I was one of them. I was doing some web design/frontend at that time (2005-2006), and the whole Ruby on Rails movement seemed so different, easy to learn, and yet quite productive.
And you could develop on a Mac (!!!. Windows XP was my OS at that time). All the rails screencasts I saw featured TextMate, on a Mac.
And so the first ActionScript gig I did was to pay for my shiny new Mac Mini.
Looking back to it, it seems like a stupid cargo cult effect, but Rails is the main reason I switched to the Mac since then.
Ditto, thanks to my first job, and I don't regret it, either. Despite recent software hitches, Mac OS has been far and away a superior experience for development than when I was trying to run RailsInstaller on my Windows machine.
Looking back to it, it seems like a stupid cargo cult effect, but Rails is the main reason I switched to the Mac since then.