You can download GCC and LLVM from apple's website (requires a free registration though) - a 140MB file. After that, you can use homebrew[1] to install MySQL, o

You can download GCC and LLVM from apple's website (requires a free registration though) - a 140MB file. After that, you can use homebrew[1] to install MySQL, or hundreds of other development tools - For example, I have redis, MongoDB, Node.js, MySQL, ffmpeg, wget, ocaml, lynx, mit-scheme, gsed, cmake, ack, clock, coffee-script and about 200 other packages installed. You're quite right that it wasn't as easy as ubuntu, but things have got infinitely better in the past year. `brew` is now comparable to `apt-get` (for everything I've tried at least). And I'm positive things will improve still. About 70% on this topic recommended MacBooks. Last year, it'd been 50%. [1] https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew