My last laptop purchase was recent enough for it to come with a "Ready for Vista" sticker on it but it wasn't doing it for me. I run Windows on it for my work at the government department that I contract to but I run Ubuntu in a virtual machine on it to do Ruby on Rails development. I tried doing rails just in Windows but wanted to use rmagick and didn't know how to get it working in Windows. All up, this was a fairly clunky arrangement.
Although the real reason that I bought a Mac is that I eventually caved to Apple's insidious marketing tactics. The reasons that I used to justify it to myself and my spouse were:
- It would enhance my Rails development speed. I've got no evidence for this at all but everyone raves about textmate. I've been using Radrails which is pretty slick so I'm very interested to compare. I'll keep you posted.
- Everything just works(tm). I'm sure hoping so. So far it has. I've synched the address book from my phone, imported my photos and my mp3's and generally stumbled around the user interface like an octogenerian at an ATM. It's a strange experience for my fingers to not automatically know what buttons to press to achieve the desired effect.
- All the cool kids in Rails land use Macs and they seem to be pretty productive. People such as Amy Hoy with her excellent cheat sheets and presentations right through to "The David" himself seem to be very happy and productive in this environment. It may have something to do with them not spending heaps of time dealing with OS level issues. Alternatively, I could be a poor workman blaming his tools - I'll let you know.
