#1 No virus/spyware worries. #2 One vendor solution (OS/HW) no fingerpointing. #3 Powerful Unix operating system, so you can run and compile custom software. #4 Lots of powerful Unix tools. #5 Trading software runs on it fast. #6 No AV needed which means no I/O overhead. #7 Lots of trader friendly features such as Spaces,Expose,etc.. and you can customize lots of keyboard functions. #8 Workstation class hardware (Mac Pro + Apple widescreens) with ECC memory, Server class hardware to insure high reliability and security of data in memory from soft corruption. #9 The OS gets out of your way and lets you do your work fast with no bloatware or overhead like you do with Vista etc.. #10 Powerful built in backup, Time machine which always insure you have a copy on a second drive. #11 easy to swap drives, tool less case, rock solid operating system. #12 OpenCL and GCD is gonna open up even more power for advanced modeling. Just a few reasons why we swapped out to 8 mac pro workstations in 2006.
KINGOFSHORTS, What trading software are you running on your Mac workstations ?. TradeStation, MB Trading , Tera Nova or IB ? Non of these software platforms will work on a Mac, without VMWare or Parellel. Am I wrong ? I am seriously looking at a 24'' 3.06 GHz 4GB of memory imac. Or may be Macbook Pro. Any suggestions ?.
I use investor RT on my macs and it rocks. Current v 10.0 in beta has direct trading integration to IB
King: I'm still running windows on a Dell workstation for now. But earlier this yearI bought a MacBook Pro. I'm using it with an aircard as a backup machine for now, amongst other things. I like the Apple system. Wondering whether you upgraded to Snow Leopard? If you did, have you noted any software with incompatibilities, such as IB TWS? I have not installed Snow Leopard as of yet. Also wondering what charting software you're using? OldTrader
If only there was some decent charting program for it, QuoteTracker running natively on a Mac would be excellent.
As I said earlier, I run Investor RT on my Macs and there's no limit to the charting possibilities. No, I havent installed Snow Leopard yet, will give it a few months I think J
Windows 7 is said to put a wintel box on a par with a MAC, and that from Leo Laporte. For trading I put a Vista Intel machine behind a white listing firewall and allow only a few url's.. that eliminates the need for any anti virus or anti anything at all, including microsoft upgrades, they aren't in the white list... only the Ninjatrader license check and IB are allowed through the firewall and I'm looking to replace Ninja with something that doesn't phone home... it all runs flawlessly 24/7.. Win7 is modular so that you can strip out the bloatware for your trading machine.. I'll get a MAC next time around for general purpose but probably not for the trading machine...
I couldn't get Snow Leapord to run on my mac. I had to settle with running their popular Dog Shit OS.