I got some good natured ribbing from friends for being the last Rails developer on Windows Vista, which Bingo Card Creator was built on. Went to Windows 7 with a VM for doing work on Ubuntu. Eventually switched to Mac last year.
My reasons:
+ The iPad was my gateway drug to the iPhone. The iPhone was my gateway drug to the Apple ecosystem. All of the "relearn an OS" cruft I was expecting to hit was greatly, greatly shortened by the experience of being on iOS.
+ Apple is a monoculture in the development communities most of interest to me. Ruby gems would break randomly on Windows due to e.g. using `ls` to get the contents of a directory rather than using any of the stdlib functions. All tutorials start with the assumption you're using homebrew. The final straw for me was when I started needing infrastructure pieces that just wouldn't run on a Windows machine -- Redis was, IIRC, the motivating technology. (MS sponsors a Windows Redis these days. Good call, a few years late. Sorry guys.)
+ I'm no more immune to social pressure than anyone else is, and my peer group was actively mocking me for running Windows since, minimally, five years before I switched.
+ I do a lot of international travel and need a laptop with me. Previously I used "the best Dell makes", generally a Dell Studio, with a big screen and lots of RAM. I affectionately called my Dell "the aircraft carrier", because it was heavy and bulky. My most recent Dell was a replacement for one which, when on a shoulder-mounted laptop bag, swung out an inch too far and caused the power button (side-mounted) to collide with a door frame, breaking it. (I had to turn that machine on by shorting the two wires attached to the power button which now strick from the case!) Every time I got back from the airport I complained bitterly about how heavy the bag was, and was mocked again by friends who ran functionally equivalent computers which seem to weigh about half as much.
+ Might not be relevant to everyone, but highly relevant to me personally: my main development machine also has to play video games. This was a major thing keeping me on Windows, and literally the day before I bought my first Mac, I said "I might get myself a Mac purely for programming, but my main machine has to play games." "Which games?" "Recently, League of Legends and Starcraft 2." "Both are available on Mac." "I'm buying a Mac tomorrow."
+ As Thomas said, every Macbook looks like it has been sculpted out of aluminum. Equivalently powerful PCs are... am I allowed to say ugly? I used a Dell machine made and marketed specifically to artistic professionals -- it's literally called "Studio" -- and even to my very limited standards it seems to lack artistic taste, particularly when it is sitting next to a row full of Macbooks.
Welcome to the fold - though I don't particularly like that you explicitly and repeatedly cite social pressure as a factor of your switch. Teasing someone about their platform of choice strikes me as immature and ultimately irrelevant.
Having spent so much time on the Windows side of things, is there some aspect of that ecosystem that you find yourself missing even after the year or so you've been on a Mac?
Every time I've even considered getting the Windows PC out it has been the direct result of a game on Steam which had no Mac version. None has overcome activation energy.
> Might not be relevant to everyone, but highly relevant to me personally: my main development machine also has to play video games.
This was big for me. I actually could run almost everything I wanted on Linux too, but it wouldn't, well, work. It did on OS X, and as a bonus, OS X has wider support.
My reasons:
+ The iPad was my gateway drug to the iPhone. The iPhone was my gateway drug to the Apple ecosystem. All of the "relearn an OS" cruft I was expecting to hit was greatly, greatly shortened by the experience of being on iOS.
+ Apple is a monoculture in the development communities most of interest to me. Ruby gems would break randomly on Windows due to e.g. using `ls` to get the contents of a directory rather than using any of the stdlib functions. All tutorials start with the assumption you're using homebrew. The final straw for me was when I started needing infrastructure pieces that just wouldn't run on a Windows machine -- Redis was, IIRC, the motivating technology. (MS sponsors a Windows Redis these days. Good call, a few years late. Sorry guys.)
+ I'm no more immune to social pressure than anyone else is, and my peer group was actively mocking me for running Windows since, minimally, five years before I switched.
+ I do a lot of international travel and need a laptop with me. Previously I used "the best Dell makes", generally a Dell Studio, with a big screen and lots of RAM. I affectionately called my Dell "the aircraft carrier", because it was heavy and bulky. My most recent Dell was a replacement for one which, when on a shoulder-mounted laptop bag, swung out an inch too far and caused the power button (side-mounted) to collide with a door frame, breaking it. (I had to turn that machine on by shorting the two wires attached to the power button which now strick from the case!) Every time I got back from the airport I complained bitterly about how heavy the bag was, and was mocked again by friends who ran functionally equivalent computers which seem to weigh about half as much.
+ Might not be relevant to everyone, but highly relevant to me personally: my main development machine also has to play video games. This was a major thing keeping me on Windows, and literally the day before I bought my first Mac, I said "I might get myself a Mac purely for programming, but my main machine has to play games." "Which games?" "Recently, League of Legends and Starcraft 2." "Both are available on Mac." "I'm buying a Mac tomorrow."
+ As Thomas said, every Macbook looks like it has been sculpted out of aluminum. Equivalently powerful PCs are... am I allowed to say ugly? I used a Dell machine made and marketed specifically to artistic professionals -- it's literally called "Studio" -- and even to my very limited standards it seems to lack artistic taste, particularly when it is sitting next to a row full of Macbooks.