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Original post by AndreTheGiant
My first and most important question is, Is it true that Macs are used for entirely different purposes than PCs? Even the Mac commercials seem to be trying to enforce this major difference between PCs and Macs. The Mac Douche makes fun of the PC guy, saying that he is only good for number crunching and the like. Well as I said, this laptop will be for work, and my work is certainly more about number crunching than it is about making family photo albums and other artsy-fartsy stuff like that. So its an important question to me.
In general, the mac has a much wider usage in the graphics/video/audio/design field than it does in other fields. In some speciality fields, and traditionally in games, there are less software options for Macs, which causes many people to shy away - however, now that you can install Windows on a Mac, along with Wine, cedega and other virtualisation options, this barrier is gone.
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Another important question is, Can Macs run Windows? Sounds like a stupid question, and Ive always the the answer was "of course not, it runs the Mac OS", but I just thought I would check and make sure. Our company is very much a "Microsoft shop", and I need to be able to work with MS Visual Studio, MS SQL Server, and other Microsoft technologies that I can only assume don't run on a Mac.
All recent Macs support dual-boot with Windows. I can say from experience that my MacBook Pro is one of the fastest XP machines I have ever used, and I have had no problems whatsoever. Vista runs nicely as well, though I don't personally favour it. Most linux variants run fine too, although the driver support can be hit or miss.
In addition, both Parallels and VMWare have very good virtualisation software, which allow you to run Windows in a VM, which works nicely as long as you don't need hardware graphics support, or similar.
Beyond that, CrossOver is doing very nicely with their version of Wine, which allows you to run many Windows applications directly on the Mac - this works very well for some software, and not at all for others. I do however have half-life 2 running quite nicely... If you combine CrossOver with Mono (to get .Net support), you can get a very decent number of applications running natively.
Edit: I notice you don't give any reason for wanting a laptop, beyond "working at home", while most people I know with laptops use them for exactly the opposite reason. Laptops are, in general, slower, noisier, more expensive, have smaller screens, smaller hard drive, etc. and are much more likely to break. The only good reason to have a laptop, as far as I can tell, is if you have to travel a lot to places without a computer.
In my case, I am a student, so I need a computer with me while at home, or at University, leaving me with no real choice in the matter. Given that you work from home, and presumably a computer is available when you need to go to the office, it would seem to make more sense to get a nice desktop at home, and getting some networked storage (or a portable hard drive you can carry into the office) to access the same data from both machines.
