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they actually were made for developers Apple has never, so far as I am aware, deliberately targeted developers as a primary audience of a laptop computer. App

they actually were made for developers Apple has never, so far as I am aware, deliberately targeted developers as a primary audience of a laptop computer. Apple's laptops became popular because they ran an operating system that was Unix under the hood, with a nice UI and good set of non-developer applications, which made them good as machines a developer could use for work and for non-work (Linux on the desktop being not so great at the second part of that). Apple has certainly been happy to make money from developers buying laptops as a result of this, but has consistently ignored the expressed wishes and desires of developers when updating its laptop lines, meaning Apple was popular in spite of Apple's indifference, rather than because Apple lovingly catered to this audience. In other words: if you were looking for an executive to run around the stage screaming "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!", I think that was probably some other company, and they got ridiculed for it...

Lio 10y ago
I believe you are mistaken. Apple has certainly courted scientific and other developers before. Here's an article about when they stopped targeting science. https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-drops-science-as-core-market-web-page-deleted https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-drops-science-...
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  "Science" is not "developers". Apple wanted to sell them on a full stack all the way up to clusters of expensive Mac hardware for parallel computing. And the article you link even admits that companies which have targeted scientific users with hardware have mostly failed -- that market is more likely to buy either extremely specialized hardware or, more likely, commodity machines that they slap Linux on.
adrianN 10y ago
Steve Jobs certainly understood the importance of developers: https://youtu.be/4QrX047-v-s?t=459 https://youtu.be/4QrX047-v-s?t=459
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  "Understanding the importance of" is different from "develop product line with explicit goal of catering to".

Lio 10y ago

I believe you are mistaken. Apple has certainly courted scientific and other developers before. Here's an article about when they stopped targeting science. https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-drops-science-as-core-market-web-page-deleted https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/apple-drops-science-...

ubernostrum 10y ago
"Science" is not "developers". Apple wanted to sell them on a full stack all the way up to clusters of expensive Mac hardware for parallel computing. And the article you link even admits that companies which have targeted scientific users with hardware have mostly failed -- that market is more likely to buy either extremely specialized hardware or, more likely, commodity machines that they slap Linux on.

adrianN 10y ago

Steve Jobs certainly understood the importance of developers: https://youtu.be/4QrX047-v-s?t=459 https://youtu.be/4QrX047-v-s?t=459

ubernostrum 10y ago
"Understanding the importance of" is different from "develop product line with explicit goal of catering to".