I used to be a die hard PC user (no, really I did) and would get annoyed when people mentioned Macs. “They’re just for designers” I thought, “with more money than sense”.

However when I moved to a new job the studio was all Mac, so I reluctantly started using them. I have to say that switching to Apple was probably the smartest move I ever made.

After a month of getting my feet wet I could do everything I did on my PC, but faster. Using PC’s I’d probably spend about 5% of my time installing apps and keeping the system running. Admitidly it’s not a lot, but if you’re using a computer 12 hours a day it can add up. By comparison I probably spend less than 0.1% of my time administering my Mac, making me a lot more productive.

With regards to needing a windows box to test on, unless you are doing things like ASP development locally, I don’t think it’s that big a deal. As a few people have mentioned, Virtual PC is a good thing to get for testing, especially as you can run different OS’s (e.g. 98 and XP) on the same machine. However these days I just use browsercam and VNC in if I need to do anything that involves behaviours.

I don’t know anything about Quickbooks, but there are various business apps on OS X including MYOB. Most other things like SFTP, CSS editors etc people have already been dealt with by other comments.