I recently bought myself a little Mac iBook through eBay. It was a good deal and I have been feeling for a while that I needed to get across the whole Apple culture.
I am going to try to use the iBook a lot over the next little while. I know that I am going to be less productive than I am on Windows, and I will still use Windows for my development work at IBS, but I will try to set up my iBook for development too so that I can see whether it is really a viable alternative as a development workstation.
My main motivation, however, is that I am seriously considering moving the kids over to Apples next year — I am so sick of all the down-time that I seem to have fixing one problem after another with virii, trojans, adware and other miscellaneous malware. The Apple is not totally immune to that sort of thing of course, but it is a lot less susceptible.
So I am using the iBook for Office applications (I installed MS Office, because I really need seamless compatibility and so will the kids) and I am really impressed with the level of functionality. Honestly, for a user of Office, the Mac versions are better than the Windwows versions. Entourage rocks, and the Notebook feature in Word is very nice — I am continuously finding new uses for it.
I am also reading up about Ruby On Rails, and am in the process of getting it all set up on the iBook.
All in all, the experience has been positive. It has not been painless, but that is because I have a lot of Windows knowledge that I don’t have the equivalent for in the Mac world. In truth, I think it is harder for a techie to swap than a non-techie, and I really think that the next person who asks me for advice on what they should buy might well find that he or she is being pointed to a Mac. At the end of the day, they are going to come back to me for support, so it is in my interest too.
