Hi
My two ha'porth.
For a laptop, this is the clincher for me - if you want to use your
laptop anywhere that has reasonable light levels (e.g. demonstrating
to anyone in an exhibition hall), you may well find that the beautiful
shiny mirror that Apple put on the front of their screens on most of
their laptops makes your investment almost useless in reasonable
levels of ambient light. Unless I could buy a Macbook with a matt
screen I doubt I'd want to buy another one.
Sometimes I wonder if my Macbook was "designed in California in a
cave" to paraphrase what it says on the sticker on the back...
It runs all the software I want it to without problems, though,
including WIndows stuff via wine or VMWare. And I do *really* like OSX
as an interface.
On 9 Aug 2012, at 16:18, Andreas Förster wrote:
>
> Mind that if you buy a MacBook, there's only one (hefty 15") model
> without a mirror-coated screen.
>
>
> Andreas
>
>
>
> On 09/08/2012 3:58, Nat Echols wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 6:55 AM, Jacob Keller
>> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>> one. Are there any really reasonable arguments for preferring Mac
>>> over
>>> windows (or linux) with regard to crystallography? What can Mac/
>>> Linux do
>>> that windows cannot (especially considering that there is Cygwin)?
>>> What
>>> wonderful features am I missing?
>>
>> Mac vs. Linux: mostly a matter of personal preference, but I agree
>> with Graeme. Most programs run equally well on either - with Coot a
>> partial exception, apparently due to problems with the X11
>> implementation (but once you get used to these, it's not a big deal).
>>
>> Windows, on the other hand, simply doesn't support the full range of
>> modern crystallography software. And in my experience, it has
>> crippling flaws that mean some programs will always work better on
>> Mac/Linux. I wouldn't ever endorse trying to use Windows for serious
>> scientific computing unless you need to run an application that won't
>> work on any other OS, and as far as I know there isn't a single
>> (macromolecular) crystallography program that falls into this
>> category.
>>
>> -Nat
>>
Harry
--
Dr Harry Powell, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, MRC Centre,
Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 0QH
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