My iBook is a slick little machine. Even though it is the low-end of the Mac family it is very impressive. I’ve been playing with the XCode development tools learning Objective-C (interesting language: kind of a C - SmallTalk blend to my eyes). The dev tools are very robust. I’m not a total Mac zealot yet but I can understand why some people are. Aside from the slick interface and easy to use apps the OS is Unix under the hood and so lots of the open source stuff I know and use from my Java work (Eclipse, Subversion, etc) - runs great on the Mac too. Open Office also runs fine on the Mac so I don’t need to spend more $$ to read Office docs. Though I’m not a Unix sysadmin guru - the shell supports all the familiar Unix commands and scripting and there aren’t a bunch of exploits written yet against the Mac so there is less virus/malware worry. I don’t think MS is going to lose all its market share overnight but if I worked in Redmond I’d be worried.

By Doug on 01.13.06 9:52 am