If you’re a developer on a Mac, I have a question for you.
Have you ever partitioned your drive to dual boot to Windows? If so, how is performance? Does it run just as well as a PC? I like Mac’s build quality and was considering a Macbook Pro for my next purchase but I do a lot of development in Windows with C# and would want to use Windows on it a lot. Should I just get a PC or would Mac really outperform? Thanks.
I don’t know if this is the best choice… you could loose performance. You might want to consider renting a Mac in the cloud (e.g. have a look to http://www.macincloud.com/). It’s also cheaper than buying a new computer.
My personal preference would be to get the Mac and install Windows on VirtualBox.
From what I’ve seen of your posts here, you don’t appear to be doing a lot of graphics-intensive stuff, so I’d say 8GB of RAM should be plenty to run both systems without noticeable slowdown.
The last metrics I saw showed Apple computers running Windows applications faster than similarly spec’d competitor machines. I dual booted Windows on my first MacBook and played games on it (cerca 2008). It should work fine for development, but partitioning your drive introduces its own inconveniences.
You’d be paying a heavy tax.
The styling/build quality of the macs are very good.
But it will cost you much more to to buy a mac than a windows laptop.
A mac booted to windows and a windows laptop with the same cpu/ram/hard drive will run at the same speed.
You will be able to buy a faster windows laptop because the pc vendors have a much faster release cycle.
So if the Mac OS and the physical hardware stylings are worth the extra money that it costs over a windows laptop than go for it. Otherwise save a bundle of cash and pickup a windows pc.