Mac vs. PC for playing and Studying Chess.

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!!

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).

last version of Scid for mac can be downloaded here

http://cachivaches.chauca.net/scid/

works perfectly on my snow leopard mac.

Thanks to Israel chacua who also gives you the chance to download in his web "cachivaches" the strong engine (rybka level) Robbolito

http://cachivaches.chauca.net/scid/files/RobboLito_0085e4l-macosx.zip (the 32 and 64 compilations are on src folder). Thanks for the compilation!!

Fritz 12 vs Robbolito e2 (latest version)

I´m looking for a place to download the new engine stockfish 1.6 which is a continuation of my favorite engine glaurung. Thanks Tord for your work and for giving your work in GPL!!

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EDIT:I have compiled stockfish 1.6.2 and runs ok on my mac. here you can get it:

MORE:

I was able to run all chessbase products I tried using "winebottle" for mac. I know some people use one to run PC engines on mac. I don´t understand this because there are engines of the same level on mac that don´t need to emulate (and lose cpu time) a PC.

I recommend it if you miss a PC software GUI and you like macs. 

Many windows app can be instaled in mac  using wine, this way of running PC app on a mac uses less CPU (and less time to start the app) than other solutions as VMware, Paralles etc.

I have compiled stockfish 1.6.2 and runs ok on my mac. here you can get it:

http://www.chess.com/download/view/stockfish-for-mac-os-sl-and-linux

Thank you all for commenting and feel free to continue. You have made my decision to switch to a Mac much easier. in the next two weeks I should finally be scoring myself a 15" Macbook Pro 2.53 GHz, 4GB RAM, with a few goodies.

Thanks Again

This is one of the reasons that A. I love the chess community, we compete as gentleman, and B. I love the Mac community, because most are helpful and friendly.

I'd highly recommend against a new MacBook Pro right now!  There could be new ones as soon as this month!

Supposedly benchmarks have already been released for one, with a Core i7 processor.  You should be following http://www.macrumors.com

I do think it´s time to wait, I agree with apollo33