Advice - convert me?

[stella17]

wah, hey...

im a student studying architecture in australia and ive been recently looking for a laptop. basically ive never had a mac before, but i was looking at them recently and they seem rather cool.

i need the laptop mainly for uni stuff, music, music recording/creation (which i hear mac's are awesome for) and perhaps a little bit of archiCAD work. i was originally looking at a 12" powerbook, which is sort of more in my price range, but now with the release of the new macbook pro's, im uncertain... should i wait and see what happens with the new ibooks (if they do release something new?)

overall, ill need something quick, light and sexy but with the ability to handle a decent amount of graphical related tasks (ie. archiCAD reccomends 128mb VGA - but id mainly be doing this at home, although it'd be nice to have the abilty to run it on the laptop).

my only worry is that the whole compatability thing will be an issue, since i need this laptop to be able to run smoothly with my home windows pc and windows based wireless netowrks at uni. i'll be continually transferring files to and from the laptop to my PC. ive heard on the rumour mill that you'll be able to boot windows on the intel macs true? ... other than that i was looking into the 'virtual pc' software - will this just allow me to run anything i'd normally run on my windows pc? or just microsoft stuff??

so really, what do you think i should do? wait for the second quarter updates? or will a mac be too much hassle ??? im really quite clueless at all this

my price range maxes out at about $2500 AU.

thanks for your help, ta

 

[7254278]

wah, hey...

im a student studying architecture in australia and ive been recently looking for a laptop. basically ive never had a mac before, but i was looking at them recently and they seem rather cool.

i need the laptop mainly for uni stuff, music, music recording/creation (which i hear mac's are awesome for) and perhaps a little bit of archiCAD work. i was originally looking at a 12" powerbook, which is sort of more in my price range, but now with the release of the new macbook pro's, im uncertain... should i wait and see what happens with the new ibooks (if they do release something new?)

overall, ill need something quick, light and sexy but with the ability to handle a decent amount of graphical related tasks (ie. archiCAD reccomends 128mb VGA - but id mainly be doing this at home, although it'd be nice to have the abilty to run it on the laptop).

my only worry is that the whole compatability thing will be an issue, since i need this laptop to be able to run smoothly with my home windows pc and windows based wireless netowrks at uni. i'll be continually transferring files to and from the laptop to my PC. ive heard on the rumour mill that you'll be able to boot windows on the intel macs true? ... other than that i was looking into the 'virtual pc' software - will this just allow me to run anything i'd normally run on my windows pc? or just microsoft stuff??

so really, what do you think i should do? wait for the second quarter updates? or will a mac be too much hassle ??? im really quite clueless at all this

my price range maxes out at about $2500 AU.

thanks for your help, ta

I would say get either a low end macbookpro or powerbook, ibook as sexy and speedy as it is will not suffice for those graphically intense tasks. You can run anything on virtual PC but it will be VERY slow, and it has no 3D support.

 

[Chundles]

Does archiCad run on Macintosh? That would be the only problem I could forsee, if it does then it's most likely to be PowerPC only at the moment and as such could be a bit iffy running under Rosetta on the MacBook Pro.

I'd email the makers of your program and ask them about it first.

If they aren't making their program universal in a hurry you may be better off with a PowerBook.

Getting a Mac to work with Windows computers and networks and the like is a piece of cake so there's no problems there, I'd just make sure that whoever makes archiCAD can guarantee compatibility between Mac and Windows.

 

[WildCowboy]

Yes, ArchiCAD runs on Macs...it was Carbonized years ago. Graphisoft was very good about Mac implementation.