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This is exactly how I remember and have experienced it, in that order. MacOS became big because of the included Unix. Developers flocked. And al ballman once s

This is exactly how I remember and have experienced it, in that order. MacOS became big because of the included Unix. Developers flocked. And al ballman once said... developers, developers, developers!

paradox460 3y ago
It also looked absolutely amazing. We came from blocky ugly 256 color icons, bland shades of grey, and lumpy fonts to aqua. Each icon looked "real", either as a real thing you could hold (hard drive, CD, printer, trash) or a glossy photo realistic artists rendition (the network icon and favorites heart in particular were gorgeous). The faint pinstripes and transparency matched apple's hardware at the time, and it just looked absolutely incredible. It's contemporary oses, windows xp mainly, improved the resolution of their interfaces, but still had garish cartoonish icons, and Linux DEs didn't really shake their lumpy pixelart icons till Nuvola and Crystal came about
westurner 3y ago
The Developer story is key, I think, in addition to content CDNs and SAST/DAST for apps. iPod Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux Rockbox Firmware for an Archos and then an Nano w/ color and no WiFi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox podman run --rm -it docker.io/busybox xcode-select -p # installing homebrew installs the xcode CLI tools: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" brew install podman brew install --cask podman-desktop https://mac.install.guide/commandlinetools/3.html https://mac.install.guide/commandlinetools/3.html https://brew.sh/ https://brew.sh/ How to add a Software repository to an OS. Software repository; SLSA, Sigstore, DevSecOps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_repository W/ Ansible: osx_defaults_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/osx_defaults_module.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... honebrew_tap_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/homebrew_tap_module.html#ansible-collections-community-general-homebrew-tap-module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... honebrew_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/homebrew_module.html#ansible-collections-community-general-homebrew-module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... homebrew_cask_module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/homebrew_cask_module.html#ansible-collections-community-general-homebrew-cask-module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... From my upgrade_mac.sh: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/upgrade_mac.sh https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/u... : upgrade_macos() { softwareupdate --list softwareupdate --download softwareupdate --install --all --restart }
- westurner 3y ago
  From https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1720410479141487099 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1720410479141487099 : > GitHub Actions currently charges $0.16 *per minute* for the macOS M1 Runners. That comes out to $84,096 for 1 machine year GitHub Runner is written in Go; it fetches tasks from GitHub Actions and posts the results back to the Pull Request that spawned the build. nektos/act is how Gitea Actions builds GitHub Actions workflow YAML build definition documents. https://github.com/nektos/act https://github.com/nektos/act From https://twitter.com/MatthewCroughan/status/1720042352767570004 https://twitter.com/MatthewCroughan/status/17200423527675700... : > This is the macOS Ventura installer running in 30 VMs, in 30 #nix derivations at once. It gets the installer from Apple, automates the installation using Tesseract OCR and TCL Expect scripts. This is to test the repeatability. A single function call `makeDarwinImage`. With a Multi-Stage Dockerfile/Containerfild, you can have a dev environment like xcode or gcc+make in the first stage that builds the package, and then the second stage the package is installed and tested, and then the package is signed and published to a package repo / app store / OCI container image repository. Continuous integration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration Is there a good way to do automated testing like pytest+Hypothesis+tox w/ e.g. the Swift programming language for computers? CloudFuzz is built upon OSS-Fuzz. SLSA now specifies builders for signing things correctly in CI builds with keys in RAM on the build workers. "Build your own SLSA 3+ provenance builder on GitHub Actions" https://slsa.dev/blog/2023/08/bring-your-own-builder-github https://slsa.dev/blog/2023/08/bring-your-own-builder-github
al_borland 3y ago
Getting on Intel was also really big. That allowed a developer to have 1 computer where the primary OS ran Unix, but could also run commercial apps like Photoshop, while at the same time allowing them to dual boot or run a Windows VM. It was the jack of all trades. iTunes on Windows was also key, as that let the iPod blow up with Windows users (using Rhapsody before that was awful). Those iPod sales really allowed them to build up their cash hoard.
- sylens 3y ago
  After the iPod, this was what really helped. As someone on a college campus in 2006, the influx of people with MacBooks (not necessarily Pro’s but the regular one in black and white cases) was astonishing to watch, as they suddenly could dual boot Windows if they absolutely had to for their coursework. Combined with a much better version of iTunes as the iPod rose to prominence (the Video one came out the year before) and it became an easy sell to any 18 or 19 year old and their parents.
  - amatecha 3y ago
    Yeah, I remember that explosion of MacBooks + iPods appearing everywhere in ~2006. It really stood out to me - suddenly almost everyone I knew was getting a MacBook (particularly people who had never owned anything from Apple before). The platform was really good then (IMO). :)
    - saiya-jin 3y ago
      Sorry to tame down those rosy memories, but nothing like that was happening in Europe, or rest of the world for that matter. Apple was seen as vastly overpriced to PC (something students and their parents react very much to), without any added value if you ignore massive marketing (not going into other Apple products since they really stood above the crowd, but ecosystem wasn't existing much back then). Basically a very expensive PC built together with custom OS, without any possibility to extend or modify it, very un-hacker if I may say so. If you used it as Windows machine it was much smarter to go to similarly-priced enterprise laptops, which offered things like NBD on-site warranty repairs (I had whole keyboard block replaced once on Dell, from manifestation to fix it took maybe 1 hour and I just took a long coffee break), with which Apple simply couldn't compete in business segments.
microtherion 3y ago
Much as it pains me to say, as a die hard Mac fan, Apple's success really largely rides on other products. The iPod (which was not at all developer friendly) saved Apple commercially for several years. Yes, the Mac business had turned around a few years before, but e.g. the year before the iPod, Apple had the disastrous Power Mac G4 cube launch, which led to some unprofitable quarters. The iPod ensured that Apple's fortunes were no longer tied to new Macs (even though there were no G4 cube repeats). And the big influx of developers came with iPhone. Not sure that Unix was that important a selling argument in that segment — it's certainly there behind the scenes, but does not play much of a role in developing.

