[NumberFiveAlive]

Per your point #3: I spend a lot of time in both Windows 7/VS2010 AND OSX/XCode (along with a smidgen of time in Ubuntu as well) and crashes are just about a thing of the past in all three environments. That said, Xcode/OSX gives me the spinning beach ball of death at least as much as I get a crash to desktop in W7 and far, far more often than I get a BSOD in W7. The idea that windows crashes a lot is a myth hanging around from before they went to the NT kernel in XP. Granted, it's a myth that was well earned in the Win 3.1/9x days, but still. The reality is all the major OS vendors (I'm including Canonical here) have reduced crashes to maybe a once a week occurrence or better. Hardly an issue anymore.

As for the polish comment, it's really a matter of what you're used to and strictly a matter of opinion, but I find Xcode a nightmare to navigate compared to VS2010. Sure, Xcode is shinier and looks better, but the UX is far superior in VS2010 (again, just my opinion). I'm very much looking forward to a single window interface in Xcode 4.3.

As a developer, the killer aspect of OSX to me is the full blown *nix environment paired with high level commercial apps (like Xcode, photoshop, garage band, etc.). Not to mention I don't have to worry about my display card or wireless card working in OSX (like I still have to do with Linux).

[CountSessine]

As for the polish comment, it's really a matter of what you're used to and strictly a matter of opinion, but I find Xcode a nightmare to navigate compared to VS2010. Sure, Xcode is shinier and looks better, but the UX is far superior in VS2010 (again, just my opinion). I'm very much looking forward to a single window interface in Xcode 4.3.

Oh dear - you haven't been using the multiple-window layout in Xcode 3, have you? The single window layout is the only way to be productive.

Update: wow - I got downvoted for saying that? Someone must really like the multiwindow layout. If that's you, and you don't want to pay the $5 for version 4, have a look in View->Layout in Xcode 3. Try the single window layout. You'll like it. Really.

[NumberFiveAlive]

I'm definitely going to give it a look. For some reason I thought the single window layout wasn't coming till this version.

The multiwindow layout wouldn't be so awful if OSX were better at windows management && I had more than one monitor to work with on my iMac. As it is, it's a struggle for me.

Oh, and who knows about the downvotes. I thought for sure I'd get nuked for defending VS. Have an upvote.

[b3b0p]

I didn't downvote you, I can't downvote, but I like the multiwindow layout because then it's very easy to use an external editor in place of the Xcode editor. I liked using MacVim or TextMate when I first got into iOS development.

[beej71]

Xcode 4's single window interface is a huge improvement, IMO, even though I haven't been able to get my old project to package up yet... "schemes" and "run destinations", oh my.

But I know once I figure it out, it will be better.

[sp4rki]

Quality is in the eye of the beholder. That being said, my Windows 7 workstation crashes at least once a week, as does Visual Studio 2010. I just checked my uptime in my OSX workstation and it has been up for 52 days and I've just had one instance where Xcode crashed. In my eyes (and in my experience), Windows is just not as stable as an OS for development, although it's a lot better than the past crap they've released.

UI wise, I hate VS2010. In my head I cannot fathom why you would say it's UX is better than Xcode, but once again that's personal preference and opinion, which is - of course - respected. I always say: "Use whatever you need to get the job done..."

I do agree completely on what the actual allure of OSX is. My past platform of choice has been Debian, and I always thought it was painful to have to dualboot to be able to do my work (specially when on the move). Enter OSX, which gave me all my unix tools and also runs Photoshop.

[qw]

I usually don't defend Microsoft, but I don't think your unstable workstation is the fault of Windows 7. Most likely it's a problem with one of the drivers, or maybe even a hardware issue.

[sp4rki]

Well, my other coworkers (some are windows fans, linux fans, osx fans, and one is a total freeBSD nazi) all agree that out of all our workstations, the Windows machines fail the most. Even the Windows fans acknowledge this. All other operating systems almost every time recover from errors (be them our errors or random errors on the OS side) without much trouble, while the Windows machines generally just blow up and need to be re-started.

Don't get me wrong, I do almost all my programming these days in VS2010 and I think it's a pretty decent piece of software (as is Windows 7), but it crashes more than any IDE I've ever used and the UI is just totally subpar. Windows 7 is a huge step up from Vista an XP, but I find it's nowhere near as stable as XP was. Our situation is not a hardware or driver issue, everyone had their preferences on which machines to buy, so they're all different machines.