Just a few paragraphs on my experiences of using my first mac. Might be useful for switchers, twitchers, undecided's and OMGIMTOOSCARED....This is personal experience and personal opinion and in no way intended as flamebait or anything else. 
I used Macs years ago in a work setting, upto the release of OS9. I have to say I wasn't impressed with it. Old Mac OS's were hideousy overpriced for their specs, crashed as much as Windows, were slow and sluggish. The office switched to linux and we ditched our remaining Windows PC's and most of our Apple machines (kept one or two on for Photoshop work and Quark).
I've been using Linux at home for 5 years now, and my main box still runs linux. That won't ever change. As someone coming from a linux environment, I was intrigued to see how a proprietary BSD based OS would match up. I have to say OS X matches up very well. More on this later.
So, if I'm happy with linux, why did I buy a Mac?
Well, I needed a high end laptop for work purposes. I needed something small, portable and powerful. I spec'd out the usual assortment of laptops at PC world and wasn't impressed. Most were too chunky, clunky and plain ugly. Most were too big and heavy. Then a freelance dev doing some work for us in the office turned up with his 13" 2.16ghz MacBook. I had a little play, my first time on a Mac since OS9 and was very impressed. I spec'd out the prices and found that, amazingly, Apple were competitive hardware wise on price.
So I bought a 13" 2.16ghz macbook for £800. I love it.
So, whats it like coming from an windows environment?
Well, firstly, OS X is built on UNIX foundations which means its solid and stable - much more than windows is, IMO. I've lost count at how much work I've lost to Windows over the years from random crashes, filesystem corruptions and restarts. OS X is very well integrated and is very responsive. The main stumbling block, I guess, for would-be Windows converters is apps - and I'm guessing again you'll want Office compatiblity.
Well, Neo office has that compatibility and I've used Neo/Open office for years and never had a single issue with exchanging .docs or .xls files with MS Office users. IMO, Neo/Open office is a better package - it automatically recovers files after crashes (which doesn't happen very often anyway) and as a built in PDF converter. And its free.
If you need a DB, use Filemaker - Access is a piece of crap compared to FM. I've lost alot of work in Access through file corruption, and personally I'd not touch it with a barge pole.
If you need photo/page layout apps then the Mac is the place to be anyway. So no issues there.
If you are coming from linux you will find OS X a little stifling. You can't change the gui very much, and you can't change the filemanager (as far as I know, could be wrong on this) - Finder is poor, IMO, compared to some of the Linux filemanagers (I prefer Nautilus or Krusader). Leopard however, looks sweet.
The other downside for linux users is the lack of decent repositories and free software. Hopefully the quality of free apps for the Mac will increase now that it shares common ancestory with linux (shouldn't be too hard to port linux code to BSD), but I do resent having to pay £10 for a decent audio converter when I can have a choice of 20 free ones in the linux repositories But that's just out of habit. Linux does spoil you in that respect.
The great thing about OS X and Linux is the ability to VM windows and windows apps, and I have to say again I have had no problems doing this in either environment. VirtualBox in linux runs Windows flawlessly and its being ported to OSX as well - its free and its superb. Bootcamp/parallels will offer the similiar solutions if you really have to have a windows app. Personally, I've never really needed to - I have found that OS X has more than enough Windows equvalents to keep me happy.
So why switch?
If you want a machine that looks nice, is stable, has eyecandy, and its virus free and superbly integrated, get a Mac. You can still run linux/windows but the quality of OS X will negate the use of Windows anyway.
If you want a fast stable virus free highly configurable fun low cost PC set up, use linux.
If you want a buggy, virus ridden, slow, bloated OS that you feel safe using, stick with Windows.
Overall, I am very very happy I bought a Mac and I'm really looking forward to Leopard. But one thing... multiple desktops - "only in Leopard...." hahaha, that's a little cheeky.
Conclusion: buy a Mac. Have fun. I will certainly be using one for life now. You'll be amazed at just how redundant windows can be.
