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> As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering I think this is a useful framing. Apple markets an appliance like a microwave or a refrig
by smarmgoblin 4y ago
> As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering
I think this is a useful framing. Apple markets an appliance like a microwave or a refrigerator — both of those are computers in a sense but function only in a specific narrow capacity. You can warm a potato (if it’s in one location and the door is closed), but you can’t move arbitrary bytes around regardless of the capacity of the underlying hardware.
On your Mac you have a way to watch movies, play music, even browse the web. General purpose computing I think is just not the overall goal of these devices.
- mikro2nd 4y agoI'm willing to accept your argument that a Mac is not a general purpose computer. It then begs the question of why these devices are so popular for software development...?
- marlowe221 4y agoAccording to the Stackoverflow 2021 survey, it's not as popular as we might be led to believe. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-most-popular-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo... MacOS comes in at 25.19%. Even Linux is higher at 25.32%. Meanwhile, Windows is 45.33% (over 48% if you include WSL, which was counted separately). 82,719 responses on the operating system question too...
- scubbo 4y agoSoftware Development is also a specific purpose. One that has a much broader range of requirements than (e.g.) a microwave, but still. It is entirely possible that Macbooks fulfill those requirements while lacking some other properties required of a general purpose computer. (I'm not claiming that that's true - simply that your implication that "it is necessary to have a general purpose computer in order to develop software" is untrue)
- mikro2nd 4y agoYep. My notion isn't so much that you need a general purpose computer to do software development, but more that people who are interested in doing development are more likely than most to be interested in general-purpose computers.
- smarmgoblin 4y agoI think it’s more of a trajectory than the current state of the world to be quite honest, but if you’ll engage with my more conspiratorial speculations — you can imagine software development would have to be one of the last activities to be subject to severe tool restriction out of the box. I think a lot of this will happen under the goal of unifying the laptop and phone/tablet experience.