I bought my first Mac about a month and a half ago during Spring Break: a 24" iMac!

A couple weeks before that, Apple refreshed their iMac line with better processors and 4GB DDR3 RAM standard... all for a lower price!  I had been planning on building a desktop to replace my nearly four year old 17" HP Laptop.  The new iMac offerings and my interest in learning to use OSX (and supported software like the iPhone SDK, Garageband, and iMovie) prompted me to make the jump and switch to a Mac.

It really was an easy transition.  I can do everything just as well on my iMac that I used to do on my PC.  While I'm sure advanced OSX users will tell me differently, I don't see any justification for why OSX is better than Windows XP or vice versa.  For average use, both operating systems function just fine for me, though each of course have their own minor differences and annoyances.

Here's my short complaint and praise list for my iMac/OSX after a month and a half of use:

Complaints (most of these are minor annoyances... but the devil's in the details!)

• You can't cut files... only copy/paste or drag and drop. Ridiculous. When I want to move a file, cutting and pasting it is so much faster than drag n drop.
• The Home and End keys don't go to the beginning/end of a line of text by default... they go to the beginning or end of the entire DOCUMENT.  Luckily Evan helped me fix this with Double Command.
• Speaking of the Home and End keys, they no longer exist on the keyboard Apple shipps with its iMacs.  Instead, Apple has begun shipping a mini, notebook-like keyboard for its desktop computers.  Apart from some minor cost savings for Apple, I have no idea why the company made this change.  Having the arrow keys crammed in under the rest of the keys as well as no home, end, or numeric keys prompted me to shell out an ADDITIONAL $50 for a full keyboard.  While you can get a full keyboard for free if you order via Apple.com, you can't if your purchase is made at an Apple Store as mine was.

Praises

• I love the all-in-one design.  This was a major factor in deciding to get an iMac. I wanted more processing power and screen realestate than my laptop, but still a level of mobility when needed.  I also love the integrated iSight camera and microphone... fewer peripherals and the mic works great when I'm playing games like Team Fortress 2.
• I love Dashboard and Expose.  While I'm sure there are Windows third-party apps that provide similar functionality, it's great that so much of this is supported out-of-the-box in OSX.  Much less hastle.
• iPhoto is excellent... now I have a great way to organize and view my photos and the photo recognition is really pretty damn great.
• GarageBand is sweet.  I was able to create a quick song in under an hour without ever having used the software before.  I'm looking forward to buying a keyboard soon to use with my Mac/GarageBand.
• I've also found several other little things quite useful on OSX, like the integrated Downloads stack.  On Windows, I never used the downloads manager in Firefox because it bogs it down after a while... but the OSX Downloads stack is really nice.  I just wish it'd auto clear itself every few weeks or so.
• And unsurprisingly, applications like iTunes and Quicktime work flawlessly on OSX, unlike their dinosaur ports for Windows.  Everything moves smoothly and scrolls like butter on OSX.

Overall, I am very satisfied with my iMac purchase and I'm looking forward to learning more about GarageBand, iMovie, and Automator during the next few months.

Please comment below with any app or system tweak suggestions you have!