5 ms·

I had the opposite experience once: at my previous company we were all issued mid-tier ThinkPads. Completely out of the blue we all received an email saying we'

I had the opposite experience once: at my previous company we were all issued mid-tier ThinkPads. Completely out of the blue we all received an email saying we'd be given a set budget and would be able to choose any machine we wanted. We went from 100% Windows to about 80% OS X within a week. They ended up giving the old ThinkPads away. (I put Ubuntu on one and gave it to my mom.) This was in 2012 or so, and because of that I was able to learn Objective-C and go on to work on the first version of our native app. It made me a stronger engineer, and allowed the company to have developers who were already familiar with the product and backend services work on native. It was win-win.

jimmaswell 6y ago
That many people willingly moved to OSX? Why? Was it a graphics company?
- db48x 6y ago
  Never underestimate the power of marketing.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  Are MacBooks any good for graphics? :-O
- pak9rabid 6y ago
  OSX is great at getting the fuck out of the way and letting you get more work done in my experience (development work).
  - Shared404 6y ago
    I think it's just what you're used to. Put me in front of a Linux desktop, and I can just start working. Put me in front of a Windows desktop, give me 30 minutes to set up what I need, and I can start working. Put me in front of a Mac, and come back to me still yelling at it five hours later. I'm sure I could learn if it was worth the time to me, but I definitely wouldn't argue that it's superior (for me personally at least).
    - eitland 6y ago
      Yes it is really individual: I have an ex-colleague who was a linux super-user and awesome sysadmin but moved to Mac for his development laptop. He loved Mac, and couldn't stand the hassle of Linux anymore as far as I understood him. This confused me a lot as even though I wasn't even close to his level at that time I had no problems living with my Linux machines while my Mac laptop used to drive me crazy every day with some nonsense. Turns out it is extremely individual. Maybe it is because I'm a keyboard person. When I work efficiently I feel I rarely touch the touchpad. I use fullscreen a lot, I sometimes use virtual desktops a lot etc.
      - robbyking 6y ago
        Enabling "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls" makes keyboard navigation much, much easier on macOS.
      - Shared404 6y ago
        You may be on to something with the keyboard idea. I've always used i3/Sway/Pop!_Shell, or just dealt with windows subpar tiling. I'm picky about terminals as well, so that may have something to do with it. Although Mac's shell is nicer than windows (obviously), I can't stand the built in terminal app.
    - m463 6y ago
      I think my productivity graphs would look like: | 22 <- linux | 22 | 1111121111 <- macos | 1 22 |1 22 |122 |000000000000 <- windows -------------
  - m463 6y ago
    It has been getting in the way more and more. The only good news would be... if apple decides to "reverse course" questing for non-discerning-consumers, all the "crazy ones" will breathe a sigh of relief and buy a pile of new hardware. I remember when apple gave up on its "apple-inward-looking" powerpc hardware and shipped intel machines. All of a sudden apple machines could run windows too, people could see more possibilities buying apple and the market for apple hardware became much larger very quickly.
- rubatuga 6y ago
  It was before WSL
  - EVdotIO 6y ago
    Yes, while WSL2 has some filesystem quirks, it works pretty darn well for what I do (ruby development). I picked up a 5 Y/O 2 CPU E5 v4 Xeon workstation for 300 bucks. I've sunk in an additional 400 for an SSD, RAM and GPU, and when paired with Microsoft Remote Desktop, I've got a solid setup that allows the best of all worlds.
    - TimTheTinker 6y ago
      If ruby development is your gig, and especially if Linux is your target runtime environment, I don't understand why you'd choose anything other than Linux, unless the choice was made for you. Speaking as a web dev on a company-issued Mac, running my local dev environment inside a Parallels Linux VM. I asked to switch to Linux but was turned down. (Now if Microsoft released LSW, i.e. an Ubuntu-based distro with Windows syscall support via a KVM-hosted NT kernel, I very well might opt for that instead.)
      - EVdotIO 6y ago
        Obviously back in the day windows was an absolute dog for any dev work outside of windows, and a complete no go. I've only started using it for development a few months now, but so far haven't encountered any major issues. Maybe I'll run into some interoperability problems with specific syscalls at the compatibility layer, but so far it largely just works for my needs (VS Code with intellisense and debugging, docker, K8S, Zsh and few other tools). If my tests pass locally, I can safely assume they pass on the CI server, and haven't been proven wrong so far. If I ever need a linux box, there's an old laptop that's just for that. At this point it's turtles all the way down, what's the harm adding another turtle on top. It's not all roses, there is a noticeable performance hit with the filesystem in both WSL and the windows layer. I wouldn't use it for production, and why would you, but for development, it's fine and largely not a problem. If you had to regularly deal with a large numbers of files, say log parsing or compiling, it's probably not going to work. Besides recent OS X SSL library issues, I've haven't ever run in problems developing on a Mac and have used one for the better part of 10 years now. Can't say the same with developing on Linux (almost exclusively on the graphics side of things, but that's a problem when it's your primary machine).
- kergonath 6y ago
  OS X is a great platform, less frustrating to use than Windows, with lots of well-designed GUI apps, a true MS Office, and a whole UNIX under the hood.
- robbyking 6y ago
  It was Hotwire.com.

