4 ms·

Weird, that description doesn't apply at all to my experiences as a developer using Macs for the last few years. Personally I find a Mac to be a better develop

Weird, that description doesn't apply at all to my experiences as a developer using Macs for the last few years. Personally I find a Mac to be a better development environment than Windows even for Microsoft tech like the dotnet stack.

stronglikedan 1y ago
> Personally That word right there means that we can both be correct, because I personally find MacOS to be frustrating for Dev compared to every other alternative. Great for creativity, but not so much for productivity.
- stetrain 1y ago
  Sure. The comment I replied to wasn’t so qualified.
fennecfoxy 1y ago
I've used Macbooks for dev pretty much my whole career and I do think that they're some of the _best_ laptops available for dev. But the caveat to my statement is that _everything_ added to their ecosystem to business reasons is useless and counterproductive. For example I can plug my Android phone into a Windows machine (two different companies inb4 someone uses flawed logic) and it just works. If I plug my Android phone into my Macbook it doesn't work at all...but an iPhone does! ;) They only very recently got decent-ish Window management, basic snapping that Linux/Windows has had for at least a decade or longer. And even then their implementation is "pretty" but slow to respond. It's like just expand and snap the fucking window for fuck's sake. In terms of the "development environment" they enjoy having had the OS built on top of FreeBSD (which yes, they have contributed to - bet Apple management hated that). To me it's a machine that gets stuff done; they could literally strip the thing down to the bare minimum, removing all of the "magical wonderful Apple stuff with cutesy fancy sounding names" and I couldn't give a shit. "Retina" screen? Fuck offff Apple.
- stetrain 1y ago
  I enjoy high-dpi displays for dev and other productivity tasks. That one isn't just an annoying marketing gimmick.
kibwen 1y ago
> Personally I find a Mac to be a better development environment than Windows This is both true and completely irrelevant, because the point of the above comment is that Apple is not in the business of catering to this use case. Look at the annual revenues: $225 billion from iPhone/iPad, $100 billion from "services" (which Apple mostly characterizes as "app store stuff"), $40 billion from accessories (watch, airpods, etc), $30 billion from desktops. The Mac segment comes out to 7.9% of their overall revenue. And this number is shrinking in both the absolute and relative sense, as "services" continues to grow and as Mac units shipped peaked in 2022.
- stetrain 1y ago
  You can't build iPhone or iPad apps on iPhones or iPads yet, so a decent chunk of that revenue currently relies on the Mac as well. Even without that, calling a $30B business an "insignificant historical afterthought" is a bit of an exaggeration, no?
  - spogbiper 1y ago
    This is by design of course. The only major platform that requires a specific minor platform from the same vendor to target, at least that I know of. Apple knows how to make money.
    - stetrain 1y ago
      Of course it's by design, and it's part of their business. Saying they aren't in that business isn't accurate.
  - kibwen 1y ago
    > You can't build iPhone or iPad apps on iPhones or iPads yet, so a decent chunk of that revenue currently relies on the Mac as well. This is both entirely true and still manages to miss the point. Yes, Apple keeps the Mac around exclusively to accommodate the creation of iOS apps. No, they are not financially incentivized to create new categories of hardware that cater toward productivity when instead they could lock them down and milk that cow for all it's worth via the app store tax.
array_key_first 1y ago
Well that's because Windows is very, very bad software. Nobody actually likes it, they use it because they need to for some bespoke barely functional application. It's Stockholm syndrome. That doesn't mean MacOS is good, though.

stronglikedan 1y ago

> Personally That word right there means that we can both be correct, because I personally find MacOS to be frustrating for Dev compared to every other alternative. Great for creativity, but not so much for productivity.

stetrain 1y ago
Sure. The comment I replied to wasn’t so qualified.

fennecfoxy 1y ago

I've used Macbooks for dev pretty much my whole career and I do think that they're some of the _best_ laptops available for dev. But the caveat to my statement is that _everything_ added to their ecosystem to business reasons is useless and counterproductive. For example I can plug my Android phone into a Windows machine (two different companies inb4 someone uses flawed logic) and it just works. If I plug my Android phone into my Macbook it doesn't work at all...but an iPhone does! ;) They only very recently got decent-ish Window management, basic snapping that Linux/Windows has had for at least a decade or longer. And even then their implementation is "pretty" but slow to respond. It's like just expand and snap the fucking window for fuck's sake. In terms of the "development environment" they enjoy having had the OS built on top of FreeBSD (which yes, they have contributed to - bet Apple management hated that). To me it's a machine that gets stuff done; they could literally strip the thing down to the bare minimum, removing all of the "magical wonderful Apple stuff with cutesy fancy sounding names" and I couldn't give a shit. "Retina" screen? Fuck offff Apple.

stetrain 1y ago
I enjoy high-dpi displays for dev and other productivity tasks. That one isn't just an annoying marketing gimmick.

kibwen 1y ago

> Personally I find a Mac to be a better development environment than Windows This is both true and completely irrelevant, because the point of the above comment is that Apple is not in the business of catering to this use case. Look at the annual revenues: $225 billion from iPhone/iPad, $100 billion from "services" (which Apple mostly characterizes as "app store stuff"), $40 billion from accessories (watch, airpods, etc), $30 billion from desktops. The Mac segment comes out to 7.9% of their overall revenue. And this number is shrinking in both the absolute and relative sense, as "services" continues to grow and as Mac units shipped peaked in 2022.

stetrain 1y ago
You can't build iPhone or iPad apps on iPhones or iPads yet, so a decent chunk of that revenue currently relies on the Mac as well. Even without that, calling a $30B business an "insignificant historical afterthought" is a bit of an exaggeration, no?
- spogbiper 1y ago
  This is by design of course. The only major platform that requires a specific minor platform from the same vendor to target, at least that I know of. Apple knows how to make money.
  - stetrain 1y ago
    Of course it's by design, and it's part of their business. Saying they aren't in that business isn't accurate.
- kibwen 1y ago
  > You can't build iPhone or iPad apps on iPhones or iPads yet, so a decent chunk of that revenue currently relies on the Mac as well. This is both entirely true and still manages to miss the point. Yes, Apple keeps the Mac around exclusively to accommodate the creation of iOS apps. No, they are not financially incentivized to create new categories of hardware that cater toward productivity when instead they could lock them down and milk that cow for all it's worth via the app store tax.

array_key_first 1y ago

Well that's because Windows is very, very bad software. Nobody actually likes it, they use it because they need to for some bespoke barely functional application. It's Stockholm syndrome. That doesn't mean MacOS is good, though.