The first Mac I actually owned was an SE. Since then I've owned five more Macs. I bought top-of-the-line Macs when people were telling me that Apple was about to go out of business. I developed a lot of software for the Mac.
I'm all about developing for .NET now; Apple is toxic to developers.
Apple has gotten a lot better since the days they pulled crap like abandoning APIs as soon as anyone started developing on them. Remember OpenDoc? And if you think IB is stagnant, remember MPW?
Where to begin?
* the almost total lack of development of Interface Builder
* ouch Java
* iPhone application approval yumminess
* Hi Konfabulator!
* Hi Watson!
There are countless other examples including the original versions of JScript and the burden that is IE6. This is not meant to be a defense of Apple. I was simply interested in why you believed that MS is somehow less "toxic" than Apple.
I'm sorry to disagree with you, but despite all of the emotional baggage that surrounds platform choice, I do think Microsoft is kinder to developers.
I remember the Stac case, but it was 18-odd years ago. It's more relevant to me now that, for instance, it is effectively illegal to write a book concerning developing for the iPhone.
After all, you'd never see Steve Jobs running up and down a stage shouting "developers developers developers" like a monkey on crystal meth, would you.
Microsoft is friendlier to developers, but the development environment in windows is not so friendly. The one major reason that I own a MacBook is due to the BSD development environment, I'd have to run vmware or colinux on a windows machine to get the equivalent feel. And no, cygwin just doesn't cut it.
Well I like to use certain command line tools for finding stuff or moving files around, which tend to happen more often as a developer. I've gotten pretty good at scripting with the new powershell in windows, but still somewhat annoying compared to what is available in most unix environments.
I'm all about developing for .NET now; Apple is toxic to developers.