Fortunately, I made it past that stage, love it now, and can't imagine ever using Windows (which needed to meditate for two minutes before even turning off) as my primary operating system again. Nonetheless, the first few weeks were rough, and the switch pretty much killed my productivity during that time.
Here are some of the software and operating system challenges I experienced, as well as how they were resolved. Hopefully some of this might be helpful to those who have recently made the switch or are considering it.
It was terrible for doing real work. This was the big one. Sure, there are great applications like Final Cut Pro that are only available on the Mac, and Adobe's suite of products runs just as well on both platforms, but the vast majority of regular people don't use those applications. Nearly everyone needs to use a word processor or spreadsheet semi-regularly, and most business folks need to work with Microsoft Office documents specifically. Unfortunately, using Office 2004 on my Mac was a poor imitation of using any version of Office on any Windows computer. The main problems were speed and stability. Since Office 2004 was written for the PowerPC platform, it runs through the Rosetta translation layer in order to work on Intel Macs. There was really no good option on this front. I tried NeoOffice, OpenOffice, Apple's own suite, and even running Windows Office through VMWare Fusion. All of these solutions were horrible. Solution: Microsoft came out with Office 2008 in January, and life is so much better. It still feels a tad slower than Office 2003 on my older ThinkPad did, but I understand that Office 2007 on Windows is no picnic either. The main benefit is that Office just works now, and my biggest potential reason for switching back to Windows is gone. Thank you Microsoft!
The web is a little broken. Web sites look different on the Mac than on Windows. One reason is that everything on a Mac looks a bit different than on Windows because fonts are rendered differently, with more aggressive default anti-aliasing. I find it makes most type look better (to my eyes at least; I know many folks who find the Mac's type to look "blurry" by comparison). Another reason the web looks different is because most sites are designed to work with Internet Explorer, and modern versions of IE are not available on the Mac. There are huge debates in the Mac community about which browser is best, but Apple's Safari is the market leader, and is the one I prefer for various reasons. However, many web sites don't render properly under Safari, and a small number of sites don't work at all. This is just pathetic when one considers that HTML was designed to specifically work across platforms. In fact, it's one of the primary reasons I convinced myself that switching to a Mac would be okay, since I use mostly web-based applications these days. I was particularly disappointed when I discovered that even many Google products didn't run as well on Safari, or on any Mac browser, as they did on IE or Firefox for Windows. Solution: Things are getting better. Thanks perhaps to efforts like the Acid tests which highlight and embarrass non-compliant browsers, it really seems like browser developers - including the IE8 team - are listening and the experience across browsers is becoming more similar. WebKit becoming a cross-platform standard is helping too.
My mouse was completely broken. This one was bizarre and completely unexpected. For some reason, my mouse didn't feel right on OS X. At first I thought it could be a device problem, so I bought a new mouse. The new mouse didn't feel any better, so I thought perhaps I wasn't yet used to the new mouse's shape, and I should get a different mouse that was shaped more like my old one. That didn't work either. I had no idea what was going on. After a little Googling I learned that OS X uses a different mouse pointer "acceleration curve" than Windows. Windows uses a flatter curve, which makes the mouse respond more naturally, whereas OS X's curve accelerates quicker for speed but slower for smaller, precise movements. The theory is fine, unfortunately the reality just doesn't work at all, with the pointer always feeling too fast or too slow. Solution: There are numerous solutions for this one, including buying a Microsoft Mouse which includes a driver with the Windows acceleration curve. I ended up buying SteerMouse, which lets you modify the curve manually. Some people also don't notice this at all, so for them it's a non-issue.
My phone didn't sync. I have a Windows Mobile phone, and Microsoft doesn't make ActiveSync for OS X. Solution: there are third-party applications which can sync with your Windows Mobile device, such as Missing Sync. I ended up using ActiveSync under VMWare Fusion.
There's no standard uninstall application. Initially I thought OS X's installation system was brilliant. You just drag an application into the Applications folder, and it's installed. If you want to uninstall, you delete it from the same folder. Unfortunately, there are various files outside of that folder which some applications will modify, which of course will not be reverted if you just delete the application package. Most well-behaved applications provide their own uninstall utility to clean up these files, however some don't. Solution: Again, there are third-party applications such as AppZapper which fill this need. I've found that not installing misbehaving applications, which are definitely in the minority, is an even simpler solution.
CTRL-X and CTRL-V don't work for cutting and pasting. For some reason, Apple thinks these keystrokes ought to be COMMAND-X and COMMAND-V. In fact, a lot of what one does with CTRL on Windows is done instead with COMMAND on the Mac. This might make sense if it weren't for the fact that Mac keyboards also have a CTRL key. [Note: As has been pointed out by several folks, the reason that Apple uses COMMAND-X instead of CTRL-X is because Apple invented this shortcut, and Microsoft copied it and used CTRL instead of COMMAND. Of course, now 95% of the world uses CTRL-X, which one must use on web-based applications even using a Mac.] Solution: OS X lets you swap the COMMAND and CTRL keys, which is what I've done. Unfortunately there are a small number of applications for which this doesn't work, and for those you just have to remember to do the reverse.
The HOME and END keys don't work correctly. I actually didn't discover this problem until I hooked up my external keyboard, since the MacBook Pro doesn't even have home and end keys! When I did start to use those keys, I discovered that not only do they not behave the way they do on Windows, but they actually behave differently from application to application on the Mac. In most applications, home and end move to the beginning and end of the page. But in some applications and contexts, they behave like they do on Windows, going to the beginning or end of the line. This is just ridiculous, especially if you use those keys a lot. Solution: I didn't actually find any perfect solutions to this. There are keyboard remapping techniques that you can use but these don't appear to work for all applications (or even all contexts within the same application). I ended up ditching my initial external keyboard for the Apple wireless keyboard, which actually doesn't have home and end keys. As a result, I finally migrated over to the Apple equivalent keystrokes: COMMAND-left and COMMAND-right (or in my case, CTRL-left and CTRL-right).
Importing email is painful. Before Gmail, I stored all of my personal and work mail locally, in multi-gigabyte Outlook PST files. I was stunned to discover that Microsoft doesn't make Outlook for the Mac. To make matters worse, Entourage, their Mac Office equivalent, can't import Outlook PST files. After playing around with Entourage and comparing it to Apple Mail, I decided to use the latter. Unfortunately, Apple Mail didn't provide any simple import solutions either. Solution: I ended up buying a $10 application called O2M which did the trick. Unfortunately, because my files were so large, it took more than a day, with lots of stopping and restarting, to complete the conversion.
It's just as buggy as Windows. No, OS X is not generally unstable. It's a very solid operating system, as most UNIX flavors tend to be. But I'm one of the rare users that didn't have many stability problems with Windows XP. When it would crash, it was typically an application problem, not an operating system issue. Of course, applications crash on OS X also, and some crash quite a bit. Solution: There's not much to say here except to hope that all software applications, on all operating systems, become more stable over time. That's a nice thought.
Aside from the above issues, there are countless additional quirks of the Mac that it takes time to get used to, but I would say there are a lot more of these which pleasantly surprise me than frustrate me. If you have any useful switching tips, especially any better suggestions than what I've listed above, I'd love to hear them.
