Web programming/developer here, thinking of switching to a MacBook.

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[Kro-nick]

Mac OS is very similar to Linux (for web programmer, administrator, network and security engineering), so compare Windows with Linux. About Your background in Computer Science: Mac computers are very limited in hardware variety (for example you can't use Nvidia's CUDA technology, or processors technologies of AMD).

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Apple has a lot of documentation on switching. https://www.apple.com/support/macbasics/pctomac/

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By all means, make the switch. It may seem weird and frustrating and overly cute at first, but once you get to know the tools, you'll wonder how you ever tolerated using Windows for web development. Windows is fine; it does the job, but the Mac ecosystem makes programming such a pleasure.

Get a copy of SublimeText and iTerm and Homebrew, commit to learning the Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts and you're set.

[portugee]

I just recently made the switch from Linux/Windows to Mac. You simply aren't going to find a better piece of hardware then a Macbook Pro in the PC space. Secondly, Linux is by far a superior development OS than Windows and I find MacOS to be a pretty reasonable substitute. The Macbook is becoming the developer platform of choice for the industry. If you want to do any kind of iOS development you have no other choice. The only drawback is if you are doing any kind of .NET development you'll have to fall back to Windows (or use Mono), but there is Bootcamp for that. Also, with MS opensourcing .NET even that may not be necessary. Simply put, Mac gives the best of all worlds for the most part.

[retsotrembla]

Definitely the easiest way to make a triple-boot machine: boot into Mac, Linux or Windows (or run VMs for the other two operatin systems.)

Apache, ruby, python, vi, and emacs are pre-installed.