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Mac (potentially) for Engineers/Developers who use Windows.. Recommended or not? What issues did you encounter?

shabaz

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone has made the transition from Windows to Mac and what difficulties were encountered. (I don't wish to move to a Linux desktop; as much as I love Linux for development, I would not like it for a desktop).

I need to start considering replacing my laptop, and it's tempting, from looking at the hardware specifications alone, to buy a Macbook Pro. 

However, I will have some legacy software that uses Windows. ARM64 Windows can run in a VM, and ARM64 Windows will perform x86 emulation, but I can't tell if x64 emulation is supported. I also have no idea, with typical engineering software, what problems may occur with connecting USB devices like debuggers. I don't know which hypervisor is most suitable for that.

For sure I'd need to move over to native Mac software to minimise the need to bring up a VM, but for a year or two at least, I'm sure I'd need a Windows VM to make as much of a transition as possible.

Depending on the above, I'd also need to think about whether it is worth it - because there would be a productivity hit since I've never used a Mac (apart from for a week or two about 15 years ago, when I decided to give it a go, and I didn't get on with it. Maybe I didn't make enough effort).

Any thoughts/opinions are gratefully appreciated!

Parents

  • In 1998 I went to Linux full time. Then, in 2003, I switched to OSX. I stayed there until 2019 when I built a Windows machine for video editing. Because I was still heavily traveling at the time, I needed a Windows-based laptop to make moving between travel/home projects easier. But I still keep my MacPro around and use it remotely (via PiKVM) today.

    There has not been a single day since 2019 that I haven't cursed Windows for being such a operating system.

    Most interesting Windows software has a native OSX / macOS binary. I found anything that ran on Linux probably ran on OSX. I kept a VM for finicky Windows-only programs when I ran OSX full-time. I'm less sure how a VM would work in the Apple-Silicon era, though.

    I switched to Windows because I needed far more powerful hardware than what Apple was offering at the time. Now that I'm not traveling 200 days a year, I will probably go back to a MacBook Pro for a laptop and decide later what to do on my desktop editing machine.

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  • In 1998 I went to Linux full time. Then, in 2003, I switched to OSX. I stayed there until 2019 when I built a Windows machine for video editing. Because I was still heavily traveling at the time, I needed a Windows-based laptop to make moving between travel/home projects easier. But I still keep my MacPro around and use it remotely (via PiKVM) today.

    There has not been a single day since 2019 that I haven't cursed Windows for being such a operating system.

    Most interesting Windows software has a native OSX / macOS binary. I found anything that ran on Linux probably ran on OSX. I kept a VM for finicky Windows-only programs when I ran OSX full-time. I'm less sure how a VM would work in the Apple-Silicon era, though.

    I switched to Windows because I needed far more powerful hardware than what Apple was offering at the time. Now that I'm not traveling 200 days a year, I will probably go back to a MacBook Pro for a laptop and decide later what to do on my desktop editing machine.

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  • in reply to baldengineer

    Hi James,

    That's pretty rare I thought, hearing of someone who switched from Mac to Windows! Then I read the bit about cursing about Windows every day, that explained to me the world had not suddenly turned up-side down : )

    A fairly tech-savvy friend mentioned he is doing all sorts of intensive work on a Mac Pro (the new silicon). so you might find that Apple now has the edge in performance again perhaps!

    When I go to the Apple store (I've never been) I really hope they can find a way to demonstrate ARM64 Windows on it too, so I can see if it's usable on these new machines.

  • in reply to shabaz

    You should book an appointment so they can dedicate time to you (that’s the way they prefer to work) and address the questions you have.  You can just rock up but they always seem busy and you may just get to see a general assistant.

    Parallels virtualisation software works well with Apple Silicon as I mentioned and it provides good integration between the virtual OS and MacOS.  From what I can tell though, it isn’t possible to take an old Intel based Windows VM to a Parallels install on Apple Silicon, you need to start from scratch.  I presume it is the same with trying to image an existing native Windows install to use as a VM.

  • in reply to shabaz

    What is the software availability in the Apple lineup?

    I know you are an avid user of KiCAD. Any knowledge on the software from the fruit world?

  • in reply to colporteur

    Hi Sean,

    I believe there are not many software choice benefits to be gained by engineers by switching to a Mac, but I'm only speculating.

    From what I can tell, traditionally, there has been Apple-only software for art/movie/photography applications, whereas, for engineering users, there has been Windows-only software. 

    But that was in the past, and a lot of new software is available for both platforms.

    I can't think of any software that engineers would want that is only available on Mac. On the other hand, I have some old Windows applications for which I'm never going to be able to find a Mac version, so if I had a Mac laptop, I would either need to purchase a different app to meet my needs, or use the existing software in a virtual machine (if possible!) or would need to switch to a Windows machine each time I needed to use that software, which could be inconvenient if I had to do it regularly.

    Since there is no engineering software that I'm interested in that is exclusively only available on Mac, really the main benefits would be especially more for future use cases because, from the hardware perspective, the new Mac laptops have features that should provide good service for many years, like the Thunderbolt 4 that Andrew mentioned, which allows for high-speed data transfer and attachment of peripherals, and things like "Unified CPU+GPU memory" which sounds highly attractive for the future, allowing the user to move the allocation around and allocate more for the GPU, depending on the workload type. Apparently, the new Mac machines are also significantly faster than the current Intel laptops so that would support running a lot more intensive software in the future.