Change to Apple $10,000 Budget

[melbournedee]

I know that the OP was looking for a notebook computer, but check out the new 27" imac for $2,200 - the strong AUD certainly has benefits!

 

[Garpal Gumnut]

Just a heads up re metastock 10(i think thats the latest?)...you cannot run it in a virtual environment due to the way it handles its licensing (I found out the hard way, luckily I purchased the monthly data option and not the outright software)

So you would still need another machine to purely run metastock or change to another charting package

My version of metastock is 9.1 and I have an older version somewhere amongst all the software stuff I keep. would that work in a virtual environment?

gg

 

[bellenuit]

I know that the OP was looking for a notebook computer, but check out the new 27" imac for $2,200 - the strong AUD certainly has benefits!

I agree. It would be a super system to have. I moved from XP to an iMac 24" about 6 months ago. I kept my XP system in case some apps required it. I turns out I only needed it for eTax (but then again I don't use Metastock).

I haven't had any problems with the mac and I don't run antivirus software of any sort. It took about 2 weeks to get use to the differences, but now I absolutely love it. I think anyone who spends a month on a mac will never return to Windows. But then I have never used Vista or Windows 7, so they may be far better than XP

 

[Garpal Gumnut]

I know that the OP was looking for a notebook computer, but check out the new 27" imac for $2,200 - the strong AUD certainly has benefits!

It looks quite impressive and I only lug my notebook about the house and verandah, so it may give me better bang for bucks than a notebook.

gg

 

[bellenuit]

It looks quite impressive and I only lug my notebook about the house and verandah, so it may give me better bang for bucks than a notebook.

gg

That was my situation too when I bought my iMac. Just portability around the house. The iMac is a beaut system, the envy of all my friends. The new models come with a new state of the art mouse that leaves the rest for dead. I would suggest you go for the biggest screen (27") if you have the real estate to accommodate it. The older models were 20" and 24" and nearly everyone who bought the smaller model regretted afterwards not getting the bigger.

Particularly if you are getting on. I run my iMac at a lower resolution than the maximum it supports but because of the size of the screen, I still get a huge amount of info on the display. But the bigger characters are so much easier on the eyes, particularly if you are working all day on it. I never have any eye strain.

 

[marklar]

Just a heads up re metastock 10(i think thats the latest?)...you cannot run it in a virtual environment due to the way it handles its licensing

Do you have any details on how this licensing is enforced? There are a few things that might be possible to tune or tweak in the virtual environment to make it run.

m.

 

[It's Snake Pliskin]

GG,
Did you do anything about a Mac?

 

[paulchow2k]

GG,
Did you do anything about a Mac?

Guys,
I love the Mac for it's ease of use. Unfortunately I trade for a living that's where bootcamp 3.x come in. Full native Windows XP for the time being.

All that said and done, I think my next laptop is going to be windows base. After 10+ yrs of using a mac, I'm ready to switch to Windows 7 ONLY for my trading.

If you don't do anything of the above, a mac with virtualization is fine.

Paul

 

[sinner]

Hi GG,

I am currently doing all my trading through a linux box, work as a linux systems admin for University of Melbourne (and previously same job at CSIRO in Sydney) and have been using linux since the age of 15.

IB TWS works fine in Linux/Mac as it runs through java. I understand NinjaTrader runs fine through java on the mac also. Haven't used webIRESS but assuming the same.

There is a commercial version of wine called Crossover which costs <100USD and I use it to run apps like Metatrader4 and some games. It is specifically designed for MS Office and Photoshop users who want to run in Linux. Aside from a few extra font and DLL requirements MT4 works great. I am sure the Mac version of crossover is what you want.

For everything else there is VMware (or its mac specific competitor, Parallels).

Any questions, feel free to ask. My advice is that if you have a $10,000 budget, you might as well buy all the Mac stuff you want as well as an $800 Dell plus a KVM switcher for trading.

 

[newbie trader]

for 10 grand you could probably buy your macbook pro, iphone and an imac (or windows 7 compatible laptop) and still have some change leftover

 

[Sidamo]

For everything else there is VMware (or its mac specific competitor, Parallels).

VMware Fusion is available for Mac. I switched from Parallels last year and think it's better. Although I use it for software dev. work, not for trading, it's pretty easy to set up so that it shares the Mac's net connection, so you should have no trouble with it.