The sad fact is a complete lack of alternative. Personally I hate Apple so much. However, I still buy one or two Apple computers a year. If you're a developer,

The sad fact is a complete lack of alternative. Personally I hate Apple so much. However, I still buy one or two Apple computers a year. If you're a developer, and you want a stable environment that gives you access to the Terminal (bye, Windows!), has nice typography (bye, Linux!), excellent text editor (TextMate is the best one I found for Ruby) and does not cause stupid problems with printers or wifi (bye, bye, Linux!), you have no choice but OS X. Their hardware is a piece of crap. Even a company that made an ad with them, agrees with that: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1489-every-mac-ive-owned-has-failed http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1489-every-mac-ive-owned-has-... I think it's very similar if you are a professional photographer. Windows is so bloated it's painful to work with. Linux has no Adobe toolkits and you end up with OS X again.