Hi Osvaldo. First of all, thanks for your comments :)

Secondly, I must tell that precisely *because* of seeing a Mac everywhere is that I wanted to try it. But I just found that it was not what I expected.

Anyway, just because everybody's using it it doesn't mean it's the best choice out there, does it?

Since you took your time to analyze many of my points, I can't do less than giving some feedback :)

- SVN: really, I didn't find much and neither did some friends of mine which actually work in a Mac every day using SVN. SCPlugin (http://scplugin.tigris.org/) seems the best out there for the moment but it's still too immature and lacks lots of features. Of course you can work with command line (talk about usability...) or integrated IDEs, but I just don't like to have a monster running to code a couple of lines.

- Simple things should be simple; you shouldn't need two weeks to learn how to do them. Mac OS X has a great feature called Spotlight, in which you type virtually anything and it find the exact application / preferences pane you're looking for. And if you don't find it that way, you can go to the Help menu which is great. But I couldn't have found how to do this kind of simple things if it weren't for Google. That's, IMHO, it's not called "simple".

- NTFS: while it's true that if you own a Mac you shouldn't need NTFS, it's still a nice feature to have, so you don't depend on Windows anymore.

- Text editors: as a matter of fact, I tried Textmate and didn't like it. Textpad and Ultraedit for Windows are far more powerful.

- Finder: I'm also used to the detail view, but sometimes thumbnails are useful: if you need to select an image but don't remember its name, you have to open a new Finder window, go to the file, remember its name then select it.

When you say you find it hard to believe, actually, it's not a matter of belief; it's right there and you can go check it. Same as with SVN clients :)

- Moving folders: what I meant is that if you overwrite a folder with another one it doesn't go to the Trash at all; it's lost forever. To get it in the trash first you need to move it manually then move the new folder in place. This is not exactly something wrong, but different from Windows and Linux.

What is worse indeed is that you can't merge folders at all, not even with a special key combinations.

- Keyboard: yeah, I know you get used to it, but while in the transition it would be easier if you have the possibility to chose. Thankfully I got the way around it and customized it my way.

Finally, I'd only want to add that I wouldn't mind paying for a good hardware, good OS and good applications. I'm not complaining about extra 20 bucks, but I want the whole package to be worth it. And I didn't find Mac worth its price for what I need to do.

If you need to manage projects, prepare documentation, surf the web or do some multimedia design, it might be the perfect tool for you. You probably won't need nothing else to get your job done. But being a developer, things are different and you need not only security + stability but a great boost in your performance as a coder, and I dind't find the right tools for that.

I do want, as you said, something that helps me focus on my day-to-day job instead of losing time, and that's why I tried Mac in the first place. But in my personal experience Mac didn't help at all. Again, this is *my* experience for *my* needs, and it might not be a good piece of advise for others.

Maybe it's just because I'm too used to Windows; I'm not telling otherwise. Just sharing my experience with you :)

Thanks again!

just my two cents....
first of all, i was lucky enough to laid my hands on an iBook (G3/700MHz, which was something about a P3 at its time, a machine 4 years old when it landed on my desktop). I had OS X 10.2 i think. I also had been following Apple line of products for quite sometime now, and I see your points, but think you might be missing some information.
First of all, it's impressive how many developers are choosing an apple laptop or desktop as their platform of choice. Linus Torvald itself is a good example. You couldn't just see a meeting of developers without seeing the apple logo all around. And if you don't attend conferences/meetings, then just see the screenshots or screencasts that are all over the web.

Can you believe I spent two days googling for a decent SVN client that integrates into the Finder? And worse, that I didn’t get any good one? Neither do I.
I really missed TortoiseSVN while working in Mac.

with so many developers working with os x, I find it real hard to believe that some sort of solutions aren't already in places. really, everywhere there's somebody using a mac. and mostly svn although i had see a new trend in using git.

Can you believe I couldn’t change my file associations without a third party app? Neither do I.

I do remember when i started working with os x that i spent almost two weeks learning how to do simple things. I also remember that as soon as that phase ended, I had this incredible feeling that for the first time in my life I was using some piece of hardware which allows to do my work instead of having me doing work just to get the real work done. The apps, the OS, everything is built in a way to make you forget about the computer and focus on the task to be done. That feeling I haven't had in any other operating system.

Can you believe I couldn’t write, only read, to NTFS drives out of the box, when it’s the most popular file system in the world? Again, I’m not telling it’s the best one, but the most popular.
To be able to write in NTFS drives I had to install MacFuse which, in fact, corrupted some of my source code files. Thank god I had a copy in my SVN repository.

yeah, sure, blame apple for that.... did you knew that linux distros got read/write support for ntfs fileystem just a year ago? mac user don't use ntfs, they just don't, so why that should be a problem for them? and yes, there's macfuse for those who need it. but again, that's just not an apple problem. it's just you. I use ext3 and really, even care or know if it can be readed on OS X.

