower and more prone to issues unless you do a dedicated dual boot, which eats up at least 70GB of your SSD space if you want to be able to store any kind of data on the Windows boot partition.

If you can find a Macbook for $1600 and are willing to spend $150 on a Windows license, then go for it in dual boot. I am all for USB C/Thunderbolt connectors, but there are a lot of times you need to plug in a normal USB thumb drive, or a mouse, or basically any kind of peripheral, and it SUCKS using an adapter every time.īut to each their own. Plus, and this is speaking as someone who has got invoices for, and I'm ashamed of this, $49,000 worth of Mac computers, the Mac is dead as a productivity laptop. The HP Spectre comes with a quad core 8 thread i7 processor and 16GB of Ram for I think $1400 US and you can configure it with dual drives. However, for $1600 you can buy a Windows Laptop that will run everything (including MacOS if you really want) better than any Mac Pro if you are willing to stick to a 1080p screen. If your budget is $1600 you can't even get a Macbook Pro.

Gis for mac review