Everyone I know has gone Mac in the last 2-3 years, and most have a story like mine. I was committed hardcore to another platform, though I had more than a few complaints. Still, no expectation of ever switching.

But the iPhone was a quantum leap in consumer technology. I was using a Palm, which was "not a bad smartphone" the month before the first iPhone announcement was made. Then iPhone was released and after 10 minutes using it I knew it was a completely different class of device. Within a few months I had realized that I couldn't keep my hands off one and bought it. Rather than let me down and gradually disappoint me, leading to rationalization and acceptance (the usual model for technology buys of all kinds), it continued to impress weeks and months into ownership and I have had no desire to switch—only to upgrade—ever since.

When iPad came out, I was absolutely sure I didn't need one, but ended up using one regularly for reasons unrelated to my own consumerist impulses. But boy did it drive those consumerist impulses... Again, within months I had bought one and it has becomemy most used and relied upon work device.

After those two experiences, Mac OS didn't seem far off, and already being in love with iPhone/iPad based on my own use of them, the one annoyance I had with them was the way that they seemed not to mesh as well with other platforms (in my case, Linux, but the same goes for Windows) as they do with Mac OS. So I resolved never to spend Mac-level money, but to buy a very old old used Mac and a Mac OS update pack, and get the OS X pack running on a hackintosh machine to "test the waters." I built a hackintosh box for $250 or so with a dual core mainboard, Firewire-800, and a RAID-1, and within a week of using it I knew I would soon migrate my life from Linux (where it had been since 1993) to Mac OS.

Within six months of going "Mac OS only," though, the difference in quality and hardware/software integration between my iPhone/iPad and my other technology devices (a hackintoshed desktop and a hackintoshed Thinkpad) was painfully obvious and I knew that I was done for—I really, really wanted access to true Mac hardware to avoid the niggling little issues and flaws of PC world hardware that seemed increasingly apparent to me.

Got a MacBook Pro 13" machine last January, finally.

It is the best computing device I have ever owned, bar none. Build quality is exceptional, fit and finish are so precise and refined that you feel as though it wasn't made by humans, but by perfect machines. Even the ThinkPads I'd always owned had little things that I'd never noticed. For example, I would never have said that the power switch was slightly crooked or that there was a little key vibration and noise in some keyswitches, or that the hinge had uneven tension throughout its range or that the display was a bit uneven in its brightness UNTIL getting and really using a MacBook Pro. The build quality is measurably better. It has raised my expectations for technology goods.

Aside from that, the ergonomics are also much better. Apple's touchpad and keyboard, though very foreign to me at first, have now enhanced my work speed considerably. For example, the key travel distance and key "give" on the chicklet keyboard has given me another 10-15 wpm in typing speed with no loss (indeed, a gain, thanks to keys not touching each other) in accuracy.

And of course beyond all of these things, there are just fewer fatal flaws. No BIOS to worry about. Exceptional battery life. No need to fuck around with drivers. No "update hell" in which the latest round of absolutely necessary updates kill some functionality in your system that you rely upon, leaving you installing/uninstalling/tweaking in a desperate haze for hours or days (problems seen both in Windows and in Linux). Just massive, massive piles of It Works Without You Having to Think About It, and It's Tough as Nails to Boot.

My parents and siblings' families have gone Mac (something I never thought would happen, and that happened quite independently of me) and about half of them have iPhones. Those that don't have iPhones talk continuously about how they're going to get them. My workplaces (I have several) are all almost entirely Mac now and the few Windows holdouts are gradually giving in. My retirement-age faculty adviser from Ph.D. times just went Mac with a MacBook Air and can't stop enthusing about it. Old dog, surprising new trick (I'd never have guessed he'd be a switcher).

My wife, who claims to "hate" the "weirdness" of Mac OS (unfamiliar UI, keyboard, etc.) nonetheless increasingly intrudes on my workspace (I work at times from home) to use my machine when I'm around, despite having a nice Windows notebook of her own (which she increasingly ignores). She also claimed to hate iPhone for a very long time, yet ultimately found herself always using my iPhone 4 for lots of little app tasks and finally switching to an iPhone herself recently.

