I think this is an underrated aspect of the enormous success of early OS X with technical people. Before, the Mac was a big deal in graphics and other areas li

I think this is an underrated aspect of the enormous success of early OS X with technical people. Before, the Mac was a big deal in graphics and other areas like that, but didn't really have an inroad to people who wanted to code. Shifting to OSX created a platform with all the power of Linux under the hood, but with access to the COTS tools that many people prefer/need. I was part of this. In the early 21st century, I was doing lots of LAMP stack work, and you could just install everything locally on your Mac, build and test locally, and then rsync up to the test server for broader evaluation. I think this was partly inadvertent, but Apple doesn't do anything accidentally. So all of a sudden, you'd go to tech confs for things like Ruby or Python, and see a roomful of glowing Apple logos. Because deliberately or not, the platform respected the power user. People are upset now b/c they fear the iOS-ification of what we now call MacOS. I'm not convinced it's happening in any meaningful sense (I can still build and run whatever I want), but it's probably worth watching. Any move away from the "perfect hybrid" that OSX was in, say, 2002, is scary/unwelcome, even if the moves are things that are probably good ideas for normal people, and easily circumvented for power users (like a default restriction to signed code).