Most of the developers at my current job are on OSX laptops. A bunch of them started cursing some months ago after installing whatever-cat-named-update because their systems got bogged down (disk paging, beach ball icon, and sometime systems so unresponsive they had to hardboot them) - seems like Apple messed up the memory manager, majorly. Not something you'll see if you're just drinking caffè latte and not using your shiny laptop for facebook and hipstagram - but definitely if you're actually using the machine.
-f0dder
As someone who has been using OSX for over two years (an imac and a macbook pro), I can confirm this. Memory management in OSX makes no sense, the system is constantly paging stuff even though there's more than enough free memory for everything. Almost every time I leave
eclipse open during the night, when I return on the next day and set focus on the window I have to watch the beach ball for a few minutes while it pages back stuff; also, usually it's faster just to kill eclipse and reopen it than wait for it to be paged in again. Also, we have 20+ macs at my workplace, and around 50% of them have had to go back to apple for fixing various stuff; all the 2year+ ones have serious marks all over the screen similar to sunburn, despite the fact that none get direct sunlight.
A related complaint: I see the beach ball at least once a week, apparently for no reason: in this situation usually the memory is half free and the CPU isn't being used at all. Also, I can see more youtube videos at the same time in my girlfriend's phone than on either of my macs (more than one is pushing it). And I can't use
this awesome stuff with any of the macs because it's simply too slow (both macs are dual cores with 4gb ram) and the laptop will burn a hole on whatever it is resting on.
Sorry for the rant, but I really could go on forever on why you do not want to buy a mac. The fact that it runs something that looks like unix is awesome, though. (and the touchpads, mice and keyboards are the best invention ever)