What do the pros use to get the job done?

LOL ... that is humorous. To think that in order to be a pro, you need to use Apple products and hardware.

Seems to be the norm. I know that I personally prefer Apple even though I work mostly with .NET.

I prefer pears,

But it does appear to becoming a trendy thing if you're a "Developer" to be a Mac person.

getting tired of hearing people proclaim they have a wonderful new Mac book pro 32" laptop and it only cost $32,000

I'd like one though

I love my MacBook Pro. It's hard to explain exactly what it is. I was on Windows my entire life up until about 2 years ago and got a Mac from a client as part of my payment. I like the native PHP/MySQL, Unix based command line, overall Mac GUI. Ease of running any other OS as a dual-boot or VM enviroment. Yea, more expensive and that sucks, but from all the Windows machines I've gone though, Mac's just seem more stable, hardly have to reboot, only runs slow after a couple months of running Firefox and Photoshop non-stop. Built in bluetooth... There are also a few things that bug me, but from my experience using both enviroments for long periods of time, I really enjoy my Mac.

Note: I am not a "fanboy". I do not own an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, or anything else. I do own an iPod, but that's because I won one of those 64gb ones a while back in some raffle. Now that I think about it. The only Apple product I have ever spent my own money on is the wireless bluetooth keyboard, because the action on it is a lot better than the keyboards on the last generation MBP.

I have always used PC and Linux (Dual-Boot) I find Linux Ubuntu very good when working on back end programming but I would never use it for design work. I have my Adobe suite installed on my PC and I have spent decent money on my PC so I don't have the problems @Deuce described.

As for Mac products I only have the iPhone 4 and that was to bug my girlfriend who got the 3GS just before the iPhone 4 was released. In reality the iPhone sucks and is extremely buggy thats why there work stations don't appeal to me.

Well, after this weeks troubles with my Windows machine I know for a fact that the ROI of Macs is higher just for the lack of futzing around needed to keep them running.

If I didn't need this windows box for work, I'd shoot it in the face.

As I've been saying for ages, I don't know how anyone can be productive in a MSWindows environment. And what did Deuce like about Mac? The Unix clone under the hood.

cheers,

gary

You can be productive in a MS box you just need to have the hardware to back it up. The benefit of most MAC systems is the power they come with as standard. Windows just needs a little more juice and to be kept upgraded.

At the end of the day you can't run a business without a windows system as ultimately business build themselves around Windows environments.

What year did you type that in?

Do you ever! While I can, and do, run a completely up-to-date Debian distro on an eleven year old PIII 733mHz 256mB machine, any MSFT os newer than 2K wouldn't run at all. Vista, unless you disable the graphics 3D stuff, will slow a dual core 2.3gHz 4gB desktop machine. Win7 is noticeably less burden on the hardware, but latency is still there on my dual core AMD 2.4gH 4gB laptop. Now, the dual core 2.4gHz 8gB desktop with a graphics card holding 1gB of on board memory flies. Where is the benefit of an os the imposes such a heavy overhead burden?

Why should you have to shut down the applications you're running in order to install/uninstall another program? And, stupidity of all stupidities, why in hell should you have to restart the computer to complete the install/uninstall? How does that support productivity?

The real benefit of Mac is its Unix type os. I'm not so enamored of the heavily graphics oriented interface. But then, it's a graphics oriented product.

No, businesses have found themselves trapped in legacy, closed source systems. The overwhelming majority of machines are simply general purpose office appliances. OpenOffice.org's suite is a more than adequate replacement for MSOffice, free, and runs on multiple oses to boot. If support is desired, it is available as a paid service or free from the community. Oddly, OO.o is more backward compatible with older MSO versions than MSO itself. There are any number of browsers that will run on various oses. The same with email clients and servers. The best concurrent versioning systems and task managers are freely available, open source and completely user customizable. Most to-purpose apps are simply database interfaces, but without the source, users are locked into the vendor. Try to imagine the cost of redeveloping all the queries and optimizations. An open source app will generally be os agnostic and transferable.

The real issue is not with the os, though it is bloated and expensive, it is with the closed, proprietary applications, mostly from MSFT, that provide vendor lock in.

cheers,

gary

And doesn't all this come down to marketing and big business?

Or you could all kill 2 machines with 1 stone and hackintosh the hell out of your useless pc boxes lol.

If it helps, the only paid-for software on my lappy at home is Windows. I use OpenOffice, Firefox, notepad++, paint.net and it does the job just fine

I love my PC and I've used both Macs and PCs for design work. Frankly I prefer PCs because you can quickly get anything you need to do the work you have to do and the software is cheap.
Like Josh Connerty says, you need to by a good quality computer and stay away from the low-end machines. Research the different processor speeds etc before you go shopping.

//Mod edit: Gratuitous link removed. Wait 'til you've gained some cred, and have a sig line. --gt