Over the last couple of months, four of my coworkers became first-time Mac owners. It’s as if one day everyone drank the Kool-Aid and knew they needed a Mac.

For me, it happened a little like this. About a year ago I decided that I needed a laptop. I had dozens of litte reasons, but mostly I missed Lisa and had grown tired of being sequestered in my home-office to use the Internet.

Around that time, an Apple “evangelist” visited the office to spread the good word. I hadn’t used a Mac since college, didn’t know what Mac OSX looked like, and still had the general impression that they were flakey, slow toys rather than real computers that I might want to use. But there it was: beautiful and speedy with software that I wanted to use. It had a real operating system. It came with developers tools. It was going to run on modern Intel processors. Was I really starting to think about a Mac? (“Seriously? Seriously?” I asked myself.)

Over the next few months — I’m a real slow mover — I tried to think of every reason not to buy one, but they all proved unsound. (A fellow developer and Mac devotee called this phenomenon “Fear of a Mac Planet”) Even the price was comparable to the Dell I built online.

Now, it’s nine months later. Am I still happy? Oh, yes!

But I don’t like Safari’s RSS feed aggregator. To my fellow Mac users: Consider Vienna, a better news reader.