Apple may have shipped 2.5 million Macs in spring thanks to Vista
Sales of Macs have doubled, and the market share of Macs have doubled over the past two years, while other computer makers have mostly, due to the economy, seen declining growth. This analyst says it’s Vista’s fault. There is some truth to this. When I chose to switch, personally, I didn’t like the direction Microsoft was going in, and Linux just wasn’t ready to handle my devices, creative applications, and being especially useful for independent programming for a living. Plus I was curious about the most popular and friendly Unix distribution in the world - OS X. Giving me the benefit of excellent security and stability, and a broad free software base as well as the commercial software advantages of a Mac.
Also, one can run Windows XP (or Vista, if you want to make your computer slower for no reason 
) with Macs since they are now basically the same hardware. This allowed me to continue to use any “niche” applications for Windows XP (Actually, I found I couldn’t replace only one, DVDaf, a Talmud-study program for Windows) that aren’t on Macs if need-be. (The same company makes MP3 DVDs with Gemara shiurim (Talmudic lectures) on them, those could be used with nearly any OS, but no easy point-and-click on a line to re-listen to part of the shiur, or multiple languages of the shiurim, etc. These are serious drawbacks because one can’t ask a computer for clarification when you use it as a review-aid.)
As most people are finding out, getting a Mac means you can say goodbye to Vista, without either keeping hold of an operating system that is no longer being sold with no future (Windows XP), and too poor security and high degree of headaches for today’s internet; or an operating system (Linux) that is not ready for many people’s needs and is for most people (but not me) too hard to use without assistance from a guru.
Of course, Linux (or Solaris or BSD) is excellent for servers and I intend to keep up my skill set in it - though OS X can run nearly all Linux software since it too is a Unix-like, or since Leopard, a certified Unix(r) operating system. It even comes with many popular tools such as Samba, CUPS, and Ruby. (As well as Perl, PHP, Tcl/Tk, and Python, pick your poison. 
(Though, I hear its PHP installation is missing essential parts for PHP programmers, like Pear, so if PHP is your thing, you may want to go with a different Unix-like operating system. This is one of the things Apple needs to fix for OS X server but is irrelevant to typical user needs, and after all, you could run Linux with PHP in a virtual machine for that if need-be just for development in PHP if Apple’s PHP installation doesn’t meet your needs.)
Any mainstream software need, and a lot of special software needs, can be met with an Apple Macintosh, and for those (very) few things that you still need Windows XP for - you can run it at the same time or seperately (you might want to do the latter, using something that comes with OS X Leopard called “Boot Camp”, if you’re a gamer, though VMWare is developing DirectX 9 support for Fusion, which will be a free upgrade for existing Fusion users.)
I am of the opinion that every typical computer user, and even many atypical users like me :-), should seriously consider a Mac. I am not one of those people who am smug about other computer systems, I think that’s silly, and Windows has good points else I wouldn’t be also running it too on my Mac - it has a somewhat broader software library for one, though it isn’t likely that you’ll need anything, or more than a very few programs, to run in anything other than the operating system that Apple makes, leaving you to enjoy safe networking, speedy operation, easy to use and elegant programs, and other benefits of a platform that doesn’t seem to be fighting its own users.
Well, enough rambling. Make sure to check out a Mac at your local Apple store or the like if you want to see the future of computing. Even if Microsoft manages to get out of its rut, or Linux becomes easy to use, you’ll see a lot of its features in the next ititeration of other operating systems…
