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20 years ago they all bought Windows machines. Apple didn't change that by suddenly being excellent and having great marketing. Developers changed that by real

20 years ago they all bought Windows machines. Apple didn't change that by suddenly being excellent and having great marketing. Developers changed that by realising that Macs were good dev machines and writing software that ran on Macs. Non-tech people ask their tech-savvy friends for advice on what tech to buy. For years that was "buy Apple; it costs more but they're more reliable, the support is great, and they're way cooler". That's no longer the case. There are manufacturers shipping great Linux laptops, that just work, and it is actually feasible to recommend one to a friend. And running Linux is way cooler these days - every muppet out there has a Macbook ;)

tpush 6y ago
> Apple didn't change that by suddenly being excellent and having great marketing. That is actually pretty much precisely the reason.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  My take on it (and I lived through this) is that pre-web everyone ran on Windows. If you were writing software, it needed to run on Windows, so you had to code on a Windows machine. Then the web changed things, and a huge number of devs moved from writing Windows desktop applications to writing web applications for the dotcom boom (I was one). This took about a decade, from around '97ish. It also freed people to use different dev machines because most of the servers were LAMP (or variants thereof), and Macs could run the AMP bit fine. Web designers who had started off in Apple-land being designers on Adobe migrated into being web developers, and that helped spread Macs into the web dev community. Yes, Macs did get better during this same period, and there was a lot of great innovation. But if nothing else had changed then that wouldn't have mattered - if you had to write Windows applications then you couldn't do that on a Mac, no matter how sexy it was. I find the parallel with today's situation (and this discussion) fascinating.

tpush 6y ago

> Apple didn't change that by suddenly being excellent and having great marketing. That is actually pretty much precisely the reason.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
My take on it (and I lived through this) is that pre-web everyone ran on Windows. If you were writing software, it needed to run on Windows, so you had to code on a Windows machine. Then the web changed things, and a huge number of devs moved from writing Windows desktop applications to writing web applications for the dotcom boom (I was one). This took about a decade, from around '97ish. It also freed people to use different dev machines because most of the servers were LAMP (or variants thereof), and Macs could run the AMP bit fine. Web designers who had started off in Apple-land being designers on Adobe migrated into being web developers, and that helped spread Macs into the web dev community. Yes, Macs did get better during this same period, and there was a lot of great innovation. But if nothing else had changed then that wouldn't have mattered - if you had to write Windows applications then you couldn't do that on a Mac, no matter how sexy it was. I find the parallel with today's situation (and this discussion) fascinating.