In short, the numbers tell us clearly that the base of Apple "fanbois" is growing. Rather than continue to feel as though it's a clear and cogent argument to label someone a "fanboi" and leave the rest to implication, it's about time the critics faced the fact that fanbois are made and not born, and Apple is making more of them every quarter. That's called Good Business[TM].

Smart companies and critics would do better to emulate Apple and their methods, philosophy, and successes than to presume that if they can only make the negative connotation they'd like to attach to the phrase "Apple fanboi" stick, suddenly all those iPhone, iPad, and Mac users would wake up, see the light, and return to PCs with embarrassment.

You can pry my Apple hardware and software from my cold, dead hands. Maybe.

that have been saying this kind of stuff for years. iPod is lame. iPhone is a useless device. Nobody in their right mind will buy iPad. iPod's price will drive people to competitors. iPhone's price will make in untenable as a phone. iPad is priced more than a laptop, only idiots will pay for it.

Blah, blah, blah. Once a week someone predicts that Apple has finally reached its apex and it's all downhill from here, as the products lack features, are too expensive, the garden is walled, and new competitors X, Y, and Z have finally figured it out and this will be their week|month|year.

So far, this has always been empirically demonstrated to be so much crap by the time the next week|month|year has arrived. Of course, at some point Apple WILL fail, just like all companies and indeed all things in the universe eventually disintegrate, and because at least once a week someone predicts that this will happen this week, at some point someone will be right.

But when that happens, it won't be because of any insight—just because the pundits have made sure to predict the failure of Apple during EVERY week|month|year cycle. And I seriously doubt this is the time, having just been at the local office supply chain store looking at Android tablets yesterday.

It was KDE4 that started my migration away from Linux after fifteen years of hardcore Linux use, advocacy, development, etc. (The pending arrival of GNOME 3 sealed the deal, but it was KDE4 that happened first.)

I still miss Linux, sometimes—the ethic, the openness.

Too bad things didn't work out and Linux didn't ever "arrive" at the same UI quality level as Mac OS or even Windows. But I still have a very soft spot in my heart for Linux and I am continually tempted to install the latest Fedora release in a VM just to have it around. No particular need though—don't actually know what I'd run in it—so I haven't yet.

above is "2010 MBP here, with Lion, no problems" over and over again, including the same thing from myself.

Looks like the results of this straw poll are in, and they are that the story is BS and /. has been had once again.

I've been running OSX Lion with the machine on 24/7 since release day on my 2010 unibody MBP and I've experienced no crashes whatsoever. Lion is a bit slower than Snow Leopard was for some UI tasks, but the new Mission Control task/desktop switcher more than makes up for any other inconvenience.

Biggest issue I had was that my LiveScribe Desktop wasn't working, but as of today that has been fixed, so now: no complaints whatsoever.

and worked, over several years, as an editor in technology publishing, then as an editor in history publishing, then as an editor in academic publishing (journals in the social sciences). In all cases, we worked in Word and sent Word files to the production team/department/contractor. Their processes upon receipt of Word files varied, but the fact is that MS Word is a major standard in many areas of publishing, certainly in mass-market books.

Pay attention; I didn't say I started using KDE in 1994. When i first became a Linux user I was using TWM, then later FVWM, then for a while AfterStep. KDE was, as you say, fall 1997 with the pre3 release, which is where I started using it.

I started using Linux full-time in 1994, wrote a number of Linux books, did a whole bunch of server and desktop installations and was a huge fan of Linux+KDE beginning with KDE pre-1.0 releases. I was religiously all-Linux, all-KDE, all the time until KDE 4 on Fedora 9.

I stuck with KDE4 for several months; at first, I couldn't imagine changing the desktop environment I'd had for so long.

Eventually, however, I realized I spent far too much time trying to configure and reconfigure my KDE4 desktop to behave and appear in ways that were acceptable to me. It seemed like I was always spending time configuring my desktop, yet never getting it quite right. I'd be in the middle of a real task and something would annoy the hell out of me and the next thing you know I'd be knee-deep in configuration and kludging and after a couple hours I'd determinedly force myself to give up and live with it (frown, frown) only to find myself configuring once again before the day was out.

