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Fun fact: the software, or at least the filesystem code, for the original IPod was developed on Windows because the ARM toolkit was windows based https://corec
by adamgordonbell 5y ago
Fun fact: the software, or at least the filesystem code, for the original IPod was developed on Windows because the ARM toolkit was windows based
https://corecursive.com/063-apple-2001/#the-first-day https://corecursive.com/063-apple-2001/#the-first-day
- sn_master 5y agoFun fact 2: Most of Google was using Windows in the early 2000s because of the need for Outlook and similar software that was Windows-only as well. Even now that Macs are an option in most FAANG+, most non-fresh-grad hires either pick Linux or Windows machines and completely avoid Macs.
- jboy55 5y agoIn support for your first sentence, Macs were very unusual for techs in the valley until OSX. I ran a linux laptop for a long time until I gave in and stopped doing my own IT and got a Macbook.
- fzzzy 5y agoUm, OS X was 20 years ago
- jboy55 5y agoYup, I've been a mac user at work for the last 18 years. Before that it was linux on laptops.
- short12 5y agoTo be fair at that time macs were extremely niche in every industry. Even graphics was dwindling. Now mac's are still niche just not as tiny as before
- jboy55 5y agoIn the pre-OSX era, Macs were only found in significant numbers in the creative areas. With OSX, Macs became the defacto standard in software development.
- short12 5y agoDefacto standard? Lol not even close
- short12 5y agoIn fact it comes in third place behind windows and linux
- jboy55 5y agoSorry, that is wrong, I work at a FAANG (not apple) and have worked at plenty of startups and small to mid-sized companies. I can count the windows users on one hand. I know Walmart and contract engineers have massive office complexes around the US, they probably are all Windows due to the costs. I'd love to see your stats. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-developers-primary-operating-systems https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#technology-_-...
- ghaff 5y ago>completely avoid Macs As someone who normally attends quite a few tech conference events, that doesn't square remotely with what I see. Macs are out of all proportion to their percentage in the world at large. While it's harder to have an inventory of the rest, I assume they're mostly Linux given that one hardly ever sees a speaker presenting from a Windows laptop. [ADDED: This is in the context of events that are not Microsoft-centric.]
- wk_end 5y agoMy understanding is that MacBooks are much less popular outside of North America, where they are indeed ubiquitous.
- short12 5y agoI wouldnt call them ubiquitous in north America by any stretch of the imagination. Popular in very specific fields and I agree. Their market share in the USA is 16 percent. That's getting clobbered by windows primarily
- ghaff 5y agoThat's entirely possible. I go to a fair number of European events but there are a lot of North Americans at them as well. I wouldn't be at all surprised if pricing made MacBooks even more premium outside the US.
- ChrisRR 5y agoDepends on the industry. In embedded, I've only ever seen one person use a mac for work
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- leobg 5y agoI remember a story where a journalist sent an email with a tracking pixel to Tim Cook and it reported the user agent as being a Windows PC running Outlook.
- deanCommie 5y agoMost exec email goes through an executive assistant filter. With C-execs, usually a team.
- armadsen 5y agoI think this is the story you're talking about: https://www.wired.com/story/how-email-open-tracking-quietly-took-over-the-web/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-email-open-tracking-quietly-.... But it's pretty flimsy evidence. Undoubtedly Tim Cook has somebody, or more likely several somebodies handling his (external) email.
- anthk 5y agoIn the USA, in the rest of the world Mac is just the machine to code against iOS and nothing else. Most media producers today switched to Windows.
- tempodox 5y agoIndeed, if you do embedded development it's somewhere between hard and impossible to avoid Windows, although it's still a horrific platform for software development compared to Linux or even macOS. Many tools are Windows-only or Windows-first.
- anitil 5y agoI am the 'grep' guy. If my colleagues can't find something because eclipse said no, they ask me to find it.
- tempodox 5y agoSo you've got the island of Unix in a sea of Windows?
- jmrm 5y agoTotally true. I have seen even how some companies dropped supporting some of their hardware in Linux without any reasonable cause or problem (some models of TI MSP430), and having to use third party tools in order to continue working in Linux.
- gumby 5y agoFor some reason they chose the official ARM dev kit which was indeed windows based. But there has been a great GCC based dev tool chain since forever. I do my embedded development pretty much exclusively using GCC on the Mac or Linux.
- ChrisRR 5y agoHardly. We're talking 22 years ago here. Why wouldn't they just go with the official, well-supported tools
- gumby 5y agoWell GCC was already eliminating a lot of proprietary tool chains in the embedded (as well as workstation) space. NeXT had paid us (Cygnus) for work on the gnu tool chain and it was by the time of the iPod the OS X toolchain (unlike the iPhone, the iPod used an embedded so not anything osx-ish). ARM was one of the few embedded vendors not paying for GCC support. Our UK office was down the road from them in Cambridge and they asked us around a lot but always wanted the word done for free.
- IntelMiner 5y agoIt probably was not nearly as good 20~ years ago as it is today unfortunately
- gumby 5y agoIt was pretty good back then too. However perhaps they thought the gui tool was important. Also windows was perhaps more likely to be used within Apple than a sun machine (remember the era we’re talking about). Then again all the CAD systems would have been on sun back then. A bit surprising as of