MAC OS X - the best

I'm a recent switcher too -- for home use. I bought last summer, with Tiger. I upgraded immediately to Leopard and now, especially with the latest upgrade 10.5.2, I find Leopard a strong improvement over Tiger.

If you can use an external hard-drive with your iMac in the Office, the upgrade is worth it for TimeMachine. Spotlight, for my use, is vastly improved. Secondary tweaks to features like Dashboard, the desktop images and screen savers, and Stacks (post 10.5.2) provide small but welcome boosts to the pleasures of OS X.

If you use iLife or iWork, they also have Leopard-specific features.

It's worth paying the $129 out of pocket. If your office is going to pay for on a work machine, you should upgrade immediately. 🙂 And buy a 500 GB external drive for TimeMachine.

I switched last month after being a PC user all of my life, and let me tell you, it sure is a nice change! I frequently found myself becoming angry with my Windows machine (which by no means was no slouch in terms of specifications) but with my MacBook Pro I've yet to even so much as get flustered with it. I've had a really good experience with it.

I've dabbled with Panther (OS X 10.3) and Tiger (OS X 10.4) for a little bit in the past but I never really got the chance to sit down and enjoy it for any period of time. I've noticed that Leopard is a very good change and a big step forward as far as usability and making things that much more easier for switchers coming from the Windows camp, everything is so much more intuitive, and I find that I need a lot less software to get things done because the Mac comes with most of the applications that I need, and iLife really helps that much more while having fun.

I don't miss anything from the Windows side of computing -- I have Adium for my instant messaging which is a better solution that Microsoft's Messenger client (Windows Live Messenger), TextWrangler is an amazing text editor with more features than I know what to do with, VLC handles all of my videos, and the only two things I paid for on the Mac: iWork '08 (which handles all of my word processing and spreadsheet needs with ease and elegance) and Pixelmator (which allows me to open dozens of file types including Adobe's PSD format, and is a very powerful image editor) were more than worth it -- $79.95 and $62, respectively. You don't see these kinds of bargains (bang for buck ratio comes into play here) on the Windows side of things, where Microsoft Office can cost $199 to $800 (depending on the suite), Adobe Photoshop sits somewhere between $500 and $1300, and the Windows Vista operating system sits at $499 for the Ultimate version, whereas Mac OS X Leopard is available for $129 and includes every feature.

Those are just some of the reason I love being on the Mac side of the fence, everything is just so well thought out and everything 'just works'. I'm sure there are a lot more reasons, it all depends on the person. But I really do believe in the phrase "Once you go Mac, you'll never go back".

Note: Keep in mind that a lot of complaints that you see on any internet forum don't really reflect the user experience overall. My general rule of thumb is this: for every 1 complaint, there are 30 to 50 people that don't have any problems, and you usually don't hear from those 30 to 50 people on internet forums.