If you have ever had any damage done to your computer or files by a virus, this might be reason enough to switch to Apple as their operating system is 100 percent virus-free. You will not be enriching Norton's anti-viral software division when you purchase a Mac. From a hardware perspective Apple's new Power Mac G5 chip is one of the fastest chips on the market and has even been stringed together to form one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
To further sweeten the offering, this week Apple introduced the new version of their operating system Mac OS X version 10.3 (Panther) that has additional goodies. Over 50 percent of e-mails are spam, and the anti-spam controls have been beefed up in Panther. Mac OS X Mail can screen out all messages except what comes from recent correspondents and people in your address book. It also auto-blocks junk-mail graphics that, when opened, report back to the spammer that the message has landed safely at a working e-mail address.
In terms of pure productivity power, Panther's most important perk is a new anti-window-clutter feature called Exposé. When you press a certain keystroke (of your choosing), all windows in all programs visibly shrink and array themselves across the screen like non-overlapping tiles. You just click the one you want to bring forward at full size. This visual method of plucking a window from a haystack is so brilliant and addictive, you'll wind up using it dozens of times a day. Exposé is the biggest graphical breakthrough that operating systems have achieved in years.
The chief programmer for this site is one of Apple's top developers (this blog runs on the Apple software program WebObjects) so I have had an inside perspective on Apple for some time now, and I am getting very close to switching to a Mac.
New York Times October 23, 2003