kldcoombs :
Wrong netspiderz - Some of the very smartest tech people I know - 3 of which make a living writing filter drivers for windows use macbook pros for everything but coding (Two of them code in a VMWare VM, the other uses a PC for coding). I have been in IT for 25 years and use a macbook pro and a macbook air (one with Fusion, one 100% native).
OS X is based on BSD Unix. Most of the old Unix gurus I know have switched to Macbooks instead of Windows for that reason (Linux is a PITA to install on a recently-released notebook and have all the hardware work). That's also where OS X gets a lot of its better security than Windows. Unix was designed from the ground up to be used in a networked multi-user environment; Windows and Mac OS were designed to be single-user and patched to add network and multi-user capability.
It's always a hoot when someone asks me to troubleshoot their Mac, and I fire up a terminal and start typing in arcane Unix commands. The look on their face when they realize what's running "under the hood" of their pretty GUI is priceless.
kldcoombs :
If you want to have fun - ask someone WHY the use the device they use. I have started doing that and have found that the reasons are far more varied than I would have imagined, everything from a line of business app that is supported on only one platform to the guy at Verizon told me it was the best. The decision as to what mobile OS (or lack of decision) is all over the map!
Agreed. I also think it's important for both iOS and Android fans to realize that if the other didn't exist, their favored product would not be as polished and wouldn't introduce as many new features each year. The best outcome for everyone is if both remain healthy competitors. The worst outcome is if one "wins" and completely dominates the other.
Msouther :
I am a professional Mac technician, with approximately 400 clients. Not a single one of them uses boot camp. Maybe 2 or 3 use VMware or Parallels. When Apple first went to Intel the option of being able to run Windows was indeed a selling point. However, in practice it is very unimportant to 99% of the Mac community.
The vast majority of Mac owners I know are in the creative art-type industries (graphics, photo, video, music, etc). That's actually Apple's bread and butter, and the software for those fields is better on OS X than for Windows. For these people, it's easy and actually preferable to use all-Mac software.
Most of the people I know outside of those fields who switched from Windows to Mac
do run boot camp or VMWare (typically boot camp for games or VMWare for developing).
It's also worth pointing out that you can do the reverse - run OS X in a VMWare virtual machine on a Windows or Unix host, if you apply a hack. There's nothing "special" about Mac hardware (aside from being designed with artist types in mind - e.g. screens come color calibrated from the factory). The only reason you need a hack is because of an Apple licensing limitation that VMWare honors (their software will refuse to let you install a desktop version of OS X in a VM). The hack simply removes that bit of code.