paradox460 3y ago

It also looked absolutely amazing. We came from blocky ugly 256 color icons, bland shades of grey, and lumpy fonts to aqua. Each icon looked "real", either as a real thing you could hold (hard drive, CD, printer, trash) or a glossy photo realistic artists rendition (the network icon and favorites heart in particular were gorgeous). The faint pinstripes and transparency matched apple's hardware at the time, and it just looked absolutely incredible. It's contemporary oses, windows xp mainly, improved the resolution of their interfaces, but still had garish cartoonish icons, and Linux DEs didn't really shake their lumpy pixelart icons till Nuvola and Crystal came about

westurner 3y ago

The Developer story is key, I think, in addition to content CDNs and SAST/DAST for apps. iPod Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux Rockbox Firmware for an Archos and then an Nano w/ color and no WiFi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox podman run --rm -it docker.io/busybox xcode-select -p # installing homebrew installs the xcode CLI tools: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" brew install podman brew install --cask podman-desktop https://mac.install.guide/commandlinetools/3.html https://mac.install.guide/commandlinetools/3.html https://brew.sh/ https://brew.sh/ How to add a Software repository to an OS. Software repository; SLSA, Sigstore, DevSecOps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_repository W/ Ansible: osx_defaults_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/osx_defaults_module.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... honebrew_tap_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/homebrew_tap_module.html#ansible-collections-community-general-homebrew-tap-module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... honebrew_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/homebrew_module.html#ansible-collections-community-general-homebrew-module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... homebrew_cask_module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/homebrew_cask_module.html#ansible-collections-community-general-homebrew-cask-module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... From my upgrade_mac.sh: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/upgrade_mac.sh https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/u... : upgrade_macos() { softwareupdate --list softwareupdate --download softwareupdate --install --all --restart }

