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Change to Apple $10,000 Budget

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Garpal Gumnut

Ross Island Hotel
Joined
2 January 2006
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I'm thinking of changing to Apple.

I've budgeted $10,000.

I'd like to get an Apple Iphone, a 17 inch Macbook pro laptop and MS Office Word, excel etc.

I realise I may not be able to use Metastock and will probably have to get data for another charting programme or maybe just chart online.

My main needs are

Data,
News,
Internet Browsing
Charting

I get more phone calls than I ever make. But I message quite a bit.

May I ask anybody who has made the change from MS to Apple , and who trades/invests, to advise on what they use, and how they use it.

gg
 
wayneL said:
The devil has all the goodies as far as trading is concerned, it's not just metastock... unfortunately.
Click to expand...

Thanks mate, so I've been googling.

Its the only thing thats stopping me from switching.

gg
 
You do know that Macs are PCs with a custom version of Linux on it right?

I think it comes with a "virtual machine" capability, which lets you run PC software on the Mac. If it doesn't come with it, you can certainly add it on after.
 
Ah so.

You run a virtual MS on your Apple.

And use your MS applications like metastock .

Am I correct?

Can you run Linux in parallel?

gg
 
Apple products are well marketed cr@p. At least its well marketed, as opposed to just cr@p
 
The real benefits of an Apple computer is that MOST of the time (unless your wanting to upgrade your Mac Pro) all the hardware straight out of the box runs flawless with the operating system.

No need to mess around with drivers, updating here and there. It just works..never had leopard/snow leopard crash on me....where as I've had windows XP, Vista and 7 all crash numerous times...

When I upgrade my trading setup im planning to get a Mac Pro (tower) and run bootcamp for ninja trader and IB (even tho mac has a native java IB client)

Once trading has finished, everything else will be run through snow leopard...

I may also try running ninja through a virtual machine on one screen and run everything else through snow leopard on my other 2 screens...this shouldnt be a problem with a quad core with 8gb+ ram but you may find with the macbook pro it may struggle a bit under heavy load running both virtualware and snowleopard.

When it comes to dedicated apple charting packages, the range is limited. The main one I know is proTA (which is rubbish imo) which means we are forced to run windows somehow.
 
Sunder said:
You do know that Macs are PCs with a custom version of Linux on it right?

I think it comes with a "virtual machine" capability, which lets you run PC software on the Mac. If it doesn't come with it, you can certainly add it on after.
Click to expand...

Unix I believe.

Garpal Gumnut said:
Ah so.

You run a virtual MS on your Apple.

And use your MS applications like metastock .

Am I correct?

Can you run Linux in parallel?

gg
Click to expand...

You can run virtual MS on a Mac using VMWare and Parallels (there are probably others):

http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

You can also run virtual Linux on a Mac.

You need separate copies of the Windows software (and operating system) to run them on a Mac which makes it expensive though.

You can also use Apple's own Bootcamp to run Windows software, but a restart is necessary to switch between OS's.
 
I MAY get an Apple next laptop upgrade, just to see what all the fuss is about.

I've not tested it myself, but these days virtualisation makes almost anything designed to run in Windows run on a MAC. I would think this is no problem with charting packages as they don't strike me as the kind of apps that are likely to do anything "naughty" or extreme that the virtualisation layer couldn't handle.
 
Most trading programs don't know what they are running, the are looking at data streams in ASCII, csv, text etc 90% of the time. They all run fine in virtual or under Bootcamp. None of them are processor or graphics intensive

Even if they where, most windows apps run faster on a macbook pro than on a any vista machine.
I have FCharts Pro running under darwine just fine & I've seen Amibroker running the same way.

Macs just work, all except safari which sucks a$$...

My windows boxes freeze and crash all the time the mac never does.
Even on a macbook pro running virtual I cant see you struggling to run that and any other programs on a dual screen setup, unless you are running Autocad or something equally as massive & processor intensive at the same time.
 
I just checked the exchange rate, you could fly to the states buy a macbook pro fully loaded add a 30 inch screen buy windows and still have change for a weeks holiday from 10 grand. Damn exchange rate was 72 cents when i was there last december
 
The kernel is based on Mach and much of the userland stuff is from FreeBSD or NetBSD. OSX v10.5 gained UNIX certification.

There is no relationship to Linux, the GNU license that is fundamental to Linux's success (and failure) would have prevented them from considering it as the basis for a new commercial operating system.

Back on topic:
I've been 'switched' to Apple for 6 years now, only have a couple of things running in XP using VMWare Fusion because they don't have an equivalent OSX product. With the fast Intel Core 2 processors these days and enough RAM I can barely notice the extra overhead of running stuff in a VM.

m.
 
Its sad that Apple has become the closed shop that it is and Windows supports the majority of Apple.

Like I say to everyone else if you want thigns to work out of the box, are happy with just doing the basics and can live with less for your buck (in terms of power) go for Apple. Apple is not a rejigged Linux, it's a refactored BSD (another Unix variant) with just enough propertioary API's to make it hard to run Apple's programs on Linux (which should technically be possible to do).

Windows is quite stable as a kernel. The problem is normally kernel mode drivers (i.e third party driver software). The ironic thing is this is Windows' strength. I like the fact that I can customise the hardware and configuration on my computer. I don't see games, big rendering software, servers and such running on Apple yet. Nor do I see fancy trading setups running on it yet either. Customisation is the strength of the pc at the expense of some stability (Microsoft do not control all the code running on your machine).
 

Hi GG,

I only use my iMac to run IB's platform and it works a treat, i also use webiress on it but it's a tad buggy, i don't do anything else with my Mac so i can't comment too much.

I was just wondering why you're thinking of switching ? From what i can gather you use quite a bit of tech analysis but the good packages seem to cater for PC only.
 
GG, I don't see where you have said why you want to switch? Do you already have a laptop, and did you buy it for mobility?
 
Vizion said:
I just checked the exchange rate, you could fly to the states buy a macbook pro fully loaded add a 30 inch screen buy windows and still have change for a weeks holiday from 10 grand. Damn exchange rate was 72 cents when i was there last december
Click to expand...

So what sort of duty would I be looking at paying on the way back in. Or if I ordered it over the net do I have to pay gst. I could look it up but thought someone might know off the top of their head. I think there may be problems with the voltage as well that can fry the innards.


Thanks mate, that is good info.


I'm switching basically from very little , a dell insp lap top and metastock with a comsec account , but am studying, testing oppies and forex, and want to upgrade my internet connection etc.so that I don't get cut off during a trade.

So basically going from nothing and I've been to the Apple Shop in Sydney 3 or four times this year and just "like" the Apple. I tend to be a educated idiot with IT, have had computers for over 20 years, all PC, experiment with linux ubuntu on an old notebook

I'm also considering ditching metastock next financial year as I just use simple charts, nothing fancy fib retracements , support/resistance, long to medium to short, I don't actually do many explorations anymore, so I'm a chartist rather than a technical analyst.

gg


Thanks all else for comments and advice.

Any more ideas would be welcome.

gg
 
Hi GG,

I gotcha,

For my charting needs comsec's webiress is all i need for the oz market, candlesticks/volume/MACD just for laughs, nothing fancy, i just get a visual on support/resistance. The only gripe i have with iress is right click doesn't launch an order pad and i can't change the layout but i do most of my executions through through IB anyhow.

Actually i was just at the local shop sizing up a macbook pro 13", i'm tossing up between that and iPhone for my away from home needs.

Anyone here used TWS for iPhone yet ?

BTW GG, i notice you're looking at options, i still use a windows laptop to drive the options profiler required to keep abreast of things.
 
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