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Comment by techjuice | Hacker News Reader

You would need to get him a Macbook Pro, you can run Windows on a Macbook Pro using Bootcamp or install it on a VM using one of the many virtualization clients that have some very nice optional integration abilities into OS X.

If he really likes the Macbook Pro, it is best to get him a Macbook Pro, he might become a hybrid fan. Either way with him having a Mac and running OS X he will be able to increase his knowledge base by adding experience overtime with OS X and maybe adding Linux later down the line.

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I've thought about this. Does anyone have experience running Windows as the primary OS on a Mac?

Yes, I mostly run Win8.1 on a rMBP via bootcamp, and have no problems with it (took me a few hours to setup, you'll need a 16GB USB stick and a non-upgrade Windows 8 key to do it). The trackpad support is not as good as in OS X, but still infinitely better than any trackpad I've used on a pure Windows machine.

It is definitely better than my previous Carbon X1. High res is beautiful (though there are many Windows options for that these days).

> The trackpad support is not as good as in OS X, but still infinitely better than any trackpad I've used on a pure Windows machine.

Does it support precise scrolling (per-pixel instead of per-line?) The trackpads in Windows 8 ultrabooks support this, but I've heard that the Windows drivers for the MBP trackpad don't.

No, but the accompanying jitter would not be very usable for what I do (coding mostly). The ultrabook trackpads seem to have more features, just none of them done very well :(

Edit:

There are things you can do to tune scrolling that are quite nice; see http://waded.org/2013/01/15/perfecting-trackpad-scrolling-in...

Yeah, you're right about that. My trackpad has a bunch of features that are so useless, I just leave them switched off. The scrolling is nice though. I've always wondered if I could switch to an MBP for Windows stuff, but if I did, I'd need to keep precise/inertial scrolling. Maybe those Trackpad++ drivers would be best for me.

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