Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me buy a Mac Pro

One guy says PC users are "illeterate" and another says he's working on his "PHD". You people is funnn-eee!

"they had absolutely no place in the engineering industry"


What a joke!!

At the Johnson Space Center, the project/business management people use PCs and the engineering directorate only uses Macs!

Your dean is extremely ill-informed.

Atlassian (http://www.atlassian.com). Most of the engineers use Mac Pros and most of the others use Macbooks.

As the team lead for Crowd (http://www.atlassian.com/software/crowd) I have a Mac Pro, a Macbook Pro w/4GB RAM, and a Windows box for testing.

In my previous life I've been a Windows kernel developer, and a commercial MFC-and-COM-on-Win32 dev, and for most things, a Macbook Pro is just fine, especially if you spring for a copy of VMWare Fusion. Unless you live in Visual Studio, I wouldn't worry.

For engineering, Macs are definitely the superior machines. For CAD, there is a lot of great software that is compatible with Windows packages. TurboCAD is one of my favorites. In a professional environment, you'd probably end up running whatever Windows CAD package they use on Boot Camp or VMs - but, as it turns out, Macs run Windows better than most Windows laptops! :)

Look, there are no best machines for scientific computing.

Which machine today comes with a parallel-programming runtime installed by default? Which machine has a grid engine installed and functional by default - and more, as simple as a "share my computing power" click?

Leopard comes by default with openmpi, the current standard in scientific computing and parallel computing. It has XGrid. If you don't have 1000 computers to calculate your work, who cares? Enable xgrid and that is.

Besides, which OS comes with EVERY development tool you need? Well, some linuxes may have, the rest of them offer as an optional install. But that's not the point.

I have a postgraduate and a masters degree in distributed and parallel computing, and I'm doing my Ph.D. on it as well. The master and the phd research is 100% mac, and I "sold" about 20 macintoshes up to now in my department, which is not that big anyway. They don't intend to go back to a pc. NONE of them.

http://team.gobanzai.com/media/pr_10152004.htm

http://www.tuaw.com/2005/07/20/vehicle-driven-by-mac-os-x-takes-team-bonzai-to-darpa-semi-final/

Just and engineering thought...
W.

Computer engineering grad student at the University of Notre Dame, here. I run almost all of my micromagnetic simulations on my 2.16GHz Macbook Pro. http://math.nist.gov/oommf/ if you want to know what software.

I can't believe no one has brought this up yet, but the best site for this sort of thing is macvspc.info. Over 200 pages of pure Mac is better than PC proof. A tad outdated as of yet, but he does update occasionally and it is probably taking time to re-evaluate for Vista and Leopard instead of XP and Tiger.

my software development shop... which i'm not allowed to name because of NDA.

I'll give you a hint, we are *the* largest provider of integrated hospital healthcare systems _in the world_. All of our software is based in java, and in case you haven't learned, mac support of Java is 10000000000x better than on any competitor platform.

I'm a high school student, and if you're looking for any low-level CAD or PC board schematics software, I know there's a whole bunch of freeware such as EAGLE/CadSoft. The same software for the Windows platform is very buggy and extremely hard to use. Our electronics teacher urges us to bring our laptops in, since the Dells in our lab don't run too well, and the only students who ever bring in their laptops have Macs. A great educational tool that eliminates any nuisances caused by badly-written software platforms.