Text editors in Mac suck. There are a couple of them which seem to work ok, but nothing compared to TextPad or Ultraedit on Windows.

ok, seems you didn't found out about Textmate. If you mean free text editor, well, maybe textmate might be not for you, but if you had enough cash to spend in a macbook, then 20 more bucks shouldn't make a difference, and yes, everybody seems to fall in love with that editor. which could had some plugin for svn support. check it out. and yes, and some point i was thinking of installing os x just to test it.

How to synch iCal and Address Book to Google Calendar and Contacts? Downloading and paying for a, I must admit, good app called SpanningSync. But there’s no free alternative for this task.

looks like you didn't check the google pages. sync between google tools and os x ones is provided by free tools for some time now.

Actually, most of the applications for Mac out there are not free but paid. And I’m not even talking about Open Source, just free.

there's a big difference. first of all, mac are pricey, and developers know that. later, mac apps are different than windows ones. and in the end, all the power of opensource is right there, darwinports is one of two projects which provides you with everything you could install in a linux or freebsd system.

Finder (the equivalent in Mac for the Windows Explorer) sucks. It’s not that Explorer is a glory, but Finder is just clumsy and inneficient. When you get an “Open file” dialog, you cannot switch views to see thumbnails of your photos.

maybe i just like to much the detail view and never used the thumbnail one, but i kind of find that hard to believe. It's even harder to believe since mac are the graphics people's prefered choice. And btw, i loved finder, still waiting for somebody to something similar in linux.

Cannot cut files or folders in Finder. That’s it, cutting is not an option for you. If you want to make a simple “move” operation you need to have two open Finders, one with the file you need to move and the other with the target folder.

yes, after windows 3.11 it's a weight we all have to carry on with (except for total comander users). windows explorer have the same behaviour.

Want to paste a folder right where another one with the same name exists? Ok, prepare to get all the contens of the old one deleted for good. You won’t even find it in the Trash: it’s completely overwritten with the old one instead of merging them. And even worse: you don’t have the option to do this!

really? the trash just worked like anyother trash as i recall

Keyboard is waaay too different from Windows. Shortcuts are different and takes too much time to get used to them. For example, when at the middle of a line you press “Home” and expect to be taken to the start of the line, you don’t; you go the beginning of the file instead. Similarly with end. To go to the beginning or end of line you need to press Command + Up or Down. WTF?

yeap, it's different, you just had to get used to it, but you do, really.

There is no US International keyboard distribution from scratch; you need to download it from Rainer Brockerhoff’s page.
Fortunately, I found a way to simulate all my previous keyboard experience so it was not a pain, but why cannot I have all this from scratch?

I didn't notice this one, i just keep the language switcher at hand and pressed the shortuct to switch between the two languages i needed it (spanish and english).

well, just a couple of thoughts. I would end this saying that one of the things i like more about my experience with apple stuff was the robustness that can be accomplished with having control of the hardware and software. this might the case when you use os x on a clone hardware. that ibook just worked, everything was really intuitive (although not the microsoft kind of intituive way).
Now I don't have the time to play with the computer, fixing broken things, loosing data because of OS wrongs, I just need something that work and be stable to let me do my job. I do have one complain regarding apple hardware these days, and is the increasing tendency to build just for tomorrow.
I used an ibook 4 or 5 years old, and the hardware was intact. Now, it's more like one year from now, your hardware will be obsolote. I can't imagine anyone bying a first generation macbook (which, as a first generation, had problems of their own), which is just a couple of years ago (well, maybe more).
I just bought a laptop, I choosed a dell vostro, it costed me half of what a macbook would had done. Maybe I don't had os x, but ubuntu fit my needs, but every now and then, it just blocked, or things didn't work and i had to admit it, i remember the os x days ;)

Vista is the BEST M$ OS?? For real?... Well, tastes are tastes eh? Nice reading though. Useful, since I want to throw my self there too... wish luck to a c++ developer and RE :P

Good Luck!! Ubuntu has none of the problems or "quirks" you mention of MacOs. Of course, it has (plenty ?) diferent ones! But, as you say, there is no perfect OS.

And, in your case, there is a catch. As a web developer, you walk the thin line between design and coding. Simply put, MacOs is THE OS for designers, as it's usually said. And Linux (or any Unix "spawn") is a OS made by and for hardcode coders (pardon the pun!). So, is pretty reasonable to think that each one is strong in one os this aspects and weak in the other.

But I'm not calling M$ winner yet. I'd rather wait for your next review about Ubuntu. :)