You need a good amount of power to run MAX, either that or a lot of time on your hands waiting for a render to complete. I don't know anyone running it on a MAC that's happy about it. Rendering even a 1k objects can take hours on a slow PC. You need CPU, memory and a 64 bit OS to make use out of it.
You will also get a lot more support on Windows as all the pros are normally on it. Houdini is a bit more MAC friendly if you like. Head on over to
3d-Palace the owner of that company is about the nicest guy around, "Cris" and he's pretty famous in the 3D world.