I don’t know what kind of koolaid Apple puts in their PR but it’s working on me! When they announced the Intel MacBook Pro it took all my will power not to drop 3 G’s on a pre-order the minute the Apple store reopened! That’s when the genius of their slick products combined with great PR strategy really sunk in because they had me (along with other bloggers such as Matt, David, and about 100 other folks) hook line and sinker!
The main appeal for me is that Apple is serving the developer community better than Microsoft. OSX is Unix with a really nice UI. It works well, it’s easy to use, and the hardware is aesthetically appealing. Just look at many startups these days and you’ll see many developers on Macs while the business folks are still on Windows.
Microsoft is doing a much better job now of working well and making the OS easy to use but let’s face it, their UI still doesn’t look as good, and they’ve never really “gotten it” that developers want a good command line interface.
Once my current work laptop is end of life I’m going to be switching to a Mac and if it can dual boot Windows or run Windows apps at almost native speed in OSX, so much the better.
For some related reading check out Cedric’s take on Apple’s Mass Hypnosis or Mike McHargue’s Dell versus Apple pricing smackdown.