Developing FOR the Apple garden is different than developing WITHIN the Apple garden. Simply put, the Mac is probably the best development platform for a numbe

Developing FOR the Apple garden is different than developing WITHIN the Apple garden. Simply put, the Mac is probably the best development platform for a number of reasons. The hardware is generally top notch, the platform is, despite a lot of add-ons, nix-based (which means you have Vim, access to perl, python, ruby, Bash shell), can be dual-booted into Windows for access to Windows-only tools (Visual Studio, for example) and IS the only acceptable development platform for Mac tools. In short, if I want to do Mac development, I have to have a Mac; and there's little that the Mac can't do for any other platforms.