I’m new here please accept my apologies if this is newbie’ish…
My wife is considering changing her habits and starting to use a computer instead of paper She might begin using Rhino5 and the RhinoGold plugin. Would you please recommend the right hardware?
In addition, it is better to use Rhino for windows or for Mac?
How would the performance be impacted if Rhino5 and RhinoGold were running inside a Windows virtual machine hosted on Mac hardware?
Avoid virtual machines. It’s generally not supported. If the Mac version isn’t what you want, then what you can do is to install Rhino on a separate Windows partition on your Mac (I’ve seen people do that, works great).
If this is for someone else, in this case your wife, you might want to ask her what she prefers. I’ve found that people with the best intentions to help that take an ‘administrator/buyer role’ and choose someone else’s computer using their own preferences accidentally end up buying something that is not the preference of the user. Sometimes that’s necessary when you are maintaining multiple machines for many users but this does not seem to be the case.
I can tell you also from experience also that virtualization is a complete waste or time, money and energy. And it provides the absolutely worse user experience ever. That should not be considered as an option at all.
Also consider which platform has more active developement, support, userbase in her industry and 3rd party tools and plugins that would be relevant for her use.
I don’t know were you are based, but here in US she can go to an Apple and Microsoft store (in many cities are close if not next to each other) and try both systems including downloading a Rhino eval and kicking its tires, open some models that come in the samples folder and spinning them around, try the default display modes, hit render and see what happens, etc. If the store demo is not enough, there’s always the option of buying two computers and returning one after 1-2 weeks.