I would say I run a Mac for very different reasons than you artistic types. I need access to low-level programming, LaTeX typesetting for scientific journal articles, and UNIX command line utilities. Graphics performance and sound editing are almost completely meaningless to me.

Before switching to Mac, which has all of the UNIX/Linux utilities I need, I was a full-time Linux guy. I ran Linux exclusively, and only touched Windows when I was using others' computers, for almost a decade. I started running Linux on a Packard Bell Pentium 60, and then a series of computers I built myself out of parts ordered over the internet. Until I bought my first Mac four or five years ago, I hadn't bought a commercially produced computer in a long time.


And my first computer was a Tandy Color Computer 2, which was basically a rebranded TRS-80, with a whopping 1.7 megahertz processor. It booted directly into a BASIC interpreter, and I learned to write my first code before junior high school. Those were fun days, saving programs I wrote to an audio cassette deck <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbup.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />