Thinking Different(ly)

Yet another person has saved themselves a second computer by making the switch to a Mac. If I felt that I could justify the cost right now, I might join him…

I’ve fully made the switch. Instead of traveling with 2 laptops (a Dell Latitude 610 and a PowerBook G4), I’ve consolidated to a single machine: a 17-inch, fully loaded MacBook Pro. The tipping point for me? The ability to do real .NET development on the Mac.

Of course, I’ve seen and heard all the stuff about Parallels and how good it is: many orders of magnitude better than Virtual PC, which must create a virtual set of hardware on which Windows can run. Parallels (and the upcoming VMWare for the Mac) take advantage of virtualization hardware on the Intel chip, so you really do get near native speed when running Parallels inside OS X. Notice: not dual booting, but running Windows in a window inside OS X. But, I’m on a .NET project, and “it almost runs good enough to do .NET development” isn’t quite enough. Thus, my hesitation up until this point to take the plunge. Well, I’m hear to say: it works as advertised. Building our project in Parallels on the Mac is essentially as fast as building it on the single processor Dell. The build time is within seconds of one another (for an 8 minute build)…. Source: Meme Agora