I grew up using Windows. At school, they taught us how to use Windows. At home, my parents always bought Windows computers. My parents started buying me my own laptops when I was in the 6th grade--all PCs that ran Windows. My first one was a Compaq and that one lasted two years. The second one was a Dell and that one also lasted two years. The third one was an HP and that one lasted four years.
All my PCs tended to end up having the same problems. They'd get viruses and sometimes the situation got so bad that I'd have to go weeks without using my computer because it was such a headache. A couple of times, I got this annoying virus or trojan or whatever it was that slowed my computer to the extreme, and every time I opened up Internet Explorer, I would be bombarded with at least fifty different popups (and they each took FOREVER to load and were just as slow to close). My chargers would always burn out, and I'd have to do that annoying thing where I'd need to keep the cable and the computer in a reaaaally precise position so that it could actually charge, and then it cost me a ton of money to replace. Oh, and the worst was when my computer would randomly shut down. I can't tell you how many times that ruined a project I was working on. I'd have to obsessively save whatever I was doing out of paranoia that the computer was going to shut down and everything would go unsaved.
I'd owned two iPod nanos before, and I liked them but they still didn't make me pay attention to Apple. Then three years ago, I got my first iPhone and I totally fell in love with the product. It was the most awesome electronic I'd ever owned (and I've owned a lot of different cell phones over the years).
At that point I was already in college, and basically 99.9% of the people around me owned MBPs (I go to art school, so the rate of Apple owners is probably way higher here than at other schools). In my freshman year, I was basically the only person (that I saw) having a non-Apple PC.
By then, my own laptop was dying a slow death. I'd had it for almost 4 years and it was ridden with a whole bunch of viruses, and the program I had to battle them never succeeded in getting rid of them all, and to top it all off it just slowed my computer down A LOT. It was also doing that randomly-shutting-off thing.
I decided I needed a new computer and I was planning on still going with a Windows PC. I'd been asking all of the people around me if MBPs were good, and I'd only heard positive things. A lot of the people I was asking were "switchers" too. Still, I was afraid to dump Microsoft, because they were all that I knew. Part of me really WANTED to switch, but I was hesitant to do it. In the end, I decided to take the plunge because everyone around me told me that they had absolutely no problems with viruses. That was what sealed the deal with me in the end. And since I loved my iPhone so much, I trusted that Apple's other products would be good too.
So I've had my MBP for almost two years now, and it still works as if I'd just bought it yesterday. I seriously love it and have no regrets.
Edit: A big part of my switching also had to do with the realization that the problems I'd been having with my other PCs didn't happen as much on Macs. I just took it as a fact of life that all that crap happened to every computer after a while. But after hearing from other MBP owners that their computers had never had any of those issues, it was a big eye-opener for me. The most common problem I hear that people have with Macs is that they wish they had more memory. But for me, I'd rather have issues with space than all the other headaches that come with viruses and with poorly-built computers.
