4 ms·
"It will be a switch from iOS developers using Macs at home to them using PCs at home and having a "work Mac" for commercial development." This is exactly what
by ascendantlogic 10y ago
"It will be a switch from iOS developers using Macs at home to them using PCs at home and having a "work Mac" for commercial development."
This is exactly what gave rise to the Mac and OSX in the last 10-15 years. People worked on Windows PCs "at work" but had Macs for personal development. Now I'm witnessing the exact same scenario play out now that Apple is the market behemoth amongst power users and developers. Do I think Microsoft will simply win everyone back? Not at this moment. They could keep stepping up their game and possibly do so. Or the collective energy people were spending on macOS could be spent on (finally) making Linux-on-desktop a viable option that doesn't require inordinate amounts of fiddling with drivers and configuration files.
Time will tell but I'm already pretty sure my next laptop will be a Dell XPS or Razer Blade.
- ihuman 10y ago> now that Apple is the market behemoth I thought Windows/PC was still much larger than Apple in the computer market?
- ascendantlogic 10y agoYes but it's been steadily declining. I guess I should have added an asterisk and said "Amongst power users/developers" since those are almost exclusively Mac now (from my observation, YMMV)
- pjmlp 10y agoI imagine you are living in a Mac bubble. On our main building, which has four floors, there are exactly 4 Macs. On two of the customers sites I visit regularly, with several hundred people on the respective buildings, only iOS developers have Macs, and they aren't that many on site.
- parasubvert 10y agoIt really varies; among many SF Bay Area companies, PCs are rare sights for the past 5-7 years. Go into any Bay Area coffee shop, for example. Now in London, Tokyo, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Toronto or New York it's probably more balanced, but I see plenty of tech companies that are Mac standard. I work for a global software and services company of over 2500 people and I'd say maybe 5% are running PCs with windows or Linux, the rest are on Macs. (And we aren't specialist iOS developers). I'm not sure what the share is in Salesforce, Amazon, Google or Facebook or the like, probably over 30% at least.
- pjmlp 10y agoI can tell you that in Europe it surely doesn't look like that. Companies like Salesforce, Amazon, Google or Facebook and similar are the snowflakes of Fortune 100. There are plenty of other companies out there, and for the large majority software development is a by product, not their main business.
- parasubvert 10y ago"for the large majority software development is a by product, not their main business." And this is why software companies are slowly taking over many other industries. :-)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- thaw13579 10y agoThe Linux subsystem on Windows seems promising too, and it may fill the same gap as the Mac OS X BSD backend when Apple transitioned from OS 9 to OS X. I'm curious to see what MS does with it, and I wonder if it could possibly win back a lot of Mac developers.
- Lio 10y agoThe two things Microsoft needs for me to switch back after 10 years with a Mac are:- 1. Really good Linux sub-system support. 2. A clear story with regard disabling all telematics and phone-home monitoring in Windows 10. If Microsoft could get its privacy stance sorted out in an upfront way I'd seriously consider them. Personally though I'm not happy with current reassurances about privacy protection in Windows 10.
- remir 10y agoThere could be a third option "soon"; Fuchsia, the new OS Google is developing. From what I see, it seems like a modular OS running Flutter apps, with Material Design as the system's UI. Google has folks who worked on BeOS, Danger, iOS, ChromeOS and Android working on this new OS.