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I have officially converted. I had my eye on a Mac for about 4 months and finally took the plunge in the last week of December. Partly for the specs and mainly because it runs on FreeBSD. I wish it was a christmas present but unfortunately I had to part with the cash - ouch. MacBook Pro 15″ with Leopard - it’s quick!

I’ve spent the past week prepping/cleaning my data to move it across. Shrinking my Outlook PST file, found this nifty app which converts PST to Mac Mail format. The data was pushed over to my trusty USB drive and then copied across. The conversion has been fairly uneventful with some frantic googling for arb things like “how do i page down” and “where the hell is the delete key”. But (L)AMP is setup now, imported all my db’s and just downloaded Zend Studio for Mac. It’s starting to feel like home, a clean pretty home.

So why change from Windows to Mac after using Windows right from 3.1? One word, “Formatting”. I’m sick of it. I think as a developer you tend to use your machine to the extreme and I found that after 2 months, even with the occasional defrag, errors tended to pop up and the performance dropped significantly. Lot’s of people I know get excited about “a fresh format”. That’s kind of disturbing in a way that it has become the norm to format because of Windows shortcomings as an operating system - and it’s widely accepted - I know plenty of people who do! Since I converted our office fileserver from Windows (rebooting 3 times a week) to FreeBSD, I’ve restarted it once and that was because of Eskom.

I started becoming a lot more interested in other operating systems in the past 2 years. I experimented with Red Hat, SuSE (my home server runs SuSE), Fedora, Ubuntu and finally FreeBSD (Active Ice choice for office fileserver). In an ideal world you would have a Linux machine with Office running on Crossover. I bought Crossover and then discovered that Mac ran on FreeBSD, something which I was unaware of until that point (thanks Jacques). So let me understand this one, I get all the functionality/stability of FreeBSD and a very pretty interface? It was a no-brainer, I was sold. There is only so much “End Now”, BSOD and “I dont know what happened but lets send something to Microsoft” a man can take. And what do we have to look forward too for the next few years? Vista! Vista is pissing off .NET developers I know with 10+ years experience so much that they reverted back to Windows XP - good advertisement for Microsoft that.

I find things going a bit slower at the moment but that is understandable as I get to know the keyboard/features. I can’t see myself turning back in a hurry. I might by myself a desktop to play games one day but that’s about it.

Some useful conversion sites:

• Ultimate guide for converting from PC to Mac
• PHPMac
• Get php.ini editable
• Working with PHP and Leopard
• Get MySQL for Mac
• Get MySQL started