It all depends upon what you intend to do with the laptop and how (or
whether) you want to share the data you use on it with the desktop.
Also whether you feel comfortable being conversant in the use of two
different operating systems is a factor.
Apple's iBooks and PowerBooks are excellent laptops. I know several
people who have a Windows desktop system and an iBook or PowerBook
laptop. They switch back and forth between them fluidly. Others I've
worked with are less flexible and don't want to understand or exploit
the differences .. for them, if they need both a laptop and a desktop
computer, it is better to have two running the same OS (either one).
You cannot run software designed and built for Mac OS X on a Windows
system, and you can't run software designed and built for Windows on
a Mac OS X system natively (you can run it in a Window emulation
environment, like Virtual PC). However, for many uses, data files
(like TEXT, Word, Excel, image files, etc) are completely
interchangeable: application software on Mac OS X and Windows will
read and write the same data files, and the data files can be
transferred directly from one to the other without any issues. It is
also the case that many popular application software packages are
available built for either OS platform ... like Photoshop, Microsoft
Office, VueScan, etc.
For hardware peripherals, most are accessible to either operating
system platform nowadays although you should always check with the
hardware vendor to be sure that there are drivers available for the
specific device on the OS you want to use it with. Monitors,
printers, external disk drives, burners, mouse and tablets, etc are
usually interchangeable these days.
Gdofrey
On Oct 22, 2005, at 7:52 AM, cbwaters wrote:
Does it make any sense to have an apple laptop If I've already got
a PC desktop?
I know they used to have totally different requirements for
printers/monitors/and software, what's that like these days?
Reply off-list if you'd rather.
Thanks,
Cory
