jd smith

Actually, most astronomers are from a Sun/Solaris background, or, more
recently, Linux background [1], yet want a laptop that:

a) Works well out of the box with no driver/kernel futzing.
b) Runs Microsoft Office for those occasional yet unavoidable brushes
with NASA HQ, the aerospace industry, etc. (where sending a
complete Word document containing a single sentence with an agenda
item is considered completely acceptable).
c) Has support for all their favorite X11 tools, like DS9.
d) Runs all of their accumulated C and/or FORTRAN code, usually
compiled with GCC.
e) iTunes, iChat, iMovie, iPhoto, iMaSuckerForPrettyApps.
f) Has Apples' Keynote, for postscript/PDF-savvy presentations.

Macs do all of the above, though not without some compromises. And it
appears Apple knows this is a growing user segment, and occasionally
throws the sci-users a bone (Control-key remapping, virtual desktops
in Leopard: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/spaces.html, etc.).

Though I don't know of an "IDL for Mac users" guide, there are several
astronomer-written guides for OSX converts, e.g.:

http://satchmo.as.arizona.edu/~jrigby/osx.html

and links within.

JD

[1] Primarily differentiated by whether they remap the Control key to
its God-given location, just left of the "a".