Macs in Finance?
This may be a dumb question but I want to hear from people with experience:
Does having a Mac, personally, create complications for those who work in IBD/PE/HF if they want to do work at home/after they leave the office?
At my previous internship I had to partition my Mac to run windows because we used, among other things, MS Access as a dealflow database. For those of you who have interned/worked/or currently work in finance, do you have a Mac?
You can use windows on a mac, so that's no issue. Excel on OS X is severely lacking.
Boot Camp or Parallels..Yeah Excel for Mac or Numbers for Mac blows.
The thought of excel for mac makes me want to vomit.
They are sweet for photoshop though.
I've never felt the need to knock macs, but like the iPhone, they are a luxury and not a necessity......therefore, most firms outside of the creative industries just don't use them.
Let's not forget the price-performance aspect. A $1500 custom-built PC has the same hardware as a $4000+ mac.
Yeah, but the mac will still work 10x better than the PC and hold it's value 100x better than the PC. I bought a Macbook in 2006 for $899 and sold it in 2010 with a broken screen for $375. Not a chance you could do that with a PC.
Just saying....
(Above posts) If you're using it for photoshop, you'll want a good processor & gpu. A mac simply cannot compete with a windows/linux at the performance level - see http://thenextweb.com/apple/files/2010/09/mac01.jpg if you don't understand. The user interface, the ease of access and overall simplicity (as well as tons of marketing) is what sells the product.
As for your macbook - I built my desktop in 06, sold it in 09 for $200 bucks cheaper. Doing that with a laptop might be a different matter - I find pretty much all windows laptops to be of shitty quality (except for custom gaming laptops & the old-school thinkpads).
Having a mac on wall street is a no-no.
The MD I worked for one summer used to have a macbook pro, an ipad, and an iMac in his office. Although, to be fair, he wasn't exactly crunching excel or powerpoint. All I ever saw him use the stuff for was iChat and watching world cup streams.
Macs are better for personal use, not professional. Always have been. If you're set on owning one (as I am), get Parallels or Boot Camp and partition it so you can run both OSs. Just don't talk too much about it at the office, people tend to throw shit around about it, i.e. you're somehow a fucking hipster for not owning a PC. False. Hipsters don't own computers, they use the tiny neighborhood library's dial-up connection to get the weekly podcast of music you've never heard of.
love macs, but office on mac is just awful. get boot camp, install windows on your mac and use it for work stuff while having mac os x for personal stuff. best of both worlds. i've had problems with macbooks crashing entire networks (no idea why) so be careful
Try Vmware Fusion. Works great for me.
Those who compare specs and say PCs are cheaper neglect a bunch of things, all of which do have value, whether you like it or not.
1) The OS is different. This is what you truly buy a computer for. What if I told you you could buy a top-of-the-line spec computer but you had to run MS-DOS on it? How much would you be willing to pay for that? If you value the stability and user-friendliness of OSX, you are willing to pay more for it. 2) Quality of components. Even for same spec components, fail rates differ, quality testing differs, construction quality differs, materials differ, etc. Look it up, durability of Macs is generally better. 3) Styling. A mustang is just as fast as a BMW, but the BMW still costs more. How many of you here say people buying BMWs (or other luxury cars) are idiots? I don't know about you guys, but my computer is in my living room. I like that it's beautiful and am willing to pay a little more for that.
I use my Mac for work. I run Windows 7 off Parallels so I can run Microsoft office from there. Having two OS's running at once is great for productivity.
I have a Macbook (as well as an iPhone), but I hate the Mustang/BMW comparison. Macs don't have better components (e.g. both PCs and Macs use Kingston RAM); they just put them together in a nicer way. You're paying for OS X (which I prefer to Windows), for the design, and for the marketing
This.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/files/2010/09/mac01.jpg
I agree that Macs have excellent build quality, and styling. That said, there are too many downsides to using one for work--most importantly, their Office is shit, AND the shortcuts are all fucked up--regardless of whether you're using Office Mac or Windows Office with Bootcamp.
I have nothing against Macs and use one in my personal life. But PCs are a much better bang for your buck and pretty much all industry software is built for them. Imagine using proprietary apps and Excel add-ins on OSX Office or a Bootcamped Mac--who wants to fuck around with that stuff?
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