Im not trying to start an argument at all, I hope it dosent come off like that in my thread. Im just trying to figure out what would work for me for school and I wanted to get the opinions of people who have been using Maya longer than I have. Ive only been using Maya for about a couple of months.

I was under the impression that Maya 8.5 was a newer version than 2008. The problem I have had with Maya on my Mac is that the maya vector will only work if I open it in Rosetta which causes the renderer not to work. So for anything vector I would have to save it frame by frame instead of a batch render.

Ive been reading about the trouble people are having with Maya 2010 on a Mac with compatibility issues and it working properly. I have to get the 2010 version because my license will end soon and I can no longer get 2008 at the student store. For the same price to get Maya 2010 they are offering Maya with 3ds Max 2010 for the pc student version thats another reason why I was considering it.
I also have a PC and was thinking about installing Maya on both computers so I could render scenes a lot quicker because Ive noticed scenes with a lot of detail take a very long time to render out.

I just wanted to see what other Maya users suggested.