The Best Of Both Worlds!
click for enlargement

I know this is a pretty strong statement (and my friends Rick, Don and I civilliy discuss ;-) this issue often - see here!), so I'll give you my personal computer story, and you can make your own conclusions!

January 10, 2003 - The screenshot you see above is of my 15" PowerBookG4 desktop, showing Apple's new 17" ultimate PowerBook in the upper left, and in the lower right, you can see me running Timbuktu to remotely control a Win2K (at 800x600 resolution) pc on my LAN (there are times a PC can be useful!)...

My first personal computer experience was the Atari 800, a sibling to the Atari game consoles, but with a full keyboard, with an optional cassette recorder for storing programs. I wrote some pretty kewl Basic programs and actually used it with home-built hardware for 2 pre-graduate assignments at RIT.

While in school there, I had worked as a co-op student for Xerox, where the Alto systems and a "desktop user interface" was born.

In 1984, Apple Computer came out with the first Macintosh, with a whopping 128K of RAM and a floppy disk drive for programs (no hard drive).  I bought one, and became a Mac software developer.

At that time, PCs were all running DOS, which you now know as the windows "command prompt". It would be many, many years before Windows would be born.

Macs sold like crazy ... they became the computer for the rest of us, and pioneered the desktop publishing revolution with software like Adobe PageMaker and PhotoShop. 

They came with MacWrite and MacDraw, the first WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) mass market applications.  Meanwhile PC users were using WordPerfect, where to make a word bold, you typed in something like:

That's what you saw on-screen. Until you printed your document, you had no idea what it would really look like, you were just guessing.

Fast forward to about 1995 ... The Mac now had full color displays with millions of colors, supported multiple monitors, and you could view 2 full pages of a magazine layout on screen, exactly (or very close) to how it would look when printed.

The wonderful thing about the Mac was that things just worked. Need a modem, plug it in, need a network printer? The Mac had networking built in from 1984!

After 10+ years of being both a Mac user and Mac developer, my brother and I ended up working for a company that was PC and DOS-based, and we had to give up our Macs for compatibility with their extensive PC-based systems.

We were both provided Dell Pentium 90 systems and Windows For Workgroups (version 3.11 I believe). The Macintosh had sound built-in since 1984, so imagine my surprise that PCs didn't come with a sound card, or a modem!

We were working from our home offices, and I needed to be able to dial out to access machines and equipment for development.

Not being "pc hardware literate", I asked the company tech support folks, who were more than a bit "challenged" (to put it nicely!), for advice.  A few days later, I was the proud new owner of an industry standard US Robotics internal modem card!  Little did I know of what was to come!

I have done more than my share of hardware work, carefully followed all the instructions, jumper settings, etc. (which you never had to do with Mac hardware), installed the card and driver software, did a simple test, and it worked!  I was pretty proud of myself!

It's been so long that I can't remember the details, but I spent the next 38 hours straight! trying to get it to work right!  As I recall, it was an incompatibility with my video card driver (what's that?), my printer driver, and the internal modem.

I ended up removing it and getting an external serial port modem, but I learned my first PC lesson:  Patience is a Virtue!

Over the next 5-6 years, I learned that lesson again and again and again with PCs and Windows.

I had become "spoiled" by ease of use and things just working on the Mac, and I learned that in the PC and Windows world, learn to be patient, and expect things not to work! That way if they do happen to work, you're pleasantly surprised!

In all fairness, Windows has come a long, long way since that time, but I am still dealing with problems and issues even when using fairly current software (Windows 2000 professional), and a 2 year old Hewlett Packard (a name brand) Pavilion.

I upgraded it from Windows 98 to Windows 2000, recently ran Windows Update to be sure I had all the "latest" stuff, and just discovered Windows has disabled my multimedia (sound, modem, game port, etc.) card that is built into the system.

Now I will have to spend hours hours trying to solve that problem if I want to hear anything, let alone use it to burn CDs or play DVDs. Since I now only use it as a server, and since all my Macs still just work, it's not a real big deal, but I was hoping I might be able to run X-Plane on it using my old (but expensive) flight yoke and rudder pedals.

So without further ado, here are my personal reasons to Get a Mac - you won't be sorry!

1. Macs Just Work!
   
   
2. Macs Don't Get In Your Way! - they help you get done what you want to get done.
   
   
3. Macs are Much More Fun to use ... Not necessarily in a "gaming" sense at all, tho there are awsome games for the Mac, but they are just a pleasure to use!
   
   
4. Macs are Kewl! ... They are like the Porcshe of personal computers ... they have style, beauty, functionality, and charm. They make personal computers personal! (unlike any others that I've ever used).
   
   
5. Macs Do Windows .... Using some software called Virtual PC, your Mac can emulate a regular PC, and run DOS, Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, or even Linux. Not that you'd want to all the time as it's much slower than a real PC, but when you need to do Windows, the Mac is there for your! On my 800 mhz powerbook G4, Windows 2000 runs faster than it does on a 200 mhz Pentium 2 system I have.
   
   If you're a software developer like me, or you have your own home local area network, your Mac can connect to your Windows system(s) right out of the box. No special software, hardware, or drivers, just tell your Mac to connect!
   
   

I certainly have many, many more reasons than this and will add them when I get some more time, but I need to get onto some other things.

You should review Apple's reasons as well to make your own decision, but IMHO, you really can't go wrong with a Mac!