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Macbooks are mostly bought by companies in the tech industry, which is how Apple can get away with charging high prices for them. Companies don't barter. They

Macbooks are mostly bought by companies in the tech industry, which is how Apple can get away with charging high prices for them. Companies don't barter. They'll pay whatever the price. This too is why upgrades home users do not need cost an arm and a leg. Why are MBs and MBPs used in the tech industry? Many types of dev roles can only be done well on Linux or OSX (or BSD), because they're writing software for servers or their software runs on servers. The company has to choose. Some companies go exclusively Linux for their desktops and OSX for their laptops. Some go exclusively laptop. Linux does have mature enough laptops for consumers, but for business use on the laptop side Linux hasn't gone far enough. I have yet to run into a company that doesn't offer laptops because of remote and partial remote work being so common, along with needing to take your work computer into meeting rooms from time to time. In short, it depends on the industry you're in, and if you're not in those industries you probably haven't seen it, but what fuels most Macbook sales is businesses.

ric2b 7y ago
My previous company used to offer both options (Dell laptop with Linux or MacBook) and eventually stopped offering the MacBook because of the RAM limitations at the time (16GB Max) and horrible docker performance. RAM and docker were very important for our product and whoever chose the MacBook ended up regretting it (devs only, I mean).
- proverbialbunny 7y ago
  The companies I've worked at have a "docker team" that does all of that, so everyone else can just write code. Continuous integration is enough to identify if there is a bug on Linux that isn't on OSX, but sometimes you just gotta SSH into a Linux box and build there to figure it out. Requiring docker from the get go sounds painful, but maybe that just comes from my inexperience never having to use it. Like, does CLion, PyCharm, and similar even support building into docker from the get go? Wouldn't that increase build times instead of just building it natively on your machine? Any extra level of complexity is painful until you automate it in a bug free and efficient way, I suppose.

ric2b 7y ago

My previous company used to offer both options (Dell laptop with Linux or MacBook) and eventually stopped offering the MacBook because of the RAM limitations at the time (16GB Max) and horrible docker performance. RAM and docker were very important for our product and whoever chose the MacBook ended up regretting it (devs only, I mean).

proverbialbunny 7y ago
The companies I've worked at have a "docker team" that does all of that, so everyone else can just write code. Continuous integration is enough to identify if there is a bug on Linux that isn't on OSX, but sometimes you just gotta SSH into a Linux box and build there to figure it out. Requiring docker from the get go sounds painful, but maybe that just comes from my inexperience never having to use it. Like, does CLion, PyCharm, and similar even support building into docker from the get go? Wouldn't that increase build times instead of just building it natively on your machine? Any extra level of complexity is painful until you automate it in a bug free and efficient way, I suppose.