General - Tuesday, July 15, 2008 16:16 - 0 Comments

Could there be a MAC revolution?

With all the hype these days you have to start to ask yourself, maybe there is some merit is having at least one Mac around to see how they work. I do a lot of .NET development and research and even though I use VMWare a lot I’m not sure I want my host being non-windows, anyway -

A little while ago I purchased an AppleTV and was very impressed by the quality of the product but more importantly how stable and easy to use the software was. Now I have another Apple product, my iPhone and I’m just as impressed. By the way if you have kids you need the Apple TV - rip all your kid’s DVDs to it and it makes being a parent that much easier.

Now we all know that Vista isn’t perfect but if I’m starting to seriously look at a Mac then there must be a lot of developers like me who have already started using one. It would be great to get your views on what this transition looked like for you. So why do I call this post a potential “revolution” ? The current market share is roughly 8% vs 90% for MacOS to Windows.

I think because the adoption is reaching critical mass, meaning that there are now enough people using them who love them that they persuade others around them to get one too and so on. After this last week and probably due to the hype around the iPhone, I was bombarded by people asking if I was switching over or trying to get me to at least get one. If I do start using one then I can guarantee I will convince a bunch of people to follow my lead and so at some point it just cascades … however PCs in the enterprise is still a big hurdle for Apple.

Right now I’d say the only thing stopping this from exploding into a buy frenzy is the price barrier. You can build a really great machine for $1.5k-$2k (PC that is) but if you want a meaty dev machine such as the G5 you’re closer to $5k. In most cases it appears that the costs are around 2.5-3x that of normal PCs and for me, right now - that is a little too high. This isn’t proprietary hardware anymore, I’m sure it is good but I don’t think its that good.

What I’ll probably end up doing is getting a regular Macbook for general home use just to see how it works out. If things go well maybe a Macbook Pro but nothing on the G series for some time yet. Still … 8 cores and it looks good too :)

A question for Mac developers out there - how do you find the keyboard? or do you just use a regular PC keyboard (via USB)?