I have over the last 3 years switched my wife and two kids to Macs. To me, they are generally superior, have fewer things go wrong, boot up in 1/30th of the time. My wife is an artist and it is vastly superior for working with visual images.

However, there are a few things Macs don't do. In addition to the scientific and engineering software mentioned, I occasionally find interesting software for the PC that doesn't have a Mac version or the Mac version is dumbed down. For example, one of my kids and my wife are both quite dyslexic. My son uses Dragon Naturally Speaking for speech recognition. It is far superior to anything that exists on the Mac and has no Mac version. They've licensed the Dragon speech engine to a Mac company, but the sales guy for that company, when I described what my son does, told him that a number of the features he would use are blocked by Apple (not the software). Similarly, I bought a LiveScribe pen -- you take notes on a special pad and it records what is being said, say in a lecture; When you take the pen and pad back later and put it on the section of the pad where you wrote a few notes on the lecture, it will replay the audio for you. Good for meetings as well, I'd think. There is a Mac version, but it is really dumbed down. Software for syncing the Mac with a Blackberry is sketchy.

That said, my son uses the Mac side for some things and the PC side for Dragon.

I have been sticking with the PCs because of interoperatibilty, though that is a decreasingly small problem as one of my business partners uses Macs, but also because I have a Fujitsu tablet, which I use when I give presentations. Two weeks ago, I did a webinar and was able to write on my PowerPoint slides that the participants could so in real time. If and when Apple comes out with a good tablet, I'll probably switch.

voice rec.
 

you are most likely referring to macspeach DICTATE. which does license the speech and language engine of Dragon. I think it is actually from Nuance. Anyway, I use Dragon on a pc and Dictate on a mac, and while there are a few limited features missing the experience and quality is the same.

David Pogue (an acquaintance who seems to be disliked by a lot of the posters here) dictates his NY Times columns and uses a Mac. He has carpal tunnel or something.

Well, that's a deal killer. I have dozens of user-defined functions, custom VB routines and macros which are critical to my work.

he's lying to you. apple does not block anything third parties do.

i don't have a blackberry but i've heard good things about blackberry sync from mark/space:

http://www.markspace.com/products/bl...-software.html

microsoft office 2004 supports vb (and the even older office v.x). it is also faster than office 2008.

Can it work with files from Windows Excel 2007? While most of my clients are still on Excel 2003, some have upgraded, and I occasionally get files in the new .xlsx format.

microsoft has a converter, as does a third party, and the numbers app in apple's iwork suite can directly open them, however, i've not tried any of them.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/960403
http://www.panergy-software.com/prod.../features.html
http://www.apple.com/iwork/numbers/whats-new.html#excel

The new xlsx format is somewhat easily converted to other formats. But when you deal with the xlsm (macro-enabled) and other versions of the documents even the Windows version of the older office suites can choke.

menaker and pdxer, I don't think he's lying to me. The underlying speech engine is indeed licensed from Nuance, so the basic speech recognition should be the same, but Dictate it is several generations back in terms of features. Most of them don't matter to an average user. But there are a few things that matter to my son that you cannot do with Dictate.

My son finds that he always has to check what the speech dictation program has produced. If it makes mistakes in key words, it seems to increase the likelihood of future errors (probably uses some kind of predictive algorithm). So, he has to keep reading, which as a dyslexic, he finds fatiguing compared to dictating to a person.

Dragon can read back to you what you just dictated into a Word file. You just say "Select last sentence" or something like that. Then you say "Read That" and it reads the last sentence back to you. You can't easily do that on a Mac. It has been a while since I talked to the MacSpeech Dictate technical support person, but it was pretty clear that you can't do that so easily. You'd have to dictate into Google Docs, use a screen reading program, and then transfer back to Word, potentially losing formatting. I've forgotten the exact details.

In addition, what my son does is dictate a Word file, email it to people (tutor, teacher) who put in changes and suggestions with Track Changes, and then he wants to go back in and make changes (sometimes accepting theirs, sometimes not). Apparently, because of a restriction that Apple (and I confirmed that it was Apple and not MSFT) put on something (I think how the audio input was stored but I don't really remember), makes it impossible to go back and forth between Dictate's output and words input with Track Changes. He was trying to sell me the software but was technical support and not sales and he told me that for the way my son uses it, you needed Dragon. I wanted to buy Dictate so my son could stay only on the Mac side, but he was clear that I couldn't do what I wanted on the Mac side.

We also use a program with a library of macros called knowbrainer that makes using Dragon even easier (and makes writing additional macros quite easy). It only works with Dragon. You can say things like "Select last paragraph."

I'm going to get Dictate for my wife, so I'll get a chance to see it.

pdxer, my only experience is my business partner, who despite having a serious IT department reported that the syncing was imperfect. He's switched to an iphone.

I don't think anyone said anyone was lying to you, I hope you didin't misinterpret that from my post. That wasn't the intent, or the content of my post.

As I said, there are SOME differences and limitations, although one can dictate into the dictate box, or any WORD app for that matter. I don't use the read it back to me feature, never have had a use for it. My only strong point is that as far as speech recognition goes and ease of use, functionality fit, there are very very few differences or deficiencies.

if he said that apple is preventing them from implementing a feature, then yes, he is lying.

i would be very interested to find out the specifics about this so called restriction and with whom you confirmed it, because as i said, apple doesn't block anything that anyone does. if a particular feature is not there, it is because the developer chose not to implement it, for whatever reason.

Just wanted to mention that Xmarks works very well for synchronizing bookmarks across computers (and provides a backup).

+1
 

+1 on xmarks (previously Foxmarks) works well across platforms, for users of IE, firefox and even safari. Worth installing JUST for the easy import across the platforms.