I've been putting off getting a mac for a year or more.. mostly waiting on Macrodobe to come out with Flash for the Intel macs. They finally did that and I went yesterday and picked up a nice new Mac Pro (dual 2.66Ghz) at the local Apple store.

Switching back isn't easy since I've spent roughly 6 years using pcs, so I'll be on the lookout for info on shortcut keys, must have apps, etc for the mac. The last FlashForward I attended had loads of people using macs and the recent release of universal binary Flash will encourage others to get off of Windows.

One of the first things I did after firing it up was download the latest Flash Player and then run a few of my old moldy ActionScript Performance tests on it. I only ran a few tests (geez I need to update those things..), but they were consistently about twice as fast on the mac pro as on my old AMD Athlon 2Ghz pc. That's pretty cool. I'm pretty certain the Flash Player is only using a single processor so getting double performance is good. I opted for for the quad processor model (rather than getting an imac or a laptop) because I don't like to switch computers very often since it's really disruptive. I like to buy good hardware, get it all sorted out, and then use it for years. I also like to edit home movies, so the quad processors will get used and it should be enough power to last a few years. The eight processor model was just way too expensive. I could justify ~$4000 for an "octo mac" if I were doing video editing for a living... but for Flash development it seemed like major overkill.

I should also say something about the buying experience.. and it was an experience.
- I thought that I'd get some good treatment going in and dropping ~$2500 in their store. Nope.. the place was packed with people buying systems. I walked out thinking I'd maybe bought an iPod.
- None of that special kool-aid was offered to me. No specially tinted glasses given to me. I wonder where people get that stuff?
- I overheard a sales person telling another guy that he got a 10% discount on hardware... wonder who he works for? I got a nice discount, but not that much.