After about three months of that, I switched to GNOME 2 on Fedora. It worked well for me and I decided I actually rather liked GNOME. Once again I settled into an environment, developed a workflow and keyboard and mouse habits and figured out how to do all of the little tweaks I wanted to do each time I did a new distro install to support new hardware, etc.

But when GNOME3 details came out and as the KDE4/GNOME3/Unity trifecta started to overtake the Linux world, I got really frustrated. I switched to Xfce for a while, but like Linus, found it not quite where I wanted to be. I tried to return to Windowmaker, which I'd used back in the day before KDE-1pre releases. But all these years later and no native file manager? No drag-and-drop? Yes, I *can* use the command line, but sometimes I'd like to have a working desktop metaphor as well.

So I tried Enlightenment. Nightmare; a toy project. You spend all of your time just trying to get the install consistent.

Then I realized that I felt really good about the Macs I was encountering at the university where I am faculty. So I committed my first Linux-betrayal since 1994, repartitioned, and installed a Hackintosh partition to "test out" OSX.

Three months later I'd built a brand new Hackintosh desktop and bought all Apple software, the first software I'd bought in decades after decades as a free software user. The Linux partition, while still there, was rarely booted any longer. Six months later I'd ditched the Hackintosh desktop and bought a MacBook Pro and reformatted all of my long-term archival media to be Mac-readable.

There are things that frustrate me about Macs (most notably the spinning beach ball moments and the inadequacy of Mac Ports next to the RedHat and Debian repositories, less notably but still there the cost of the hardware and difficulty of cheap repairs with eBay spare parts), but I am in all honesty more productive than I've been in a very, very long time, and once again rarely have to worry about being pissed off by, or spending time I don't have reconfiguring or trying to kludge apart, my desktop—just like back in the KDE3 and GNOME2 days.

Too bad those days are over, but I fear that free software has lost this padawan to the dark side for life. Once you get used to no configuration, no kludges, everything works to your satisfaction 95 percent of the time, it's really hard to imagine going back to tweaks, hacks, editing configuration files, and new releases that routinely require that all of these be rediscovered and that come down the pipe in regular updates and are required for recent hardware support.

I left Verizon Wireless in the late '90s precisely because they were billing me for things that I couldn't identify and that they wouldn't itemize.

Let me tell you how "leaving them" worked out for me. After lots of attempts to get them to itemize, I just paid everything and said cancel (my initial agreement period was over and I was on monthly). Then, I got a bill from them the next month—for the same monthly service, including things they wouldn't itemize, as before. I called them up.

Me: WTF? I quit last month and paid off.

Them: Yes, but you re-opened your account.

Me: WTF? How did I do that? I haven't talked to you since then.

Them: We don't know. But there is this charge that you incurred that means you continued to use the service.

Me: How did I incur the charge? That sounds like the same amount I was asking about before?

Them: Must have been local calls or sth. We can't tell you. But it's there. So your bill / account is back also. You owe for the month.

Me: But I threw away the VZW phones, like, three weeks ago!

Them: Sorry. Pay up.

Me: Get your supervisor.

Song and dance, yadda yadda, I ended up giving in, paying off the month again, and cancelling again.

Next month, WHAT DO YOU KNOW, another VZW bill lands in my mailbox for monthly service AS USUAL.

I called again, same song and dance, only this time I also wrote a letter to corporate describing the sequence of events and suggesting that I was ready to take legal action. Then the retention department or someone behaving like a retention department called me and asked if I didn't really want to stay. I was so livid my head nearly exploded. Then, finally, this last person agreed to cancel me and I stayed cancelled...

Until I got a COLLECTIONS LETTER for another VZW monthly amount. At first I refused to pay in case it was going to go this way every month again, but when two or three months had passed and just that one charge seemed to be left, I paid the collections bill and that was the end of it.

But you'll never get me to go back to VZW unless every other telecom has been carpet-bombed. Even then, I might prefer tin cans and strings to VZW.

As I recall, it was already late when I was a CS major in 1991 using GNU Emacs on SunOS.