One last thing to remember: An OS is a tool, not a religion. Use the best tool for the job you need to do.
I used Macs years ago in a work setting, upto the release of OS9. I have to say I wasn't impressed with it. Old Mac OS's were hideousy overpriced for their specs, crashed as much as Windows, were slow and sluggish. The office switched to linux and we ditched our remaining Windows PC's and most of our Apple machines (kept one or two on for Photoshop work and Quark).
I've been using Linux at home for 5 years now, and my main box still runs linux. That won't ever change. As someone coming from a linux environment, I was intrigued to see how a proprietary BSD based OS would match up. I have to say OS X matches up very well. More on this later.
So, if I'm happy with linux, why did I buy a Mac?
Well, I needed a high end laptop for work purposes. I needed something small, portable and powerful. I spec'd out the usual assortment of laptops at PC world and wasn't impressed. Most were too chunky, clunky and plain ugly. Most were too big and heavy. Then a freelance dev doing some work for us in the office turned up with his 13" 2.16ghz MacBook. I had a little play, my first time on a Mac since OS9 and was very impressed. I spec'd out the prices and found that, amazingly, Apple were competitive hardware wise on price.
So I bought a 13" 2.16ghz macbook for £800. I love it.
So, whats it like coming from an windows environment?
Well, firstly, OS X is built on UNIX foundations which means its solid and stable - much more than windows is, IMO. I've lost count at how much work I've lost to Windows over the years from random crashes, filesystem corruptions and restarts. OS X is very well integrated and is very responsive. The main stumbling block, I guess, for would-be Windows converters is apps - and I'm guessing again you'll want Office compatiblity.
Well, Neo office has that compatibility and I've used Neo/Open office for years and never had a single issue with exchanging .docs or .xls files with MS Office users. IMO, Neo/Open office is a better package - it automatically recovers files after crashes (which doesn't happen very often anyway) and as a built in PDF converter. And its free.
If you need a DB, use Filemaker - Access is a piece of crap compared to FM. I've lost alot of work in Access through file corruption, and personally I'd not touch it with a barge pole.
If you need photo/page layout apps then the Mac is the place to be anyway. So no issues there.
If you are coming from linux you will find OS X a little stifling. You can't change the gui very much, and you can't change the filemanager (as far as I know, could be wrong on this) - Finder is poor, IMO, compared to some of the Linux filemanagers (I prefer Nautilus or Krusader). Leopard however, looks sweet.
The other downside for linux users is the lack of decent repositories and free software. Hopefully the quality of free apps for the Mac will increase now that it shares common ancestory with linux (shouldn't be too hard to port linux code to BSD), but I do resent having to pay £10 for a decent audio converter when I can have a choice of 20 free ones in the linux repositories
But that's just out of habit. Linux does spoil you in that respect.The great thing about OS X and Linux is the ability to VM windows and windows apps, and I have to say again I have had no problems doing this in either environment. VirtualBox in linux runs Windows flawlessly and its being ported to OSX as well - its free and its superb. Bootcamp/parallels will offer the similiar solutions if you really have to have a windows app. Personally, I've never really needed to - I have found that OS X has more than enough Windows equvalents to keep me happy.
So why switch?
If you want a machine that looks nice, is stable, has eyecandy, and its virus free and superbly integrated, get a Mac. You can still run linux/windows but the quality of OS X will negate the use of Windows anyway.
If you want a fast stable virus free highly configurable fun low cost PC set up, use linux.
If you want a buggy, virus ridden, slow, bloated OS that you feel safe using, stick with Windows.
Overall, I am very very happy I bought a Mac and I'm really looking forward to Leopard. But one thing... multiple desktops - "only in Leopard...." hahaha, that's a little cheeky.
Conclusion: buy a Mac. Have fun. I will certainly be using one for life now. You'll be amazed at just how redundant windows can be.
One last thing to remember: An OS is a tool, not a religion. Use the best tool for the job you need to do.
