Ive noticed more of my teachers (and other students) doing their math/physics/stats computing on Macs. Im thinking of making the switch...My specific question: does anyone here use a Mac for using c or c++ for math problems? Does anyone use Xcode? Whats its like for scientific computing? What other alternatives to Xcode exist for mac?All of the documentation/reviews etc seem to be for developing iphone apps etc, which is not what Im interested in. Im interested in using it for standard computational math/stats problems. Any thoughts? Experience?Many thanks

Regarding C/C++, same as outrun. Regarding IDE, I like Eclipse. In OSX I use: Matlab, Mathematica, R, ROOT. Also CUDA for MAC is OK, no problem to port the code to other platforms where I have the graphic cards.I do also have parallels to run Windows in virtual machine and it works quite well, but I only use Windows for some electronics development applications (no mac release) or when I want to play with Visual Studio. I am not a big fun of Xcode, but I do a lot of math computing with my mac and I am very happy.

I do not see any great advantage to switching to a Mac for number crunching.The price performance is always lower and the raw performance is usually lower as well.Macs cost more and use the same chips, but almost always a step behind the leading edge.The other important factors are tool and s/w environment.I'm not aware of any significant tools for scientific computing that are Mac-only, so that is not a reason to switch.If you're more comfortable and productive on a Mac, then you might as well stay there, but I don't see any value for a programmer in moving to the Mac.Macs are really rare in banks outside a few laptops and the people who make brochures for the firm, though a couple of people have told me how much they love Apple screens.My favourite "experience" with Apple was being a director of the one firm in the world that Apple least wanted to look incompetent and malevolent towards.We had to buy some Macs for the graphics people.Apple refused to quote for the hardware.When they heard our name, none of their dealers would sign a maintenance contract.Eventually one of our guys found out why. These Macs would be critical to our business, and we were not a firm that Apple could stiff.So they didn't want our business. Amongst the many issues was that Apple made it difficult on purpose to get spares, apparently people were making "unauthorised" upgrades by putting Apple hardware in Apple computers.The only way to stop that was a Kafkaesque process that ensured that it was actually impossible for any hardware support operation, including Apple itself to actually fix machines in the time they promised.We didn't even ask for extra special short fix times, in fact we had not got that far, and were just looking at the standard terms that Apple themselves set, but chose to make it impossible to deliver.

I remember sometime ago I was working for a small Fund manager - the head of IT wanted to move everyone onto a consistent infrastructure. There was one guy that would refuse to migrate from Mac to a PC. He said "Show me one thing that I can do on a PC that I can't do on a Mac". The Head of IT pointed to the right-hand mouse button!

Thanks all for your advice. I found it really hard to find any advice/experiance/reviews for using Macs for anything other than making iphone apps or movies etc. I go to the big mac store in the city, and all the staff are COMPLETELY incompetent and know NOTHING about any mac products or how to use them. Not one person in their big flagship store had ever seen, let alone used Xcode. No joke. Not even someone on their 'genius' bar. The best was when one of the staff opened a unix terminal, and then looked at me like 'TA DA!'. heaps impressed. Are apple staff elsewhere around the world as idiotic? Or did our penal colony get the world's apple dregs...?that said, the screens are very nice, and i like typing on their keyboards.... and thats enough for me...

I know that one of the largely used (in USA) CFD software was ported to Mac OSX. http://aaac.larc.nasa.gov/tsab/tetruss/mac/The software is free if you are in the US (The majority of the software developed at NASA is free for US users).F.

It's not often that I defend Apple, but it would never occur to me to visit a computer store to get advice on software development.Keyboards are a very personal thing, my preference is old style IBM clicky keyboards, I still have an 1980s generation aircraft carrier, with a vast number of function keys and heavier than my laptop.

QuoteOriginally posted by: DominicConnor...Keyboards are a very personal thing, my preference is old style IBM clicky keyboards, I still have an 1980s generation aircraft carrier, with a vast number of function keys and heavier than my laptop.I read that Das Keyboard is a good solution for fans of the IBM clicky keyboard.