So I had a rather spirited debate with a friend of mine about buying a MacBook Pro and he is ardently against the Mac platform based on the fact that you can't get any decent chess programs for the Mac that are reasonably priced. My arguement was that you can run any Windows program on a Mac in a virtual machine using Parellels or VMware.

I would love to here your opinions, especially if you have a Mac and have some experience with this.

Thanks

I've been eyeing the new iMacs in large part because their increased RAM will make running a Windows virtual box a more livable experience than what I've got now, running XP (via Parallels) on my 1GB MacBook.

RAM is vital, but if you've got the hardware, there's no reason you can't have the best of both worlds.

But there aren't restrictions in Windows as far as applications.

This friend of mine says he had a student that bought a Mac and couldn't get any Windows programs to work on it even though they installed Windows on it.  I think they just didn't do something right or they didn't have enough RAM as you mentioned.

The money involved is intimidating but if I don't have to fix it every few months it will be worth the money for sure. We didn't have our new Vista machine for 3-4 months and I was already having sound card issues. My task bar disappears occasionally, and sometimes it just doesn't work right.

I'm just another frustrated Windows user that is eyeing up a Mac. Actually looking at the 13" or 15" Macbook Pro.

Interesting...  I've run Chess Position Trainer, Chessbase Lite, Chessimo and a (very) old version of Fritz on my XP virtual machine without any issues (other than predictable performance degradation thanks to my lack of memory).

I have a coworker who uses Fusion and he hasn't had any problems either, although he's not straying too far from mainstream software (MS Office, etc.), as far as I know.

Hey, & maybe Windows 7 will solve all your problems anyway.  :)  No?

I got fritz 11 working on the virtual machine.  I can't get chessmaster to work no matter what I do.  But the mac rocks.  I mostly play chess on my iphone and on chess.com now anyhow.  The mac barely ever crashes.  I'm in love with it.  I give it pet names.  I was very upset about chessmaster not working until I found chess.com

I have a mac book pro with 4 gb of ram.  I'm a software developer actually.  I wont go back to a pc.

Good to know!  Interesting about Chessmaster, but maybe not all that shocking.  I always found later versions of CM a little bit twitchy, even on a PC.  :)

Macs are good.

The future of chess will pay more attention to mac OS Snow leopard. Why? Because both the two new feauters of the apple os (Gran Central and OpenCL)are a must for any chess engine programer. I`m really happy with SCID (mac OSX compilation by Israel Chacua) as database, and I use Glaurung as engine in SCID. Glaurung is a top engine that has a mac 64bit compliation (Thank you Tord!!!). All freeware!

I use no window program for chess. I dont need paralles, vmware nor bootcamp for chess

bye

Also shredder is a very good and strong chess program for the mac. I'm on a mac for 3 years now and never looked back. Although i have a virtual machine installed, without problems by the way, i rarely use it. Windows7 is for sure a big improvement (wasn't that difficult to improve vista), i would never switch back.

regards

I have a 13" MacBook Pro and love it!  I recently downloaded Sun's free virtualization software, VirtualBox, and installed Windows XP and ChessBase Light, and it works really well!  The upcoming VMWare Fusion 3 is supposed to be much better than VirtualBox, so I'm considering that when it comes out.

My MBP only has 2GB of RAM and the nVidia 9400m graphics chip, and I can tell you that more RAM would definitely help with a virtual machine, and I'm pretty sure a better graphics card would help a lot too.  So I'd recommend a MBP 15" with 4GB of RAM and the better graphics card, if you can afford it.  They probably have cheaper refurbs with those specs that would be good, also.

Go for the Mac.  Just be prepared to see ugly PCs everywhere you look after that

DeepGreene: The desktop Intel Core i7 would make chess engines pretty strong, too   And help a ton with virtual machines, since you could have them run on 2 or even 3 cores, instead of just 1!  (Oh how I'd love a maxed-out 27" iMac!)

I´m very happy with both my mac mini 2.0 GHz and my ultra portable Macbook Air. 

And I never open windows for chess!!

I've been a die-hard PC user all my life, but recently bought a 13" MacBook Pro.  I absolutely love it.  I run VMWare Fusion for my PC programs and it works beautifully, with the exception of ChessMaster (as barnettech pointed out).  The 4 GB RAM definitely helps with the virtual machine.  I notice the Pro gets really warm when I run engines (Fritz, Rybka), which I guess means the processor is working really hard. 

For sure.  I didn't know my MacBook had an internal fan till it was the computer's turn to move...  :)

I use Parallels 5 on my macbook for the few windows programs I use, I have 2gb of ram and it could do with a little more

I run HIARCS and Shredder on my 2.4Ghz Macbook Pro with 4Gb RAM. I don't have any experience of chess programs on the PC, but I really like the HIARCS and Sigma Chess combination. I still haven't really figured out Shredder, so can't comment on it. It seems like a good package, but it isn't as intuitive as the HIARCS/Sigma Chess combo. I've used this combo to really nail a couple of variations on my pet French Defence Tarrasch closed variation up to 22 moves deep! Sigma Chess has a nice way of saving games as collections, so I can keep my 34 analysed games of 14 Ne2 and 33 games of 16 Bxh7 all clearly labelled, analysed and stored away for future reference. I wear my anorak for these occasions.

I'm considering buying one of the chessbase DBs for my old PC because I just can't find anything to compete with the big chessbase DBs for the mac. If anyone can point me in the right direction I'd be grateful! (I already have Scid - it's populating it with quality games is the issue).