I was in a very similar boat a couple of years ago. The two owners of my company both switched from PC to Mac and I had next to no real Mac experience. Being the resident "IT Guy" I thought it prudent to learn at that point. No better way to learn than total immersion. So I checked my PC back into inventory and checked out a MB Pro. Took some getting used to but two years later I find a lot of the early annoyances (some of which you mentioned) have turned into annoyances with Windows now. I do still hate not being able to resize a window from any edge or corner, that's just silly. But the common menu bar has become a HUGE plus to me. The menu for ANY app is always at the top of the screen and not taking up valuable real-estate inside the working window of the app. Personally I like that. Now. I've also grown to really like Finder. It was very frustrating at first coming off of DOS and Windows for the past 20 years. But now I'm quite used to it and prefer it to Windows explorer. I used to think software availability would be a huge problem for me, but outside of a huge number of games I'd like to play that are PC-only, I have found there are Mac versions or similar software to just about anything I need. I don't know how long you've been working with a Mac, but if you really want to get used to it and learn to love some of the things you hate about it now, ditch the PC for 1 month, do everything Mac-only (except gaming) and then see how you feel. I still work with both OSes daily, but when given the choice of which platform to do something on, these days I always pick the Mac unless it's for a game.
I actually stopped using Windows as my main OS about 4 years ago, and started using GNU/Linux. Mostly Ubuntu, and at times Debian. I really enjoyed it for programming web applications. There are some amazing tools, and the proprietary and expensive TextMate editor hardly compares with the open source and wonderful Geany editor for linux. The most obnoxious part of course is that Adobe doesn't make linux versions of their software, so I'd always use a virtual machine with Windows XP to use Photoshop, so I ended up getting pretty decent at using the GIMP instead. And then 4 or 5 months ago I bought a MacBook so I can do iPhone development. It's very nice. I'm a bit of a power user, and so having a real bash terminal with all the commands you'd expect (ls, cat, grep, find, netstat, nc, nano, ssh, ps, kill, etc.) and also being able to run Photoshop is pretty great. It's muuuch better than Windows, in my opinion. I've pretty much completely stopped using my PC and only use my Mac now. Which in the back of my mind makes me feel kind of like I'm selling out and forsaking linux and open source software in general. But whatever, iPhone game development is really fun, and as good as the GIMP is, it still doesn't compare to Photoshop... Maybe I'll use Ubuntu more when I get into android development.
I just bought the cheapest mac laptop which is a small white plastic case. I forget the model name but it was around 900$ and it has been fine for me. I figure its probably similar in cost to the mini once you add a monitor, etc.
Yeah, I agree. It's difficult to 'assimilate' yourself into understanding another platform when you've been using a different system for so long. I used to think a lot of things about Macs were stupid when I first switched, but I soon realized they were just different from what I was familiar with, didn't make them "wrong." A few years later I've actually found many of those OS X differences to make more sense than Windows, and be considerably more intuitive and elegant in a design sense, with your mention of the unified 'top menu' being a perfect example.
now I do most of my personal works on MacOS, but I still keep a copy of windows in my HDD. Without it I'd feel like im missing something And Mac OS isnt better, its just different. Granted that MacOS has some nice features, but those doesn't make you "never use Windows ever again". After my iphone project is done, I will try my hand on the new UDK, may be then I will spend more time on Windows again
