A while back I purchased a Mac hoping that it would "feel like" a natural progression from the Amiga. Honestly, nothing could be furthur from the truth.
Firstly, the Mac without OSX, is a single-process box (you heard that right, OS9.1 and all previous releases of the Mac OS are NOT multitasking in any way, your Amiga has always been better ... ) :-D
... Enter OSX. I am not sure what people may or may not know about OSX, but, essentially, this is a BSD kernel, with some Mac code and a Window Manager called Aqua slapped on top. Is this a bad thing? Essentially, no. But, I would rather save $2000, buy a super fast PC and run the *nix clone of my choice, instead of OSX. Granted, you can still run all the old OS9.1 and previous applications, but, then we have the whole non-multitasking issue again. Slow and sloppy...
Second, I always got the impression that the Mac was very poorly supported. The amount of software available for it was pretty pathetic, again, this is an area where the PC really shines. Basically, don't plan on running Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 on your new Mac any time soon, if ever. Your Amiga has more games than the Mac has ever seen, and most of them are free now!
Third, OS control. One of the reasons that I love the Amiga so much is that I have control over everything. I know where everything is, I know what everything does, there are no surprises like "where did all my HD space go?" that I get from Windows. The CLI is actually important, and coming from a Unix background, this is important to me. The Mac has no shell or CLI, and on the PC it's essentially meaningless now . The Mac is also a complete whore (can I use the word whore here?) to develop software for. There are ROMs but they are no where nearly as robust as the kickstart ROMs and there is nothing that even resembles the power and flexibility of Intuition.
Personally, as a previous Mac user, for about 2 years, I was very disappointed in the machines. I had respect for Apple back in the 80's, but, they pretty much suck now.
In my very humble opinion, I would stick with the Amiga, if you like the Amiga. OS4 is coming, systems are a little bit pricey, but, they are honestly worth every dime and you still will pay a fraction of what the Mac costs. In comparison, being a classic Amiga fanatic, I would rather have an Amiga 3000T than a brand new Mac any day.
So, hope this helps you out. By the way, You only met one smug Mac user, I never met one who wasn't smug. You certainly won't find a community like the one that the Amiga has in the Mac space.
Thanks,
Mike
