[TriLUG] macbook question

[John Wheeler]

I run a Mbp from a few years ago with a C2D and 4gb ram. The MB Air has newer core 2 based chipset and uses faster DDR3 Ram. So it will do slightly better than my machine can.

I rum vmware fusion with a few guest OSes. Linux variations, an xp image, and a win7 image.

You should not expect to play newer windows games in a VM running on a C2D. Or do any heavy multimedia work really. Office apps, and general purpose computing is doable. Web dev testing is my main use case and it works well.

I use a win7 netbook image, which boosts performance a bit on that front.

If you need to run processing intensive windows apps along side your mac environment, I would highly recommend a MBP variant instead of the Air. The Air is a fashion model, very sexy. You are paying for the form factor, not the performance.

On the other hand, if you don't mind booting into windows alone through bootcamp, instead of virtualizing, then the Air will run wonderfully.

Bottom line, light work in a virtual machine is definitely doable on a C2D.

A MacBook Pro has much newer, faster hardware. Your $$/cycle are much better spent on a MBP.

Either will work excellently in bootcamp.

Unless the primary goal is arm candy,
my suggestion would be to jump for for the pro and know that you'll get the job done.  The 15" pro has been an excellent model in almost every generation. 

The best answer in the end is to find OS X software solutions or the tasks that are normally performed under windows and migrate away from  It entirely. There is rarely a case where this is not possible.

Hope that helps a bit.

--John

On May 15, 2011, at 4:03 PM, James Jones <jc.jones at tuftux.com> wrote:

> Do any of you that have answered my email have a MacBook of any kind
> or are you answers based on technical specs?
> 
> jcj
> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 11:20 AM, John Broome <jbroome at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 07:47, Ron Kelley <rkelleyrtp at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> According to Apple's website, the best Macbook Air you can purchase has an Intel 2.13GHz Core-2 Duo with 4G RAM.  While you *can* >run VMWare Fusion (virtualization software) on that kind of hardware, you won't get very good performance.
>> 
>> Plus 'only' a 256 gb drive, you start making a windows image, a linux
>> image, etc you'll run out of space pretty quick.
>> 
>> A 13" MBP gets you an i5 or i7 plus a max of 8GB ram (which for some
>> reason i thought was 16gb) and will support whatever laptop sata drive
>> you want to put in there.
>> --
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Jc Jones
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