Calling all Leopards

by algorithmist, posted in General

After living in the clutches of the M$ empire for most of my career, I’m seriously considering joining the rebel alliance and purchasing a Mac Book Pro (17″).  I’m interested in all opinions from current owners; in particular, those currently running FlexBuilder and/or Flash CS3 with Leopard.  Thanks!!

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16 thoughts on “Calling all Leopards”

  1. I got my Mac Book Pro in March. Had used Windows forever. Haven’t really looked back. I was using a pc at Brightcove, and now that that is done, I’m Mac around the clock. Can’t say that I miss it at all. Have had no problems with Flex Builder or CS3 in Leopard. At least no more than I ever had in Windows. I’m not one of those Mac users that bashes Microsoft at every opportunity or goes out trying to convert everyone. But the Mac has been a very positive experience for me.

  3. Hey Jim,

    I’ve been a happy user of a 17″ MBP for almost a year now, and use both Flex Builder and the CS3 suite on it an a regular basis. I’ve had no problems switching over from Windows XP, despite never having been a regular Macintosh user before. I haven’t looked back since, especially as it’s trivially easy to run Windows alongside either in a standalone boot configuration or via virtualization.

    I haven’t however, upgraded over to Leopard yet–being in the middle of a project, I’d rather choose stability over new features at least until I have some time to play with them.

  4. I’ve been using 17″ MBP for ca 1.5 years now. Never been happier with any other computer. The resolution is great on 17″ ones, especially now where you can get 1920×1200 screen.

    The only slightly annoying thing about this machine is that it’s quite big and heavy to lug around. But with a good bag (I have Booq’s Folee) it’s not that big of a problem.

  5. You won’t regret it. The Flex and CF blogosphere is littered with ‘switchers’. Come on over to this side, and laugh at the windoze users with us. 🙂

  6. Got my Macbook Pro right after they came out. I was a PC guy with no Apple experience. I love it. I picked it up and with almost no problems at all I was back to my web development and graphic art. Just upgraded to Leopard and now it is even better. I have never had a PC last over 2 year and my Macbook Pro is just a few months away and still running as it did day one. I will never spend another penny on a PC.

  7. I think if you are going Flash/Flex/Objective C etc it is all good. Most good apps are available in some form online. There are so many development utilities like FlashDevelop that aren’t in MAC world so I have yet to make the jump, but the Rebel Alliance is much cooler than the MS imperial army BUT as long as Jobs doesn’t go too Disney and get all platform greedy like MS. So far the iPhone and other mac platforms they tend to be more closed than Microsoft at times.

    I would get a mac and use to find all the real reasons that you use Windows currently, if nothing causes a problem, it is jedi.

  8. Thanks everyone – sounds positive. My current gripe against the evil empire is that I can’t upgrade my Dell M60 to XP SP2 – serious BSOD. I’ve been lucky to recover after two failed attempts (yes, even upgraded the bios). Supposedly, I can run both OS’s on the MBP and it is often a good thing to have a MAC for testing or debugging those odd “this doesn’t work right on a Mac” issues. If it’s a solid development platform to begin with, then that’s even better.

    The rebel alliance may soon have a new member 🙂

  9. You are making a great move to go MBP. I’ve been running Flex and CF for over a year on my 15″ MBP now and haven’t been disappointed. Other instructors in the Computer Science department thought I was nuts going Apple. Now six other instructors have one and two also have the Mac Pros–and they can still teach their curricula (imagine that). And, most of these professors thought Macs were still an ‘experimental’ technology as recently as last year. Make the move.

  10. I made the switch after starting my new job a few months ago. I hope to never use a PC again. It took a day or so to learn the keyboard shortcuts but I’ve found that the shortcut keys are easier to access and there are more on the Mac. I was concerned about speed and my Mac book pro is the same if not faster than a brand new ThinkPad which I used temporarily. I’m using VMware Fusion to run XP and I haven’t noticed a performance hit at all when XP is running. The Mac book pro also has a lot of little things that are much more convenient than what is offered on a PC such as the dashboard, very usable mousepad, keyboard feel, etc.

  11. (this is written from a macbook running leopard ;))

    I’ve been a long time windows user (think 486 and win 3.1),
    some years ago I used a little bit OS8 and 9 but it didn’t really cut it for me, reason ? no prompt, sorry but that’s the one thing I can not live without on a system, I need a command line or it’s a no go.

    About 3 months ago I convinced the IT guy at work to trade a shitty IBM thinkpad with a macbook, the catch was the macbook was “broken” and nobody would really care to fix it, it took me the weekend to fix/reinstall/learn OSX and never regreted it since then :),
    and few weeks ago I was buying leopard in an apple store on the release day.

    here the reasons why I made the switch, and why my next laptop will be apple or nothing:

    * MS Vista, there is no way I will work under that OS (to explain in detail exactly why would be to long to write here, not I don’t hate MS nor Windows, just Vista)

    * leopard (oh even tiger would do)
    a GUI that don’t get in your way with beneath a powerfull
    Unix system and the command line, for me it’s the best of
    both world (I don’t say either that OSX is perfect, I still think the finder need much much more improvment, hence why I use often the terminal)

    * virtualization, let’s face it as a long time windows user
    you can not complety 100% switch to OSX like that, but between Parallels, VMWare, etc. you can have both

    * Adobe software, those one are working as good either on Windows or OSX, so Flash CS3/Flex Builder/etc. should basically work the same (note: for FB I could be a little off as I’m not using FB2)

    * at worst if for some reason I’m not happy booting OSX,
    I can double or even triple boot win XP SP2 and Ubuntu

    honestly the hardest thing is not to switch from windows to macintosh, it’s to decice which mac hardware you gonna pick,
    the choice between a macbook and a macbook pro can be pretty hard to make 😉

  12. Pingback: polyGeek - offTopic » Going over to the Apple side

  16. Hey, I’m in the same boat. I’m looking for a new laptop and I’m seriously considering a MacBook Pro. With VMware, I can run all my existing Microsoft development tools, etc..

    The only real thing holding me back is
    1) No eSata port (Asus has some sweet machines with eSata builtin, and when you’re working from VM images as much as I am, you want the fasted possible disk access time.)

    2) No dock. (sure, I’ve seen that kludgey thing some third-party company makes for MacBooks, but it’s not nearly as sexy in my eyes.)

    3) I’m not in dire needs right now, so I’m going to wait and see what’s announced at MacWorld, or whatever the event is in January where there’s rumors about a smaller Mac Book Pro type of computer, with maybe a 13″ monitor. (I’d love a 13.3 inch monitor computer, something similar to the Sony Viao SZ but with the full 2.2 or 2.4 processor and 256 meg graphics card in a nice 4 pound package.)

    I really think the silver Mac Books are sexy. But, I don’t hate Windows as much as a lot of Mac people do. Really, when was the last time you saw a blue screen? It seems the Mac crowd is a bit immature in this regards. I was at an Adobe event and whenever they were giving away software to the crowd, they’d ask what platform you wanted it for, and if someone said PC, the rest of the crowd would start booing. Talk about a group of users with an inferiority complex!

    Anyway, with Parallels and VMWare Fusion, and enough memory, you’ll be able to keep doing work in MSFT tools (I’ve read good things from guys running Visual Studio on Mac Books.)

    Oh, one thing. I really wish Apple would have some demo Macs in their stores that ran the PC SOFTWARE virtualized. I think it would be a great selling point for people like us who are interested in switching, but might still want the ability to run some PC software.

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