Apple hardware is significantly more expensive - and with fewer choices - than other vendors, for similar value. Yes, Apples are very pretty, but this is business we're talking about, and pretty doesn't cut it.

Apple OSX is less secure than Vista, as security researcher Charlie Miller and others have pointed out. Apple's gotten a free ride on obscurity (small market share i.e. less attractive target for black hats) for a while, and it's brilliantly mendacious ad campaign trashing Microsoft, but Apple's free ride is over and again, this is business.

I understand you're volunteering to maintain admin on your own box, but were I CTO, I'd say "no" because the company needs uniform policies and standards. Microsoft is more business-friendly for this reason as well.

I recall a friend of mine who started at an unnamed company that was all about ditching Microsoft for Linux. This was years ago, but my friend ended up leaving the company because, basically, in the IT environment, nothing worked.

My advice: since your lead is advocating Macs, you have to at least keep an open mind or leave the company, but BEWARE the "Macs are better" religion. 'taint necessarily so.

I can see by the early postings that this will become a total Mac/PC flamefest as all these things come to be.

But to stay on topic, I think you will find the Mac to be a good development platform. Indeed, at my company, which is a Microsoft partner from way back, Macs are creeping into the development and QA ranks. They offer a very low level of upkeep and a very robust software design that doesn't crash. In addition, since they are based on FreeBSD, open source software and tools can be used if desired.

As far as using other Unix systems, Linux and BSD are used a lot at our company, but getting to a BSD box is far easier on a Mac with its built in software than the machinations that are required to do the same thing on a PC.

Usually people arguing against the Mac are doing so from a Microsoft based status quo, citing for instance, the Mac's poor support of the massive and overly complex network directory systems on Windows, or the cost issue, which rarely takes into account the return on investment. Macs don't need IT support in most cases which can also turn some IT personnel against them.

Just make up some stuff.

I'm not a big MS fan, though as a developer in the Seattle area I use their technologies so as to be eligible for the majority of programming gigs.

My first question would be software. Are their software apps available for all of your needs on the Mac platform?

My next issue would be that of finding developers. Most developers I know work in Windows, and then a significant minority in Unix or Linux. Perhaps this ratio is different in other parts of the country. But how difficult will it be to find developers who are comfortable with the Mac?

While I prefer Java, especially for larger projects, Visual Studio and C# provide a way to develop simple web applications and desktop applications/utilities more quickly and cheaply than other platforms.

As far as Java IDEs go, my experience has been that NetBeans is simpler and easier to learn, but that Eclipse is more powerful and full featured.

"I understand you're volunteering to maintain admin on your own box, but were I CTO, I'd say "no" because the company needs uniform policies and standards. Microsoft is more business-friendly for this reason as well."

I wouldn't work in a shop where I couldn't admin my own box. You're trusting me to write systems that touch all of your sensitive data and run your business, but I can't be trusted with my own computer? No thanks. Who would want to work there?

This is a job writing code, not in marketing or sales. You want the right to install and configure software as you see fit so you aren't always having to email some neck bearded comic book guy ten times a day.

The "macs are actually less secure than windows" smacks of the kind of pabulum that frames debates only among the ignorant. As measured by what? As long as a platform is securable it should work fine. Any expert user should be able to harden a windows or mac or linux system. At that point the fact that there are more people out there trying to compromise windows machines (and more compromised windows machines) by several orders of magnitude becomes a key difference.

The linux comments about "a friend" of yours also seem to me like the kind of throwaway anecdote bandied about by people without first hand experience. I have several linux based machines in my house. My roommate had been using one for months before I asked her "how do you like using linux?" Her response was "Huh? What's linux?" It's incredibly usable, stable, and workable.

I actually had to move one of my machines, which resulted in having to use wireless instead of cable for network connectivity. I plugged in a usb wireless nic and was expecting the hoary days of ndis-wrapper and the like, but ubuntu just picked it up and boom, I was online. When I plugged the same usb wireless nic into a windows xp box it took a full installation procedure using the cd that came with the device and a reboot before the network card was usable. Fail.

I would buy mac hardware, but install ubuntu on it. Look at the actual specs for what you get with a mac, and price it out from one of the pc oem vendors and you will see there really isn't much of a price different at all. When you look at sticker price vs. total cost of ownership, the disparity vanishes.

Linux will give you the ability to install anything you might want, including java, apache, mysql, etc... from convenient packages. It is probably a lot more similar to your server/deployment environment as well.

For an IDE, I would use eclipse. It's great for java/java ee code and there are a multitude of plugins for any other thing you might write. The java ee stuff in particular is nice because you can run your test environments from within the ide as well.