Don’t do it. I’ve been using a mac all day at work for 5 months now, and am fairly at home with it, but I’d still go back to a PC if I could.

Things that mac lovers don’t tell you:

– macromedia software is quite buggy on the mac. Dreamweaver/Flash/Fireworks MX 2004 all crash on me at least once every two days, while they are rock solid on my Windows XP box.

– freeware/shareware apps are few and far between. I love the fact that on Windows if you’re doing something only once, there’s generally a little app out there you can grab to do it.

– keyboard/mouse inconsistencies. Everyone says “just get a two button mouse and it just works” That’s sort of true, but Mac apps aren’t really designed for 2 button mice, so if you right click in different applications you’ll get a bunch of different behaviours that aren’t consistent. I live and die by home/end keys for coding, but they act differently all the time making me much less efficient.

– the finder is slow. At first it drove me mental, but now I’m tolerant of the 4/5 second delay when I scroll down network folders with many files. (I’m using a G5 btw) If you save a file to your desktop, expect to wait 10 seconds for it to appear. I hope they fix these speed issues in the next osx update, becuase it really makes the whole experience feel ‘clunky’.

(btw. Small Paul, command line FTP comes free with Windows XP too. No big deal.)