A mac is much better in almost every way, but that is no less than you would expect given 30+ years of evolution since the 80/90s. The bit you’re maybe missing

A mac is much better in almost every way, but that is no less than you would expect given 30+ years of evolution since the 80/90s. The bit you’re maybe missing is how different the standard dev process was back then to accommodate how slow build infra was. You (or at least I) typically started compiling something and went for a coffee or whatever because it would take a l o n g time to build anything. So often teams would have a setup where each member had a low-power desktop that was basically just an x terminal and everyone would run their actual builds on a team buildserver. If you had a proper workstation it meant you could generally build your own code directly on your workstation meaning you weren’t contending for resources on the build server with everyone else. So I remember in one team back then one guy left who had a sparc 10 on his desk, so my buddy grabbed that, I swapped from my terrible lunchbox LX to nab my friend’s sparc 5 and suddenly local builds were a possibility for me, meaning a huge increase in productivity.