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> The Apple hardware and operating system have been standards for developers for many years now. I think this is yet-another kind of bubble people submerge the

by dom0 10y ago

> The Apple hardware and operating system have been standards for developers for many years now. I think this is yet-another kind of bubble people submerge themselves in.

lallysingh 10y ago
Lots of places are heavy Mac, even when they only develop server side software to run on Linux. The laptops are well behaved, low maintenance, have good UIs, and have good support.
- gpderetta 10y ago
  I still don't understand why one would use a laptop as their main development environment instead of a proper workstation (more cores, more ram, larger disks).
  - nathan_f77 10y ago
    Laptops are portable and fast enough. There's not much else to say.
  - jslabovitz 10y ago
    My workstation is an 11" Macbook Air, and has been for years. For what I do -- mostly Ruby, some C, some shell -- it's perfect. I fullscreen everything, and switch between apps with cmd-tab. I avoid or have disabled most macOS GUI features. 4 cores is fine. 8GB is fine, though having a couple hundred open tabs in Safari slows things down a tad. If I need to do something requiring more screen space, like an InDesign layout or a SketchUp design, I just cable up an external monitor & keyboard. Simple, straightforward, no stress.
- dom0 10y ago
  You're missing the point. I'm not saying macs are bad or whatever, I'm saying that "macs are the default hardware for everyone ^W developers" is just skewed overall. Backing that claim up by "but [I feel like] 90 % of conference people have a macbook on their lap" is just backing my claim up, that it's a skewed perception, because conference attendees are a minority of all developers (they have to be - just compare the number of developers to the attendee numbers of big conferences), and you can't just extrapolate (the same goes for "I only see {macbooks, XPSes, thinkpads (pick one)} at $coffeeShop"). Many people don't care about conferences at all, or their employers don't care (and hence these people don't feel like spending hundreds of bucks from their own pockets to attend), some don't want to go on conferences and so on. For/to many developers they are just irrelevant. Obviously not everyone goes to coffee shops, either.
  - lallysingh 10y ago
    There's going to be a lot of variance across different populations of developers. For tech sector, I've worked in big tech companies smaller ones, and the majority of developers consistently use macs as their laptops. Your experience can be different, but without a global survey, there's no way to be sure. The closest proxy we can probably find is what CS students are using - as they'll likely continue using that platform going forward. There aren't hard reasons to switch as there used to be -- VPN software tends to work well on all 3 platforms, and there's not nearly as much client-side native development as there used to be.

by dom0 10y ago

> The Apple hardware and operating system have been standards for developers for many years now. I think this is yet-another kind of bubble people submerge themselves in.

lallysingh 10y ago

Lots of places are heavy Mac, even when they only develop server side software to run on Linux. The laptops are well behaved, low maintenance, have good UIs, and have good support.

gpderetta 10y ago
I still don't understand why one would use a laptop as their main development environment instead of a proper workstation (more cores, more ram, larger disks).
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  Laptops are portable and fast enough. There's not much else to say.
- jslabovitz 10y ago
  My workstation is an 11" Macbook Air, and has been for years. For what I do -- mostly Ruby, some C, some shell -- it's perfect. I fullscreen everything, and switch between apps with cmd-tab. I avoid or have disabled most macOS GUI features. 4 cores is fine. 8GB is fine, though having a couple hundred open tabs in Safari slows things down a tad. If I need to do something requiring more screen space, like an InDesign layout or a SketchUp design, I just cable up an external monitor & keyboard. Simple, straightforward, no stress.
dom0 10y ago
You're missing the point. I'm not saying macs are bad or whatever, I'm saying that "macs are the default hardware for everyone ^W developers" is just skewed overall. Backing that claim up by "but [I feel like] 90 % of conference people have a macbook on their lap" is just backing my claim up, that it's a skewed perception, because conference attendees are a minority of all developers (they have to be - just compare the number of developers to the attendee numbers of big conferences), and you can't just extrapolate (the same goes for "I only see {macbooks, XPSes, thinkpads (pick one)} at $coffeeShop"). Many people don't care about conferences at all, or their employers don't care (and hence these people don't feel like spending hundreds of bucks from their own pockets to attend), some don't want to go on conferences and so on. For/to many developers they are just irrelevant. Obviously not everyone goes to coffee shops, either.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  There's going to be a lot of variance across different populations of developers. For tech sector, I've worked in big tech companies smaller ones, and the majority of developers consistently use macs as their laptops. Your experience can be different, but without a global survey, there's no way to be sure. The closest proxy we can probably find is what CS students are using - as they'll likely continue using that platform going forward. There aren't hard reasons to switch as there used to be -- VPN software tends to work well on all 3 platforms, and there's not nearly as much client-side native development as there used to be.