We are closing in on one whole year of Mac use. Yes, it has been nearly a year since my wife and I bought our first iMac both switched to Mac. Despite the challenges we have faced with our Apple products (see 75% of Apple Products I Bought Have Been Defective), overall our switch to Mac OS X has been a great experience and I feel like we have been more productive now than ever before.

In a number of ways my Mac switch has made day to day things easier. My Mac sleeps and wakes up very quickly, and makes it very easy to run downstairs and check your e-mail quickly. The fact that I can open my iBook, connect to the internet, check my e-mail and close the iBook in less than one minute has completely revolutionized how my wife and I work.

My wife’s experience has been pretty good as well, though some defective components and a half-competent regional repair facility resulted in our going without her iMac for nearly a month and spending more than $60 out of pocket on shipping/courier expenses. After the second warranty service, her iMac has been silent and working just like it should. (I hope that was the last time I will have to send it in.)

We can do pretty much anything on our Macs that we could do on a Windows PC, but it is not perfect. There have been a few disappointments, a few occasions where a Windows PC would make life easier, and a few odd web sites (such as vistaprint.com or the QuickBooks online edition) whose tools require the use of Windows and Internet Explorer.

The Mac has been a saving grace in a number of ways and has made it very easy for me to transition from being a long-time Windows user. Though I am new to most of these areas, the large amount of community support has made it easy for me to get my iMac and iBook set up with a full web application development environment.

In particular, the community of Mac-wielding Ruby on Rails developers has certainly made it easier for me to get the full development environment up and running. I’m sure this would be fairly easy to do on Windows as well, but it all seems to run a bit more seamlessly on my iMac.

As someone whose business is in the field of information technology and the internet, buying an iMac G5 has allowed me to grow in leaps and bounds that I had truly never anticipated. After one year of heavy use, I feel like I have barely scraped the surface of what my Mac can do. That’s pretty exciting for me.

If I had to do it again, I would still definitely switch.