I have recurrent tendinitis in my wrist (combination of weird bones from a break and too much typing) so I use dictation software a lot for email and writing in English.

With regard to publishers, although some really do want MS Word, my experience is that few publishers actually work with MS Word. Often, it is the editors who want MS Word, whereas the publishers will accept PDF or something else. In some cases I have been able to avoid MS Word format by agreeing to produce camera-ready PDF containing the editor’s revisions and the page numbers and so forth.

Have you found it impossible to use OpenOffice.org Writer to collaborate with people using MS Word? My experience is that most of the time it works quite well. Almost all failures come from one person, who seems to like features of MS Word that haven’t been successfully reverse engineered.

What do you use the speech recognition software for?

Bill

We both bought functionally identical machines, running the same hardware underneath (same Intel Core Duo, same motherboard, same 2 GB of RAM, same LACK OF PC CARD SLOTS — if that’s at all important to you, the new standard is not at all backwards-compatible). He was already a Mac user, and not looking to convert; I was already a PC user, but strongly willing to consider a move to a Mac after my great unhappiness with Dell.

The con with a Mac is that you pay a good deal more for that same hardware. Despite the identical specs — and the fact that my new HP has a bigger screen with higher resolution than his — I paid somewhere around 25% less for my machine than his. I didn’t end up pricing out the Mac warranty, but I would expect it to be a bit more expensive than a comparable Dell/HP warranty.On the other hand, if cost had not been a factor, I would probably have gone for the Mac on the grounds that their build quality in the areas where the parts aren’t the same is so much better. The Mac case will take a good deal more beating without complaint than my old Dell or my new HP, and I imagine your fieldwork requirements trump my train commuting in that regard. I also am MUCH more impressed by the OSX features that accompanied the Mac, like the iTunes-like media interface and remote control, than I am by the Windows Media Center extensions on my PC.

Pre-Intel, I probably would have not even considered the Mac, because I need some of the Windows applications in order to maintain compatibility with files made by coworkers — if I went off a la Pullum about the incompatibility of files across supposedly identical MS applications, I could fill a blog for a month. The Mac makes that an option, which is very nice, but it has pitfalls. I also dual-boot, doing most of my “real work” in Linux, and my experience is that I am very unhappy about frequently having to move back and forth just because I checked my e-mail and found someone sent me a document I can’t deal with in OpenOffice. If you like the Mac interface, can get all the applications you need on it, and won’t lose any sleep over the cost premium for what is now easy-to-compare hardware, I would absolutely go Mac. If you really expect you’ll be doing a lot of booting back and forth, aren’t used to it presently, and could do your work in either environment alone, I would reluctantly recommend going PC. Ultimately, dual-booting sounds a lot better on paper than it is in real-life with constant 2-minute downtimes while one OS shuts down and another starts up.