Mac vs PC

The title might have thrown you. This isn't gonna be one of those entries that tries to pit one platform against another and ends up showcasing the author's hidden bias. Nope, this is going to be a post about solutions.

I don't like to think of my company as being a "Mac Company" or a "PC Company" or even a "Linux Company". We like to think we are a company that utilizes computers. That's pretty generic. Actually, I would like to think that we're a company that matches up business needs with the appropriate technology to get the job done. Most of our employees use a Mac, but it's not because we're fervent followers of all things Apple. We use Macs because we can take advantage of virtualization technologies to run Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. We do like the Mac hardware, but let's face it, they're pretty much all Intel driven devices and the hardware edge goes to Mac simply because we can't legally run OS X on a Windows-based platform.

My personal machine is a MacBook Pro, it has 3GB of memory and a 2.16 Core 2 Duo. I swapped the hard drive to give myself a full 180 GB of space and the speed improvement of a 7200 rpm drive. This machine has never left me wanting for more. Seriously. It keeps up with what I'm doing. I usually push machines pretty hard. I'm running Parallels with a Windows XP image that was a Physical-to-Virtual migration from my old IBM Thinkpad. I use Windows everyday. I don't use Bootcamp because I'd rather operate Windows in a Mac Window and leave myself the ability to switch back and forth. I rarely reboot either my Mac (the host) or my Windows image.

I run VMWare purely to take advantage of the many freely available VMWare Appliances available. I usually have a copy of the xTuple Linux image which has a full development environment pre-built. This saves a ton of time and effort.

Anyway, you get my point. I'm a fan of technology. The hardware and software providers are all just part of the cast.

- Scott