Certainly, it is human nature to believe that what we are using now is the best. As humans we have an intense desire to be right. We want to justify the time, money and energy already spent on our choice.
To help you neutralize the Mac vs. PC prejudice, consider two things. One, it’s all just computers. And secondly, the marketplace needs competition. Without competition there would be no need for any vendor to improve its products. Further, legally corporations are bound to maximize their profits for their shareholders. Without competition our digital life would be much more expensive.
There was more good news. In the computing ecosphere competition has driven price and performance to heights where the real winner is us as users and consumers, regardless of what platform we are using.
The best choice in virtualization on Mac vs. PC is very much like buying a pair of shoes. The best choice first comes down to selecting the right shoe size. From there, considering purpose. A properly sized dress shoe will be useless for going out fishing. Only after those two considerations have been addressed can one intelligently look at price and brand.
There is one final consideration, and that is quality vs. price. Traditional thinking says by a quality product that will last. On the surface, this makes a lot of sense. And yet it is not always the correct answer. A case in point would be power tools. Let’s look at this market segment for an important learning point.
It used to be that power tools were expensive and lasted seemingly forever and a day. A tool manufacturer known as Black & Decker did some market research. They discovered the average homeowner would buy a variety of power tools for projects around the house. Yet the utilization of the power tool in question typically only got about 25 hours of use.
This gave them the insight to manufacture power tools with motors that were much lighter in weight and designed for considerably less operational life. Of course, this afforded them much lower manufacturing costs. In addition to this, the end-user was able to purchase a power tool at a lower price with considerably less weight.
Going back to the dress shoe analogy, a person that only occasionally goes out to a formal event will find it more cost-effective to purchase a good-looking dress shoe that will not last more than a dozen evenings. These examples relate well to the consideration of virtualization in OS X vs. Windows (or for that matter Linux/UNIX).
Which is the best can be answered rather easily. When one gives a serious and unbiased consideration the following factors.
What is my endgame in virtualization?
If you are new to the concept of virtualization. There is no getting around the fact you are going to have to make an investment of your time to learn it. Regardless of your OS choice you do not have to spend money. If you are in this camp. Two good choices are VMware player and/or VirtualBox. While both are free, there is a distinct separation between the two offerings.
VMware player is free and proprietary. While VirtualBox is free and open source. The former comes from EMC, while the latter is offered by Oracle. Both are big-name players with aggressive support and updates.
While both support Windows, Microsoft has its own Hyper V offering that is free as well. This has found itself embedded in the upcoming Windows 8. Being as it comes with this virtualization offering as part of the installation, it is the easiest choice to get started with since it is already there.
A quick sidebar on Windows 8. While the smart money is saying it will not be available as a final product until the end of 2012 or early 2013 what Redmond is doing is becoming pretty clear. In simple terms, Microsoft is going through all the subsystems and putting them on a diet.
They have reached their goal of running on as little as a 1 GHz processor with 1 GB of RAM. And doing this while keeping all the functionality of a Windows 7 desktop OS. Programs that run on Windows 7, with few exceptions as of now operate perfectly.
Given this, playing with virtualization means you need a relatively small amount of resources even if you are virtualizing on a host OS that is not from Redmond.
