Notebook; OSX or Windows?

[nidrig]

Hi,

It's a bit out of topic, but I need some advices from fellow photographers.

Most of the time, I'm postprocessing (stitching, HDR, PS) my pictures while on the move.

I have a six years old notebook, XP based that requires half of the day to boot and the other one to stitch 6 pictures at low-res.

I'm planning to buy a new one, but my heart balances between OS X and Windows. I'm not a Mac user at all and wonder if the performances on an OS X based notebook were better than on a Windows one.

Thus, what are you advices for 1500-2000$, 17'', excellent screen and powerful GPU/CPU?

I don't care about the battery life, nor the weight, nor blue-ray capabilities.

Thanks for your input.

[allSaints]

Hi Nidrig,

I've been a PC and Windows user since it was invented, but my next computer will definitely be a mac. My last mistake was buying a new pc with Windows Vista. I think it really sucks - it is nothing but an Apple-wannabe that never succeds. It will never be a good multi-user multi-tasking environment. :(

And the really smart things they did at Apple was to migrate to the Intel processor and to implement a UNIX version of the kernel (OSX).

What has stopped me so far from taking the plunge has been the Windows applications, but enough is enough - now I'm heading for the Apple store!

regards,
Tommy

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

Ditto.
Only last night one of my PC's gave up, resulting in both harddisks in it dead. All information I had there is absolutely essential for one of my works (records for 5 years of work)... hope to be able to retrieve it with some specialist's help.

I have purchased my last PC... and the next purchases will be Macs. I have had enough of this crap.

[Elliot]

Nidrig

My next machine will be a a MacPro without any hesitation from my part. Next laptop will also be an Mac. I have a brand new Intel - Microsoft laptop..... it was $4,200.00. My daughter bought an Apple laptop for half the price and it is almost twice as fast.

I assemble my own Towers. We do 3D Virtual Reality, for that we use AutoCAD, 3D Max, Revit and SolidWORKS. All these programs work equal or better on the Mac's. The Adobe products work better on the Mac's.

On 3D Max the Microsoft based machines crash way too often...... Rendering times on the Mac's is 40% faster. The machines I assemble are Quad Xeon or Opterons. I usually use 4 or 8gb of fast, low latency memory, SCCI Raids and Quadro Video Cards. These highly customized machines are not as good as the 8 core MacPro's.

Good Luck
Elliot

PD:
I have had it with Microsoft. Vista is not very good and Windows XP has a 3gb window limitation. No matter how much memory you put on these machines Windows will only see about 2.7gb of memory. The Apple software will see the entire memory amount you have on the computer.

On the Opterons from AMD there is mode you write on the INI file, they call in the 3 Gig Switch, with this mode you are supposed to see more memory. It doesn't work either. When you run the benchmark programs the Apples beat any of the Microsoft based machines.