and I just wanted to say I have not become a rabid Mac user, I still use my Windows box for 99% of my web surfing/emailing/work, and the Mac is only used for the one purpose I purchased it for (iPhone development).
Obviously I’m the only person in the world who has not succumbed to its charms. I just thought I’d, you know, share that mundane & pointless observation.
So there. 
Gee. I just bought a new Porsche. I don’t really drive it, I just sit in the driveway and listen to the radio. If I have to go somewhere, I drive my old Toyota. The Porsche is so overrated.
So there.
This is a true story.
A friend of mine has been living in Japan for the past 4 years. He recently came back for a few days to visit, and brought his mac in to the apple store for maintenance.
The store was absolutely stuffed with people that were 3-4 points higher than average on the 1-10 attractive scale. It was surreal to be in a room packed full of people, where the lowest among them was a 6 or 7, and the median was some decimal between 8 and 9.
Owning a mac makes you hotter. Congratulations on your purchase!
Athena, you are not alone. I have spent about 50% of my time on the Mac just trying to make it work for me, and about 40% figuring out how to make it run my Windows programs.
I cannot believe the Mac made a Windows fan out of me. But it did.
Um no, no it doesn’t. My hotness level hasn’t changed.
Confirmation bias.
It sounds like you’ve spent 50% of your time trying to make a Mac work like a Windows box, and 40% trying to run apps that aren’t designed for it. Why did you buy a Mac to begin with?
Stranger
She thought it would make her hotter.
Only while you are in the Apple store. Once you take it home and plunk it on your desk amid stale pastries, encrusted coffee cups, half-baked novel outlines, old tax returns, unpaid bills, and precarious stacks of O’Reilly reference books applying to programming languages and computer utilities which have ceased to exist except in alternate universes where Firefly has been running for five seasons as the crown jewel of the Fox Television Network, you just look like the same dull-normal and uninteresting person you always were.
Or maybe that’s just me. Whatever, anyway, if a Mac is good enough for Jeff Goldblum to take down an alien mothership, it’s good enough for me.
Stranger
You can of course use your computer for whatever you like, but Macs do have better virus avoidance for surfing and email (as far as I know, anyway). Safari with PithHelmet has very few pop-ups, unders, or ads. I’m not sure why you wouldn’t take advantage of all this.
Because I never have had problems with viruses - AVG works great. And I do a lot of stuff that I can’t do on a Mac (work stuff & gaming). And from what I can tell, beyond hardware setup, the damn thing is at least as difficult as Windows to get it to do anything. I just loooove the idea of writing shell scripts to make things start automatically upon boot, for example.
I used Safari for a while until I decided it was stooopid (can’t remember exactly why) and switched to Firefox for the Mac, which is no better or worse than Firefox for Windows as far as I can tell.
Really, I was expecting to be a bit more impressed than I am. It came through at first, with the automatic finding of teh Interwebs and the nice way it found its wireless keyboard and mouse. But really, beyond that, things were either just as hard as Windows, harder (there are few things I loathe more than a Unix shell), or the same but different (oooh, the “close window” button is on the left, not the right!).
I do like the lil widgety things.
It did, however, make me hotter. At least I think it did. I got the Mac and a new mountain bike at the same time, one of 'em got me hawter. I was thinking it was the bike, but now after I read this thread maybe I’m wrong…
Fair enough. I don’t lovelovelove my Mac, either. There are things about it that make me crazy (I’ll take Windows file management any day of the week). (I never use my widgets, either.)
Does this help, or are you trying to do something else?
I agree that the Mac is not the end-all be-all of computers. There’s certain things I prefer on Windows (navigating directory structures, for one.) There’s certain things about Apple that drive me nuts (there is an element of “do things our way” with some of their software that drives me up a wall.) It all depends on which computer better suits your needs and your temperament. For me, after switching to a Mac environment two years ago, I could say I’ve never had a computer that was more a joy to work with. But I deal with photography and the graphic arts. Also, as someone who likes to dabble in programming, I like the UNIX shell, and I really like all the programming languages that come installed, as well as the X-Code developing environment. But I just use that for fun. Someone like you who programs for a living may find the programming environment annoying and wanting. I don’t know.
At the end of the day, I don’t expect anyone to be wowed by OS X. It’s certainly not the right OS for everyone. For me, I just fell in love after the first day with the computer. However, I don’t play games, and the software I use tends to be Mac-oriented software. I thought I would install Windows on one of my machines, but I never did end up getting around to it.
After being a lifetime Windows user I bought a Mac a month ago too. I have to say that this is the easiest transition ever. I miss a few things that only work on Windows (my Blackberry for example, just does not talk to the Mac), but I deal mostly graphics, photography and web-design, things that Mac is better at. I am just surprised how intuitive it is. Truly plug and play.
Macs suck. You can’t even right-click with them, they’re WAAAAY more expensive than a PC, and really, they look good but at the cost of usability. Not to mention, you can’t customize them at all. There’s no software for it, and all the apps open in a window, where you can still see the desktop underneath.
You honestly have to be out of your mind to use a Mac.
gotchya ya! I have an 8-core Mac pro, a new MacBook, an old iMac, and 3 Mac Minis for a render farm. Plus 1 iPod and an iPhone. Macs are delicious.
Mark/Space makes a program called The Missing Sync that might help you. That’s how I get my Windows Smartphone to talk to my Mac…
Yeah, but if you’re already out of your mind, which, in fact, most Unix hackers, graphic artists, and other prototypical Mac users are, they work awesomely! 
Stranger
Hint for the unwary: highlight the previous post for the secret decoder message.
Well, they are “insanely great.”
I love OSX and I used to love my mac, but I think I’ll be buying a non-Mac for my next purchase. After a couple of annoying and expensive fixes for computers that were still under Applecare, then buying two new desktops and immediately having video card issues, Apple isn’t really giving me any reasons to spend the extra money on their machines anymore.
Yep. Got me! I was about to welcome you to 1985! 
Exactly. Just thought I’d get all the misconceptions out of the way. Usually someone will rip through the STC* from 1985 to post all that malarky. My work is done here. steps through glowing STC portal, into the future
*Space-Time Continuum