Boot Camp vs. Parallels vs. etc.

[mhschmieder]

I don't yet own an Intel Mac (I have a lowly 700 MHz G4 iMac), so none of this is from my own experience, but I thought I would share some of what I learned at Winter NAMM after a lot of shop talk with folks at various hi-tech companies regarding Intel Macs.

Most of the specs and measurements we see are in the context of average users doing word processing and email or whatever. I'm not sure if anyone has actually yet published a study in the context of DAW's and audio.

Boot Camp seems to be much preferred for DAW's and audio apps, as Parallels suffers huge performance drops in this context since it is essentially an emulation mode vs. a bootup mode.

Many vendors also told me that the Intel Macs make for the best performance and the most trustworthy stability when running Windows XP, vs. non-Apple hardware solutions for the Windows crowd.

As all of this runs contrary to what I had been reading in the trades, I thought I would open it up for discussion here, and see what people's personal experiences have been, and/or whether anyone knows of a neutral study that has been done that takes into account the more extreme needs of DAW's and audio apps in general vs. "typical" home computer apps.