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MacBook Pro with Windows only?

GTaudiophile

GTaudiophile

Lifer
I am interested in the 13" MacBook Pro with Retina Display, Iris graphics, etc. But I am not so much interested in OSX. I would most likely prefer to run Win7 Ultimate on it. Do many people do this? Buy a Mac and run Windows and forget about OSX?
 
You know, VMWare Fusion is good enough that I used my MBP for years with a full copy of Windows 7 on VMWare Fusion. By using a virtual desktop and full-screen mode, along with hardware video acceleration, I got an almost perfect native Windows 7 environment that i used probably 60% of the time, but with a quick 3-finger swipe to the left, I had a full seamless OSx environment and with a quick 3-finger swipe to the right, I had a full, seamless Linux environment.

These gestures, combined with the virtual desktops and the multi-touch gesture support made the Mac my favourite platform ever.

One caution, if you're an avid Windows user, you may be frustrated with how the special keys Alt-Ctrl, etc map to the Mac keyboard. Fusion offers the ability to remap them, and you can do some of it in Windows as well, or you can just learn that Ctrl and Alt are in a different location than you might expect.

🙂
 
Got Fusion Pro when I got my new 13" MBP and it's butter smooth. Runs pretty fast and it's seamless with OSX. Don't even know what the difference between Pro and non-pro are but I got it cheap.
 
If you do, know that you'll take about a 40-50% hit on the battery life.
 
Macs are attractive these days, but they say you lose all the battery savings and trackpad advantages if you run Windows on a mac. It doesn't seem worth it if you mainly want to stick with windows. The keyboard/keyboard shortcuts alone are going to be irritating enough for most power users.
 
That's sounds like a great setup - I didn't realize VMware Fusion functioned like that. I generally prefer a Windows environment as everything I do work related is in Windows. However, the Macbook build quality is really good, and I would like to learn OSX.

How about the latest MBP w/ retina display? Does the increased resolution cause any issues beyond having to simply deal with the increased pixel density?
 
TheStu said:
If you do, know that you'll take about a 40-50% hit on the battery life.
Click to expand...

Isn't one option to run Windows in a VM inside of OSX, and the other to run a second boot environment? Any comments on how well each of those function?
 
Also Fusion can run a bootcamp partition as a VM if you don't want reboot to Windows all the time and not have 2 separate installs.
 
RaiderJ said:
Isn't one option to run Windows in a VM inside of OSX, and the other to run a second boot environment? Any comments on how well each of those function?
Click to expand...

BootCamp is installing Windows to a separate partition on the drive. If you want to run Windows, you have to restart the computer and tell it to boot into Windows. It is 100% native, but Apple's drivers aren't always all that great in Windows (what's the motivation?) and there's a BIG battery hit.

Fusion/ Parallels is virtualization. It lets you install Windows into a virtual machine. You can then switch between OS X and Windows like you would switch between firefox and chrome. As someone else pointed out, both of them will actually let you use a bootcamped install of Windows as your VM (virtual machine), then you don't have to juggle files and settings in as many places.

Back when I had both OSes on my MacBook, I usually preferred Fusion, they were usually behind Parallels in terms of bells & whistles, but when they did roll the stuff out it was usually a little better implemented. Though, this was at least 5 years ago when the scene was still young.
 
GTaudiophile said:
I am interested in the 13" MacBook Pro with Retina Display, Iris graphics, etc. But I am not so much interested in OSX. I would most likely prefer to run Win7 Ultimate on it. Do many people do this? Buy a Mac and run Windows and forget about OSX?
Click to expand...

Lots of people do this. My sister has a Macbook Air and runs Windows 7 100% of the time using Boot Camp.

TheStu said:
If you do, know that you'll take about a 40-50% hit on the battery life.
Click to expand...

It's more like a 25-30% hit. Definitely tangible, but on a newer mac with 6-8 hours of battery life it's an acceptable one.

TheStu said:
BootCamp is installing Windows to a separate partition on the drive. If you want to run Windows, you have to restart the computer and tell it to boot into Windows. It is 100% native, but Apple's drivers aren't always all that great in Windows (what's the motivation?) and there's a BIG battery hit.

Fusion/ Parallels is virtualization. It lets you install Windows into a virtual machine. You can then switch between OS X and Windows like you would switch between firefox and chrome. As someone else pointed out, both of them will actually let you use a bootcamped install of Windows as your VM (virtual machine), then you don't have to juggle files and settings in as many places.

Back when I had both OSes on my MacBook, I usually preferred Fusion, they were usually behind Parallels in terms of bells & whistles, but when they did roll the stuff out it was usually a little better implemented. Though, this was at least 5 years ago when the scene was still young.
Click to expand...

