Chess Software for a Mac

I'm interested in buying a chess program for my Mac. I have a macbook pro. Would you guys recomend Fritz 12? - i can put windows on the Mac. Or Shredder 12 for Mac?

I'm nowhere near good enough to worry about which is the "strongest" or "deepest". I just want a user friendly program that will help me analyze my games and study games from a database.

Thanks!!!

-Ted

Anyone?

The difference in strength between fritz 12 and shredder 12 is negligible, but I think fritz's interface is easier to use.

I recently bought Deep Fritz 12. It is not all that different from Fritz 9 except that the interfacehas been modified. Actually I use the free Stockfish engine in it which seems to be stronger than Deep Fritz 12. Both Stockfish and the free Fire engines support multiple processors as does Deep Fritz 12. Rybka 4 is the strongest chess engine, but I don't have it.You can buy it with either the Fritz interface or its own interface.

I don't know of a Mac program that has an interface comparble to Fritz or Rybka -especially for analysis, but I play these programs on my Mac using Windows with Bootcamp.

I'm biased on this. I would say Fritz. It is one of the main reasons why I've gotten to be so good at chess lately. The interface is in "ribbon" format like the new MS-Word version. It's a terrific program but like I said, I'm biased

Interesting, I've been thinking about doing the same.

How much hard drive space did you assign to the Windows-side of the machine?

Thanks!

-Ted

Ted,

I have a 750 Gb drive on this IMac, and two drives of the same capacity on my big Mac at work, with the space equally divided between Mac and PC, and 2 Gb of memory on each. It is much more than I really need, so with less drive space you might want to look more closely at the division. I must add that I play a LOT of PC games, soome of which require a lot of space, so if you were using the PC only for chess, you could do with a lot less drive space.I use Windows XP, and I don't know how much space Windows 7 requires for the system.

Note that Windows is not included with the Mac, so unless you have access to an institutional license, you will have to buy a copy of Windows to use with Bootcamp.

Parallels allows you to use both Mac and PC at the same time, but probably with some slowdown for Windows, since parallels runs Windows under the Mac system. OTOH with Bootcamp (which is free) your Mac IS a PC when it is running Windows, so there is no slowdown.

I know this is not what you want to hear, but recently when I bought a "chess laptop", I specifically did not buy a Mac because it did not support the ChessBase / Rybka combination.

Although I have bought and frequently use Deep Fritz 12 for analysis (after the games are finished), I have ordered Deep Rybka 4, which seems somewhat superior for analysis, although Fritz 12 is good. For example there is no way for Fritz to interrupt an analysis and continue it at a later time, whereas the Rybka interface allows this and more (such as adding branches to a tree) with the "Idea" function. (yes of course you can interupt a move-by-move infinite analysis with Fritz and save it and restart it from any move later, but I am referring to say a "full" or "deep  analysis").

Deep Fritz 12 also has some minor bugs, and the engine is significantly weaker than some free programs such as Stockfish. Stockfish has some disconcerting quirks such as a tendency to suddenly change is evaluation value as it digs deeper into a position, but IMHO is is better than Fritz for moderately fast analysis (say 10-15 secs per move).For that reason I would caution about using Stockfish for instantaneous evaluation of a position (say less than 10 seconds on a 3 GHz dual core processor) unless you can tolerate recommendation of "inferior" moves.

There is no version of Rybka for the Mac, so if you are using Rybka on a Mac you are using the Rybka under Windows, in which case it is like any other PC and supports whatever any other PC supports.

Thanks for the info. I wont be using the PC side for anything other than chess... Chessbase and Rybka or Fritz or would be it. I have the lower end macbook pro. I wouldn't think I'd need to much room for Windows and those 2 programs. Maybe I'll ask someone at the Apple store. 

Thanks again!

-Ted

Hey Ted - I used to work for apple and I can tell you my solution was to run VMWare with XP and Fritz/Rybka. As long as you have a decent machine (which you do) any potential slowdown should be negligable. In fact I'm typing this reply to you from my xp vm. If you want a free alternative to vmware check out virtualbox (though you still need to own a copy of windows)

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. And if you don't mind me asking . . . why would that be better than running windows with bootcamp on the macbook?

Thanks!

Ted

With Bootcamp you have to reboot to change from Mac to Windows. With Parallels and similar programs you can run both Windows and Mac without rebooting, at the cost of a slight slowdown. I use Bootcamp myself, so I can't say much about performance with the others. I have yet to fnd a Windows program or game tht will not run under Bootcamp.

My home chess laptop is windows 7, and is an HP with an Intel i7 quad core chip. Recently, at work, they got me a MacBook Pro which has _nearly_ equivalent specs. Comparing the two:

MacBook Pro: Smaller, lighter. Better battery life. Doesn't get as warm. MUCH better track pad.

HP/Intel: Runs Deep Rybka 4, 64-bit version natively. Cost ~1200$ instead of ~2200$.

Really, it's not even close, with the use case of a chess laptop. With almost any other use case, one has to do the dollar tradeoff. But you probably wouldn't need such a high-end device, so the price gap would narrow.

 Agree 100%. I bought a laptop for the first time recently (our youngest has stolen what used to be my study!). I looked at macbooks and PC notebooks. In the end I bought a Dell laptop with Windows 7, dual core 4GB, it cost me around $600. The cheapest macbook is much more expensive and can't run Fritz, Rybka etc. You need at least dual core or the machine will grind to a halt when the machine's thinking or analysing a game.

My wife recently bought an iPad (supposedly for my birthday but I have yet to use the thing!). It's a beautiful piece of engineering and very user-friendly but it's not much use for chess (even if I do ever get to wrest it from my wife or son)

Regarding software, I recommend Fritz12. It's got the best user interface of the programs I've seen, human-readable analysis, serves as an interface to playchess.com etc.

If you think you won't be using the PC for anything other than chess... think about what will happen to the computer when you upgrade to a different PC for chess... it will for sure be used for something else!

Now that I have experience with both DeepFritz 12 and Deep Rybka 4, both are good. Fritz is easier to use, but Rybka (Aquarium interface) has IDEA, an interactive system for analysis that is pretty hard to understand. If you just want to do quick and dirty analysis of your games, I would go for Fritz. 

I have a MAC and use Stockfish 1.8 with a Sigma Chess interface. It is a very fast and strong engine - probably better than Fritz and certainly better than running Fritz under emulation. The Sigma interface is good, but not like Fritz etc. But you have a MAC and these work well on a MAC as opposed to Fritz which doesn't work at all.