jimmaswell 6y ago

That many people willingly moved to OSX? Why? Was it a graphics company?

db48x 6y ago
Never underestimate the power of marketing.
lostmsu 6y ago
Are MacBooks any good for graphics? :-O
pak9rabid 6y ago
OSX is great at getting the fuck out of the way and letting you get more work done in my experience (development work).
- Shared404 6y ago
  I think it's just what you're used to. Put me in front of a Linux desktop, and I can just start working. Put me in front of a Windows desktop, give me 30 minutes to set up what I need, and I can start working. Put me in front of a Mac, and come back to me still yelling at it five hours later. I'm sure I could learn if it was worth the time to me, but I definitely wouldn't argue that it's superior (for me personally at least).
  - eitland 6y ago
    Yes it is really individual: I have an ex-colleague who was a linux super-user and awesome sysadmin but moved to Mac for his development laptop. He loved Mac, and couldn't stand the hassle of Linux anymore as far as I understood him. This confused me a lot as even though I wasn't even close to his level at that time I had no problems living with my Linux machines while my Mac laptop used to drive me crazy every day with some nonsense. Turns out it is extremely individual. Maybe it is because I'm a keyboard person. When I work efficiently I feel I rarely touch the touchpad. I use fullscreen a lot, I sometimes use virtual desktops a lot etc.
    - robbyking 6y ago
      Enabling "Use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls" makes keyboard navigation much, much easier on macOS.
    - Shared404 6y ago
      You may be on to something with the keyboard idea. I've always used i3/Sway/Pop!_Shell, or just dealt with windows subpar tiling. I'm picky about terminals as well, so that may have something to do with it. Although Mac's shell is nicer than windows (obviously), I can't stand the built in terminal app.
  - m463 6y ago
    I think my productivity graphs would look like: | 22 <- linux | 22 | 1111121111 <- macos | 1 22 |1 22 |122 |000000000000 <- windows -------------
- m463 6y ago
  It has been getting in the way more and more. The only good news would be... if apple decides to "reverse course" questing for non-discerning-consumers, all the "crazy ones" will breathe a sigh of relief and buy a pile of new hardware. I remember when apple gave up on its "apple-inward-looking" powerpc hardware and shipped intel machines. All of a sudden apple machines could run windows too, people could see more possibilities buying apple and the market for apple hardware became much larger very quickly.
rubatuga 6y ago
It was before WSL
- EVdotIO 6y ago
  Yes, while WSL2 has some filesystem quirks, it works pretty darn well for what I do (ruby development). I picked up a 5 Y/O 2 CPU E5 v4 Xeon workstation for 300 bucks. I've sunk in an additional 400 for an SSD, RAM and GPU, and when paired with Microsoft Remote Desktop, I've got a solid setup that allows the best of all worlds.
  - TimTheTinker 6y ago
    If ruby development is your gig, and especially if Linux is your target runtime environment, I don't understand why you'd choose anything other than Linux, unless the choice was made for you. Speaking as a web dev on a company-issued Mac, running my local dev environment inside a Parallels Linux VM. I asked to switch to Linux but was turned down. (Now if Microsoft released LSW, i.e. an Ubuntu-based distro with Windows syscall support via a KVM-hosted NT kernel, I very well might opt for that instead.)
    - EVdotIO 6y ago
      Obviously back in the day windows was an absolute dog for any dev work outside of windows, and a complete no go. I've only started using it for development a few months now, but so far haven't encountered any major issues. Maybe I'll run into some interoperability problems with specific syscalls at the compatibility layer, but so far it largely just works for my needs (VS Code with intellisense and debugging, docker, K8S, Zsh and few other tools). If my tests pass locally, I can safely assume they pass on the CI server, and haven't been proven wrong so far. If I ever need a linux box, there's an old laptop that's just for that. At this point it's turtles all the way down, what's the harm adding another turtle on top. It's not all roses, there is a noticeable performance hit with the filesystem in both WSL and the windows layer. I wouldn't use it for production, and why would you, but for development, it's fine and largely not a problem. If you had to regularly deal with a large numbers of files, say log parsing or compiling, it's probably not going to work. Besides recent OS X SSL library issues, I've haven't ever run in problems developing on a Mac and have used one for the better part of 10 years now. Can't say the same with developing on Linux (almost exclusively on the graphics side of things, but that's a problem when it's your primary machine).
kergonath 6y ago
OS X is a great platform, less frustrating to use than Windows, with lots of well-designed GUI apps, a true MS Office, and a whole UNIX under the hood.
robbyking 6y ago
It was Hotwire.com.