I tried Parallels 7 desktop on my Macbook Air and like BootCamp a LOT more. I found virtualization choppy and clunky. If the OP is going to run Windows 100% of the time, BootCamp is the way to go. There's no performance hit, and the native Windows drivers Apple provides with Boot Camp work perfectly.
 
Infohawk said:
Macs are attractive these days, but they say you lose all the battery savings and trackpad advantages if you run Windows on a mac. It doesn't seem worth it if you mainly want to stick with windows. The keyboard/keyboard shortcuts alone are going to be irritating enough for most power users.
Click to expand...

Keys can be remapped in Windows. There is even freeware that does it.
 
I think one thing is very clear from this thread: Apple is the only OEM out there with its shit together when it comes to building laptops lol.
 
GTaudiophile said:
I am interested in the 13" MacBook Pro with Retina Display, Iris graphics, etc. But I am not so much interested in OSX. I would most likely prefer to run Win7 Ultimate on it. Do many people do this? Buy a Mac and run Windows and forget about OSX?
Click to expand...

Don't do it. If you want Windows full time, get a Windows 8.1 ultrabook. Trust me on this - Apple's drivers give Windows bare bones functionality, but that is it; the battery life of the rMBP in windows is terrible at best.

OSX really isn't terrible, unless you have a specific need for a Windows app. OSX has grown on me to be honest, and while i'd like to run windows - it just isn't an option because there are many caveats to running Windows fulltime on a macbook. Again, OSX is pretty darn good. Very good in fact, unless you absolutely need a specific windows application.
 
blackened23 said:
Don't do it. If you want Windows full time, get a Windows 8.1 ultrabook. Trust me on this - Apple's drivers give Windows bare bones functionality, but that is it; the battery life of the rMBP in windows is terrible at best.

OSX really isn't terrible, unless you have a specific need for a Windows app. OSX has grown on me to be honest, and while i'd like to run windows - it just isn't an option because there are many caveats to running Windows fulltime on a macbook. Again, OSX is pretty darn good. Very good in fact, unless you absolutely need a specific windows application.
Click to expand...

^ see the posted review above. New rMBP gets 7 hours 47 minutes in Windows, vs. 11 hours 18 ms in Apple. Definitely a big hit, but just under 8 hours is quite solid, and competitive with other Ultrabooks.

There are not that many caveats to running Windows on a Mac laptop!! You get a hit of 30% battery life. That's pretty much it!

Also, Apple's Windows drivers are fine - no problems with them at all. And their trackpads, even on Windows, are better than ANYTHING on the Windows side.


Again: to the OP, if you want to run Windows only, it's a piece of cake with Boot Camp, and once you set it up it boots and runs automatically like any PC laptop. If you ever need to get back to the Mac side, you simply hold the Option key at boot time and select the Mac partition. Otherwise that stays hidden and you can run and update exclusively on the Windows side.
 
jiffylube1024 said:
Also, Apple's Windows drivers are fine - no problems with them at all. And their trackpads, even on Windows, are better than ANYTHING on the Windows side.
Click to expand...

I think that's one of the biggest selling point for me on a Macbook - baffles me trackpads are so crappy on many Windows machines.
 
GTaudiophile said:
I think one thing is very clear from this thread: Apple is the only OEM out there with its shit together when it comes to building laptops lol.
Click to expand...

That's true. At this point, if I didn't need specific Windows software (not games), I would be getting a MBP. It's the safest bet. But if I did that I would just use OSX full-time.

blackened23 said:
OSX really isn't terrible, unless you have a specific need for a Windows app. OSX has grown on me to be honest, and while i'd like to run windows - it just isn't an option because there are many caveats to running Windows fulltime on a macbook. Again, OSX is pretty darn good. Very good in fact, unless you absolutely need a specific windows application.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's hard for me to believe there wouldn't be caveats on this kind of setup. Even within a given operating system, there are often compatibility issues when you need a specific windows application. And if you don't need a specific windows app, why not just switch to OSX?
 
I found alternatives for all the Windows apps I use for work. I was worried about RDP when I was purchasing my MBP because that's a huge part of my work but cord works perfectly on osx. It did take a bit to get OSX to connect to my work share via VPN but also got that working.
 
gus6464 said:
I found alternatives for all the Windows apps I use for work. I was worried about RDP when I was purchasing my MBP because that's a huge part of my work but cord works perfectly on osx. It did take a bit to get OSX to connect to my work share via VPN but also got that working.
Click to expand...

Microsoft makes an RDP client for OS X, why not just use that?
 
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