Sometime in the early years of the 2000s, I signed on a major new customer. The customer said be here Monday with your laptop and at the time I did not own one. I went to CompUSA (in business at the time) to buy a typical Windows-based laptop. While I was there I saw the newly introduced titanium PowerBook. It was so cool, so sleek, that I decided to buy one — and I'm glad I did.
Since then all of my customers have been big corporations fully ensconced in the Windows platform, but it it it has never caused a problem. I am still what many may call a Windows expert; however I find my productivity is far increased using a Mac.
You would think I could explain better about why that is, yet I am not really sure. The best I can come up with are these snippets. Some are stories, and some are anecdotal tidbits.
I don't have to eff with it. The slogan about "it just works" is true. People in this thread have talked about how Microsoft makes sure drivers are written correctly and that kind of thing but as a person who gets handed a lot of laptops from friends and colleagues to get things working right, locating the right driver for the right device is not as straightforward as they might want you to think. My salad days were spent repairing the IBM keypunch, Series/1, System/32, and IBM 360, and then I came up through the ranks of putting jumpers on pins of attachment cards; thus, I am no stranger to dealing with drivers and devices. It doesn't scare me... I just want don't want to mess with anything anymore. I just want it to work.
If you must run software that is available only for Windows, there are solutions such as Parallels for Mac. I use it to run Visio and FrameMaker.
Any device maker, such as a printer or whatever manufacturer worth their weight in salt, makes a device or driver for Mac OS.
A customer brought in a number of large expensive printers. The Windows users could not get them to do things like color or double-sided, but I had downloaded the driver from the manufacture and got the printers up and running in a matter of minutes. Tech-support came to my desk and asked me how I did it; I said, "I don't know, I'm using a Mac." It took a full two weeks for the corporate IT people to figure out what they did wrong. To be fair, any Windows expert here knows IT simply picked up the wrong driver and/or configured it incorrectly. But that really isn't the point: The point is is that apparently there was enough complexity in the driver configuration that they messed it up.
Many times the support staff from IT has walked by my desk and said wow, I wish they would give me a Mac. (And many IT folk I know have Macs at home.)
At my most recent customer, I was told that senior leaders were asking IT to let them bring their Macs into the office or give them Macs, so they could get more done. And I happened to notice that as I walked by the offices of senior leaders that it was not uncommon to find a Apple logo glowing alongside a Windows machine.
My ex-wife has had for Mac laptops in the last perhaps 5 years. She drops them, runs over them with a car, sometimes throws at them down the stairs -- perhaps you may see why I am now divorced -- but in any case now she has a Samsung laptop and she hates it. She begs me to get her another Mac laptop and I refused. She picked up the Samsung for $500 on eBay and she hates it. <span id="INSERTION_MARKER">You might think that she wants a Mac because that is what she is used to but that really wasn't the case. It turns out that she was on Windows for... I don't know, many years... and when she destroyed her Windows laptop I had a Mac laptop that I gave her and she loved it.
I will close out (almost) by saying that since the early 2000s I have been carrying some form of Mac laptop into the corporate office of my Windows-based customers, and I get more work done than anyone else around me. No, let me change that: I get more tasks done that anyone around me.
And I can't help this item for the people adding to this thread: Mac is neither an acronym nor an initialism. It is an abbreviation --- a shorter form of a longer word -- and is not uppercase.