Did you see last night's episode of Mythbusters? Adam and Jamie bought a Mac Mini to see if it really would give their van an extra 20 miles per gallon, enhance their sex lives, and cause $100 bills to fall from the sky. MYTH BUSTED!
Seriously though, I use WinXP and Mac OS X on a daily basis. My servers run Linux and Solaris. I used to work with AIX, SGI, and NeXT systems. You know what? They're all really competitive. Seriously. Each has it's pros and each has it's cons.
I love Mac OS X, but I also love WinXP. I've used Final Cut Pro and I've used Premiere Pro. I've used the iLife suite and I've used the Ulead Video Studio. It's all good, man, it's all good.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I use my PowerBook for software development, unix apps (command-line and X11 gui), Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, lots and lots of tasks. In nearly three years I've only had two crashes: once when I was playing the demo of Halo, and once when I was manually "tweaking" the DHCP server via command line while using my PowerBook as a cable modem -> 802.11g router for about 5 other users. Do you know how many times WinXP has crashed on me in 4 years? Less than 5 times. I don't remember exactly, but, like the Mac, WinXP crashes on me so rarely that it's not even a problem.
I'm not really sure where all of the iLife bashing comes from. iLife is one reason why I use my PowerBook so much. GarageBand is probably the most complex app in the suite, it's a really nice music composer/editor that you're not going to find anywhere else for less than $50. It even works with USB and MIDI (via USB adapter, of course) keyboards. I'm not a musician, but I've seen and played many of the awesome GarageBand compositions out there, including Trent Reznor's "Hand that feeds". Sweet stuff. iMovie gets a lot of use from me as it's simply a nice video editor for when I need to juggle a bunch of DV clips from my camcorder and only want to use basic transitions, titles, and effects. Ulead has similar video editing features, iMovie is nothing spectacular, but it works nice and fast on my old PowerBook G4. I really like iDVD as it has allowed me to make some really nice looking DVD menus in literally 3 minutes. Its MPEG 2 encoder isn't the best, but it's not too slow and the quality is great for my 32" TV and my MiniDV camcorder footage. Looks just as good as when I plug the camcorder directly into the TV for playback. iPhoto gets the most use of any iLife app for me, I sync my camera to it at least once a week and have thousands of my digital photos on there. The newer versions of iPhoto (2005 and 2006) finally do about 90% of the photo editing I need... resize/crop/color/redeye/etc and the new fullscreen Aperture-like interface is sure a nice addition. Finally, there's iTunes, which I don't use much because I'm oldschool and prefer the radio, but everyone knows about iTunes anyway.
So let me wrap up my long winded iLife blab by saying that my favorite "feature" of iTunes is how each app is able to access the various files stored in all of the other apps. iMovie can export a movie straight to iDVD.... iMovie and iDVD both have instant access to the music stored in iTunes and the photos in iPhoto, etc etc etc. Yes, any monkey can use the "Open" and "Save" features of other applications, but this simple intergration allows me to sit down, grab some photos/videos/music, design a quick DVD menu, and start burning a disc in only a few minutes. It saves me time. It does the job. I'm happy with it.
So there you have it... a long time Mac user who is also a long time Windows user, who likes both. It's all good, man.
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