westurner 3y ago
From https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1720410479141487099 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1720410479141487099 : > GitHub Actions currently charges $0.16 *per minute* for the macOS M1 Runners. That comes out to $84,096 for 1 machine year GitHub Runner is written in Go; it fetches tasks from GitHub Actions and posts the results back to the Pull Request that spawned the build. nektos/act is how Gitea Actions builds GitHub Actions workflow YAML build definition documents. https://github.com/nektos/act https://github.com/nektos/act From https://twitter.com/MatthewCroughan/status/1720042352767570004 https://twitter.com/MatthewCroughan/status/17200423527675700... : > This is the macOS Ventura installer running in 30 VMs, in 30 #nix derivations at once. It gets the installer from Apple, automates the installation using Tesseract OCR and TCL Expect scripts. This is to test the repeatability. A single function call `makeDarwinImage`. With a Multi-Stage Dockerfile/Containerfild, you can have a dev environment like xcode or gcc+make in the first stage that builds the package, and then the second stage the package is installed and tested, and then the package is signed and published to a package repo / app store / OCI container image repository. Continuous integration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration Is there a good way to do automated testing like pytest+Hypothesis+tox w/ e.g. the Swift programming language for computers? CloudFuzz is built upon OSS-Fuzz. SLSA now specifies builders for signing things correctly in CI builds with keys in RAM on the build workers. "Build your own SLSA 3+ provenance builder on GitHub Actions" https://slsa.dev/blog/2023/08/bring-your-own-builder-github https://slsa.dev/blog/2023/08/bring-your-own-builder-github

al_borland 3y ago

Getting on Intel was also really big. That allowed a developer to have 1 computer where the primary OS ran Unix, but could also run commercial apps like Photoshop, while at the same time allowing them to dual boot or run a Windows VM. It was the jack of all trades. iTunes on Windows was also key, as that let the iPod blow up with Windows users (using Rhapsody before that was awful). Those iPod sales really allowed them to build up their cash hoard.

sylens 3y ago
After the iPod, this was what really helped. As someone on a college campus in 2006, the influx of people with MacBooks (not necessarily Pro’s but the regular one in black and white cases) was astonishing to watch, as they suddenly could dual boot Windows if they absolutely had to for their coursework. Combined with a much better version of iTunes as the iPod rose to prominence (the Video one came out the year before) and it became an easy sell to any 18 or 19 year old and their parents.
- amatecha 3y ago
  Yeah, I remember that explosion of MacBooks + iPods appearing everywhere in ~2006. It really stood out to me - suddenly almost everyone I knew was getting a MacBook (particularly people who had never owned anything from Apple before). The platform was really good then (IMO). :)
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    Sorry to tame down those rosy memories, but nothing like that was happening in Europe, or rest of the world for that matter. Apple was seen as vastly overpriced to PC (something students and their parents react very much to), without any added value if you ignore massive marketing (not going into other Apple products since they really stood above the crowd, but ecosystem wasn't existing much back then). Basically a very expensive PC built together with custom OS, without any possibility to extend or modify it, very un-hacker if I may say so. If you used it as Windows machine it was much smarter to go to similarly-priced enterprise laptops, which offered things like NBD on-site warranty repairs (I had whole keyboard block replaced once on Dell, from manifestation to fix it took maybe 1 hour and I just took a long coffee break), with which Apple simply couldn't compete in business segments.

microtherion 3y ago

Much as it pains me to say, as a die hard Mac fan, Apple's success really largely rides on other products. The iPod (which was not at all developer friendly) saved Apple commercially for several years. Yes, the Mac business had turned around a few years before, but e.g. the year before the iPod, Apple had the disastrous Power Mac G4 cube launch, which led to some unprofitable quarters. The iPod ensured that Apple's fortunes were no longer tied to new Macs (even though there were no G4 cube repeats). And the big influx of developers came with iPhone. Not sure that Unix was that important a selling argument in that segment — it's certainly there behind the scenes, but does not play much of a role in developing.