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AFAIK, Apple does or did sponsor MacPorts and uses or used it internally; but maybe I'm wrong. Apple should have a vested interest in developers on their platf

AFAIK, Apple does or did sponsor MacPorts and uses or used it internally; but maybe I'm wrong. Apple should have a vested interest in developers on their platform and thus ports of popular F/OSS; but obviously, developers, graphic artists, music and other content producers aren't as significant a customer group relative to consumers as they used to be. I wonder how the decline of the Mac platform for professional work hits Apple's baseline assuming the historical draw of content creators to the platform also brought consumers and has been used by Apple in advertising, but I guess Apple knows better and simply makes so much more money with iDevices.

saagarjha 6y ago
Apple sponsored much of the original work on MacPorts, but these days it's run as an independent project of which a handful of maintainers are still from Apple. The first patches for Apple silicon came from Apple engineers, FWIW.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I was surprised that you said up-thread they use Homebrew internally, though? Do they use both? Did they switch at some point?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Apple's a large company, and like many large companies different people use different things ;) Since teams are largely autonomous with regards for tooling, I am sure that the choice of Homebrew or MacPorts for dependency management comes down to the choice of one engineer from the early stages of a project. For teams that use neither themselves developers are free to choose either for their machines. I would assume that new hires mostly pick Homebrew to use when given the choice.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    I'd assume any sufficiently large and old MacOS shop uses some combination; I don't see why Apple themselves would be any different.
alwillis 6y ago
Apple should have a vested interest in developers on their platform and thus ports of popular F/OSS… Lets not forget that pretty much everything that's part of the Darwin layer (a.k.a. Unix) is already running natively on M1 Macs, including Ruby, Python, Perl, Vim, Emacs, etc. Straight from Apple. I wonder how the decline of the Mac platform for professional work hits Apple's baseline assuming… Apple's Mac revenue hit an all-time high just last quarter and that was before M1 Macs shipped. Yes, a product line that's about to be 37 years old in January 2021 hit $9 billion in revenue during a global pandemic [1] and jumped 39% [2]. I doubt there's a decline in professional usage of the Mac; even if there were, entry level M1 Macs that outperform professional Intel-based machines from Apple and others will address that. but I guess Apple knows better and simply makes so much more money with iDevices. The iPhone is brings in the most money but the Mac ($9 billion) made more than the iPad ($6.7 billion) and the Apple Watch + HomePod ($7.8 billion). [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-reports-fourth-... [2]: https://fortune.com/2010/05/17/u-s-mac-sales-up-39-in-april/ https://fortune.com/2010/05/17/u-s-mac-sales-up-39-in-april/
pjmlp 6y ago
The only decline is from GNU/Linux devs buying Apple hardware as pretty UNIX.

saagarjha 6y ago

Apple sponsored much of the original work on MacPorts, but these days it's run as an independent project of which a handful of maintainers are still from Apple. The first patches for Apple silicon came from Apple engineers, FWIW.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I was surprised that you said up-thread they use Homebrew internally, though? Do they use both? Did they switch at some point?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Apple's a large company, and like many large companies different people use different things ;) Since teams are largely autonomous with regards for tooling, I am sure that the choice of Homebrew or MacPorts for dependency management comes down to the choice of one engineer from the early stages of a project. For teams that use neither themselves developers are free to choose either for their machines. I would assume that new hires mostly pick Homebrew to use when given the choice.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  I'd assume any sufficiently large and old MacOS shop uses some combination; I don't see why Apple themselves would be any different.

alwillis 6y ago

Apple should have a vested interest in developers on their platform and thus ports of popular F/OSS… Lets not forget that pretty much everything that's part of the Darwin layer (a.k.a. Unix) is already running natively on M1 Macs, including Ruby, Python, Perl, Vim, Emacs, etc. Straight from Apple. I wonder how the decline of the Mac platform for professional work hits Apple's baseline assuming… Apple's Mac revenue hit an all-time high just last quarter and that was before M1 Macs shipped. Yes, a product line that's about to be 37 years old in January 2021 hit $9 billion in revenue during a global pandemic [1] and jumped 39% [2]. I doubt there's a decline in professional usage of the Mac; even if there were, entry level M1 Macs that outperform professional Intel-based machines from Apple and others will address that. but I guess Apple knows better and simply makes so much more money with iDevices. The iPhone is brings in the most money but the Mac ($9 billion) made more than the iPad ($6.7 billion) and the Apple Watch + HomePod ($7.8 billion). [1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-reports-fourth-quarter-results/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-reports-fourth-... [2]: https://fortune.com/2010/05/17/u-s-mac-sales-up-39-in-april/ https://fortune.com/2010/05/17/u-s-mac-sales-up-39-in-april/

pjmlp 6y ago

The only decline is from GNU/Linux devs buying Apple hardware as pretty UNIX.