One of the first things I noticed when attending classes at Harvard during the evening or walking around the campus during the day was that there was an unusually high percentage of Apple laptops in the hands of students. To boot, many of the professors were using Mac products during classroom demonstrations. Finally, many many people I know who code professionally were moving over to the Mac as a primary machine.

I began to think that maybe there was something to this Mac “renaissance.” Yet I still resisted.

My very first computer was an Apple IIc. It was a small, all-in-one job with an integrated floppy drive and keyboard. It was supposed to be portable but I never took it anywhere. It didn’t have a battery. This was WAY before there was a suitable portable power source for laptops. It had all of that Apple funkiness. I absolutely loved that machine.

I learned to program in Pascal on that machine and wrote my first real applications designed to solve problems I encountered in school. Partly as a result of having so much coding time in front of a machine, I was able to ace the AP Computer Science test in high school, earning a 5 out of 5.

(NOTE: My teacher had a deal with us students: if you got a 5 on the AP exam, you got an A. No ifs, ands, or buts. If I hadn’t earned a 5, it would have been C’sville for me.)

I absolutely LOVED that machine.

Of course, towards the end of high school, IBM clones were beginning to take over the marketplace. It wasn’t until a few years later that I got a Zenith 286 clone and said goodbye to Apple forever. The market had spoken. The variety of x86 machines and the power of Microsoft were an unbeatable combo. Apple was a machine for graphic designers and zealots. Then Jobs was pushed out of Apple and started NeXT. Apple faltered. It wasn’t long before it looked like Apple might not survive another decade.

That all changed when Jobs came back. He simplified the product line, brought over a lot of what he learned or developed at NeXT, and rescued Apple.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Which brings us to today. A few months back, I changed tack and bought a MacBook Pro. After almost 20 years of using exclusively PC/x86/Microsoft computing platforms, I was changing platforms. What convinced me?

1. Parallels. With Parallels, I was able to keep all of my existing applications. I don’t care what the zealots say. There are some things that are just easier to do on a PC because there is an application to solve that specific problem. Macs are getting better, but they’re not there yet. Parallels was the first software product that I purchased for my Mac.
2. Unix. One of the big perks of the OS X family is that it’s all Unix under the hood. Yes, it’s a hacked up version of Unix, but if all else fails, you can get pretty good software for free that will solve a lot of nagging problems. Since I’m an avid Linux user, the Unix background helped ease the transition.
3. Community. One of the interesting things about the Mac platform is the range of users that adopted the platform once OS X took off. To a lot of people, the Mac is the best Unix workstation they’ve ever used. They’re not newbies to computing; they’re professional code hackers or computer scientists. These people choose good tools that accomplish specific tasks. They don’t have tons of time to solve dumb software problems. For me, this was a big factor. When people you trust choose a specific product, you’re unwise to discount their opinion.

For me, 3 was most convincing, 2 was comforting, and item 1 reduced the risk and cost of switching. A few months ago, I decided to take the plunge and just buy one.
I’ve been a happy owner ever since.

If you’re planning on returning to school to study Computer Science, you owe it to yourself to forget your previous PC experience and look at a Mac for your academic endeavors. I can guarantee you that it will save you a lot of grief and enrich the learning experience that much more. When you realize that most schools teach Operating Systems by delving into the internals of the Unix OS, you’ll be thankful a command prompt is nearby for you to learn on.