Re:Ask HN: Mac or PC for Hacking?
by Someone1234 on Wednesday July 09, 2014 @02:17PM
(#8011330)
I wouldn't do cryptocurrency mining or heavy duty multitasking on a Mac just for cost reasons. If your budget was for example $2K you could buy an entire farm of barebones PCs running Linux to do that heavy lifting for you rather than a single high end i7 Mac (Macbook Pro, Mac Pro, etc).
Macs are fine for normal day to day stuff: coding, web-surfing, development, etc. But per dollar they're terrible at raw throughput.
For pen testing you likely want a laptop, not a tower, since you'll be doing things on-site a lot of the time. But a laptop (any laptop) is the opposite of what you want for raw throughput due to heat dissertation issues.
So I'd likely recommend a really barebones tower with high spec (e.g. unbranded/self-built, i7, high end GPUs, etc) and a laptop (e.g. Thinkpad T series) for the user/pen testing stuff.
Macs are fine for normal day to day stuff: coding, web-surfing, development, etc. But per dollar they're terrible at raw throughput.
For pen testing you likely want a laptop, not a tower, since you'll be doing things on-site a lot of the time. But a laptop (any laptop) is the opposite of what you want for raw throughput due to heat dissertation issues.
So I'd likely recommend a really barebones tower with high spec (e.g. unbranded/self-built, i7, high end GPUs, etc) and a laptop (e.g. Thinkpad T series) for the user/pen testing stuff.