> I think the the industrial design of the laptop is driving a lot of people over, not Mac OS X. Are people switching to Apple desktop machines at the same rate?
I'd concur, but that's the rub: Once you have that nice, well-designed machine in your hands, you discover that it has Python and Ruby and Emacs and Vim all preinstalled, not to mention a competent X server, and a reasonably nice terminal. Heck, it even defaults to Bash!
And once you're faced with that, the cost-benefit analysis for switching the machine over to *nix starts to tip in OS X's favor. You can finally run popular commercial software (Office, PhotoShop, etc), if you want. You can finally test things in OS X. Sleep / resume, external displays, bluetooth accessories, printers... they all Just Work. And your battery life is great.
Switching means giving up most of those benefits. And for what? You have a good POSIX environment, right?
It's the nuances that get you: OS X ships libedit instead of readline, and getting the IPython to use the latter was excruciatingly difficult for quite some time. Not to mention libraries like PIL. But by the time you run up against those issues, you've already bought into so much of the Mac ecosystem...
I'd concur, but that's the rub: Once you have that nice, well-designed machine in your hands, you discover that it has Python and Ruby and Emacs and Vim all preinstalled, not to mention a competent X server, and a reasonably nice terminal. Heck, it even defaults to Bash!
And once you're faced with that, the cost-benefit analysis for switching the machine over to *nix starts to tip in OS X's favor. You can finally run popular commercial software (Office, PhotoShop, etc), if you want. You can finally test things in OS X. Sleep / resume, external displays, bluetooth accessories, printers... they all Just Work. And your battery life is great.
Switching means giving up most of those benefits. And for what? You have a good POSIX environment, right?
It's the nuances that get you: OS X ships libedit instead of readline, and getting the IPython to use the latter was excruciatingly difficult for quite some time. Not to mention libraries like PIL. But by the time you run up against those issues, you've already bought into so much of the Mac ecosystem...