For a couple of years now I’ve been wanting to go Apple and buy an Apple iBook (well, it used to be an iMac, but I’ve phased myself out of that one). I know that a lot of programs are not compatible with Mac OS, but I can deal with that.
Thing is, I’m studying I.T. and Windows seems to be the standard everywhere. Would I be wasting my money buying a non-Windows computer? Do you think Microsoft’s monopoly in the I.T. industry will falter any time within the next 10 years?
By the way, I don’t think I’m buying an Apple computer in the near future as I am stuck with the mandatory IBM Thinkpads from my university program. I’d like to get one once I graduate though. 
(Is this more suited for IMHO?)
Depends what you want to do… there are a number of distributions of Linux, for example, that are free, easy to install, have full desktop functionality and come complete with an office application suite, email, web browser etc. If you have to install a specific piece of software and it is only available for Windows, that can be a bit problematic (there are solutions, but they aren’t guaranteed and they aren’t necessarily simple).
Or if you wanted to get an Apple, again, you’re going to be able to do all sorts of regular stuff and exchange documents with your peers, but if your work mandates the use of, say, MS Visual Basic or Microsoft Access, then you’re pretty much stuck with a Windows PC.
What do you intend to use it for?
Do you plan to take 10 years to graduate? Even if you go for your PhD, I personally guarantee that when you go looking for your first job, Windows will still have most of the desktop market and a big chunk of the server market.
I.T. is a huge business. An I.T. student asking whether he should study “Windows or Apple or Unix” is like a medical student asking whether she should study bones or organs or skin. They’re all gonna be important for the forseeable future. You can specialize in one but you need a solid foundation in all.
Drifting into editorial mode… nothing is more pitiful than seeing someone who has spent their entire career specializing on one OS and watching what happens when they are forced into one that they’ve neglected. Someone who previously been considered smart and confident regresses to a state of childlike helplessness. Seen it happen with too many “Unix gurus” who suddenly inherited a Windows machine. Don’t be that guy. Be reasonably comfortable in all environments.
I started out programming on Macs and I suppose, given the choice, I’d probably still be programming on them. Unfortunately the job market for Mac developers is tiny.
That’s not to say that you can’t learn and study on a Mac. The basics of IT are the same everywhere and Macs are well designed examples of the art. But you shouldn’t get the idea that you’ll never have to work with Windows, or Linux, or a dozen other operating systems and environments. There’s nothing wrong with being skilled in as many as possible.
What the situation will be in 10 years time is anyone’s guess, and IMHO territory. I’d be amazed if Windows wasn’t still a major factor in IT, though I suspect not in the near monopoly at present. We will, however, have better standards of cross-platform compatability. Most developments will be done on ‘virtual’ systems that all platforms can use. Whether the Macs will still be around is a harder question. Apple has a habit of stumbling from amazing success to near disaster.
I’m an engineer, so that means I’m a really heavy user of computers at work. I also consider myself a computer expert. Maybe I don’t know everything, but I know how to find out (that’s 90% of engineering, when it comes down to it). I can do just about anything on Windows or on a Mac or on a Linux box.
So am I saying all of this to brag? Hell, no. I’m saying that despite all of this, I still choose to use Macs. There’s nothing that Windows can do that a Mac can’t do. Sure, there are some applications that just don’t exist, but there are usually alternative applications. And Macs are fast enough that VirtualPC (“VPC”) can run your XP session for just about everything but 3D games without a noticeable loss of speed. I admit I do this for a couple of DVD subtitle programs as well as for running Punch! Pro.
As an IT person, you get a Mac OS X machine, a UNIX machine, a potential LINUX machine, and if you install VPC you have an x86 machine onto which you can install any x86 operating system – BSD, Linux, WinXP, Win95, BeOS, whatever.
So what if you get a Windows laptop? You’re stuck with no options. Well, Windows, DOS 6.22, or Linux. But is that what you want to limit yourself to?
Waitaminute…you’re going into IT and you’re speaking as if you were only going to own one computer?
Get at least one Mac. (I’d recommend PowerBook rather than iBook.)
You’ll be picking up various PCs, mostly at bargain prices and in stripped-down condition, and install various permutations of various OS’s on them, and at any given moment 1/4 of them will be sitting with their cases open in various stages of diassembly. (And they will coexist with a shelf full of ATA hard drives and mice and keyboards and KVM switches and CD burners and infrared pointers, not to mention a couple of projection monitors, several CRTs, flat-panel TFTs, motherboards, RAM chips and modules galore, hubs, routers, PC Cards, adapters, connectors, and about 37 miles of cable). Maybe you’ll have a couple of Macs amidst the clutter as well. As I said, you should have at least one, even if you end up focusing on network architecture.
If you aren’t rolling in dough at the moment, go ahead and get only a Mac for now if that’s what you want, but unless you deliberately specialize rather than opting for generic IT familiarity, yeah of course you’re going to spend as much time staring at Windows as the most overworked window-washer in Manhattan.
(I’m technically considered an IT person and I only own a Mac, but I’m specialized as a FileMaker geek, and for the 2% of tasks that need to be set up and implemented differently for our PC users VirtualPC is an acceptable solution.)
It’s not a Windows-only world, even in small companies. My 14-employee company uses AIX 5.1 running on an RS/6000 as our main production database server, Linux on most of the secondary servers (mail, web, ftp, routers, etc), an old, creaky domain controller/RAS server running NT 4.0, and a mixture of Windows 2K and Linux on the workstations.
I see no reason to avoid buying the iBook, and I’m somebody who sneers at people who drink the Apple-flavored Kool Aid. It’ll at least give you some experience running a Unix-ish OS, as long as you don’t avoid the terminal.
In other words, OSX is gonna offer you a lot of things that “just work.” If you want to learn anything useful, you should avoid those solutions in your daily computing activities.
Write a few shell scripts. Learn some Perl. Buy a cheapass flash player instead of an iPod shuffle, and learn about flashing upgrades and formatting USB mass storage yourself.
You’ll get all the Windows stuff you could ever want at school, and it’s not too difficult to pick up the basics through trial and error in the real world.
BTW, most Thinkpads are good machines to run Linux on, so it might be worth setting up a Debian Woody (for the learning curve) partition to fuck around with.