I don't know what makes a Mac a Mac, but right now I'm running Windows on mine.

When I got my first ThinkPad in 1998, I fell in love with it - the way people fall in love with their Apple devices! - and swore I'd never buy another brand of computer.

Of course, later I got into cross-platform web development and needed a Mac, so I bought the cheapest Mac Mini I could find and upgraded it to a decent amount of RAM - a whopping 2GB!

Had to get special tools to take it apart - a pair of putty knives! - and unbend the bendy circuit board to get the RAM in, but it worked. I could still develop on the ThinkPad and test websites for Mac compatibility on the Mini.

I stuck with ThinkPads for some time, ending up with a W520, while keeping the old Mini around for testing.

Finally this got a little long in the tooth: the 32-bit Mini wouldn't run any recent version of Chrome any more. And after Lenovo bought the ThinkPad line, they decided not to make real ThinkPads any more. Instead it seemed they wanted to make MacBooks dressed in ThinkPad garb.

So for my next upgrade I bought a maxed-out MacBook Pro, installed Parallels and a Windows virtual machine. This was great! Now I had both OSX and Windows at my fingertips on one machine. Anyone who asked, I told them that a Parallels VM was a much better setup than Boot Camp.

Then I started doing VR development, mostly on Windows, so I ended up doing that on the W520 and other stuff on the Mac.

Of course, eventually Oculus stopped supporting the Optimus GPU switching on the W520 (even if you disable it!), and I started booting the Mac into a Windows 8.1 (and later Windows 10) Boot Camp partition. It's not the optimum VR machine, but for the particular part of VR I work on - not the fancy 3D graphics but more of the systems-level integration - it works fine.

And now the funny thing is that I noticed I haven't booted into OSX in a couple of weeks. Been pretty much using the Mac as a Windows machine. Even when I'm working on stuff where that beautiful combined OSX+Windows VM setup would let me use both OSes simultaneously.

That's because something has gone very sour in my OSX installation. I think it may be largely a Chrome problem, but I'm not sure. If I run Chrome and my Windows VM at the same time, things can get very slow. Often everything slows down by a factor of 10! Even if I just run one or the other of those.

So I don't know what's wrong. It's a lot like the thing people used to complain about with Windows - "you'd better plan on doing a clean install every few months so your system doesn't slow down to a crawl."

Meanwhile, my Boot Camp Windows 10 partition is running hummingly. And I can do native Windows VR development.

Now here's what pisses me off. (I'm not one to swear, so that is strong language for me.) I've got this nice running Windows 10 installation, and I would love to be able to run OSX side-by-side with it in a VM.

But Apple doesn't let you do that. OSX is so precious that you can only run it on the bare hardware, or in a VM that runs under an OSX physical boot. You can't run an OSX VM under a physical Windows 10 boot.

And for a VR developer like me, that really sucks.

Maybe I'll go back to a ThinkPad and see if there's a current Hackintosh build that runs in a VM.