I'm curious what other people's perspectives are on the (what appears to me anyway) dominance of Macbooks among developers these days. Is it the convenience of a Unix-y machine with decent drivers, or something else?
The trackpad is laughably horrible. I wonder if anyone at Dell ever tried using it. Or maybe my fingers are weird or whatever, but I just cannot for the life of me make the goddamn cursor go where I want. I feel like I'm arthritic.
And I haven't managed to get suspend to work properly. Amazingly, the side effects of the brokenness is that some random subset of font characters become garbled or replaced with other characters. I truly have no idea how that happens but I'm very curious! Maybe there is some obscure kernel patch somewhere, but whatever, I just shutdown and reboot...
I also haven't found the right Xorg settings to make smooth scrolling look actually smooth, which is psychically distressing.
The sound quality is kind of crappy, since the whole chassis resonates, like the equalization isn't set properly and/or again nobody tried using the damn thing.
I still appreciate the laptop. Aside from these inevitable quirks, I love having a fast Linux machine with me.
But every time I get out my MacBook, I feel relieved. I don't buy into any magical notion of Apple, but I'm pretty grateful that the basic components of their hardware feel like someone tried them for at least a whole day and incremented until it was usable enough.
There are complex reasons for all of this and so on... but I really just wish some person with a bunch of capital would just make a simple functioning laptop that works with a plain Linux kernel. I'd pay a month's paycheck for that.
I was told that the new one is pretty good, but it doesn't sound like that. That's sad, because if Apple replaces rMBP with some new MacBook-like nonsense, there won't be any reasonable laptop at all.
For full disclosure I'm not using the stock Ubuntu -- which I as a Linux nerd found to be really pumped full of bullshit that I don't want ever.
It's possible that their special distro has magic patches that they haven't managed to get into the mainline Linux kernel, but that doesn't impress me much since they advertise it as a "Linux developer machine," not as a "Dell Custom Ubuntu machine."
It also requires a proprietary WiFi driver, although I'm told some configurations have an Intel chip that works out of the box with Linux.
I strongly believe that a developer machine advertised to work with Linux should not require any proprietary extensions. Probably Dell doesn't care about this very much though.
But they should, since I'm now tarnishing the reputation of their flagship dev product in a forum full of semi-influential hackers...
That all said, I use the thing everyday and, whatever, I'm used to stuff being broken, and I can get used to most things. That trackpad though... so infuriating. On the plus side I'm using more keyboard navigation than ever. (And noticing how terribly the web works if your mouse sucks.)
Pick up an old Thinkpad, like an X220 or X230. The key is "old". For something old, even the conservative distros like Debian will have a kernel and Xorg that support your hardware. Thinkpads are built well.
For years I used old Thinkpads. The hardware and kernels worked fine. But the desktop environments became a disaster area with KDE 4 and GNOME 3. I hand-rolled setups with FVWM and then i3, but after getting tired of futzing with that and the lack of decent compositing window managers I switched to the Mac and haven't looked back.
- A high resolution display - Decent battery life - A good keyboard - A Unix based OS (Though I'm fine with Linux) - Hardware that feels good to use
The MacBooks are easy to compare to pick the one you want, all look good, and you're pretty well guaranteed that you're going to get what you expect, even if it costs a little more. On the other hand, to pick another manufacturer, you have to dig a lot to even start finding what the options are, much less to refine them. I paid $X more to get a macbook and not go through that :P
The hardware is very well designed, well put together, feels like a premium piece of equipment. PC laptops used to (and cheap ones still do) feel like junk. Apple is willing to put expensive trackpads (amazing!) in their laptops instead of accidentally crippling the machine with one piece of penny pinching.
OS X does everything I need and does have all the unix stuff underneath so I can use it to do development in an environment very similar (relative to Windows) to the Linux servers code is deployed on.
And OS X has a good community of software developers making great programs like MarsEdit, BBEdit, and all sorts of other things. There is paid software (Office, Photoshop, etc.) if you need it, something that isn't the case with Linux.
The total experience was so much better than I remember with Windows, and I can work well on it. I don't have to worry about tracking down weird drivers. If something is wrong there is one place to go: Apple. I remember the fun of Dell telling me it was Windows and to call MS, who would tell me it was Dell's fault.
So that explains the rise of OS X. I'd place the 'fall' of Windows at two things (this is just speculation on my part): stagnation and hardware.
Stagnation is obvious. Windows XP was great, but it sat around forever while Apple kept improving OS X. Then we got Vista (I won't judge it) very late, then eventually 7, then by 8 and 8.1 MS was actually starting to move again.
On the hardware side the race-to-the-bottom with prices really made it much harder to find good computers that weren't built like toys. By and large the PC guys didn't target that market very hard. Their 'upscale' laptops often felt like lower end ones with better specs but the same build. It seems like this is turning around (a bit) as MS tries to force it, which is great to see.
That's a consumer-oriented view. Dell, HP and Lenovo continued to supply solid business laptops and portable workstations. Some were even ultraportable, including the ThinkPad X series and Toshiba Porteges.
Not sure why you think "the PC guys didn't target that market very hard" since they had more than 90% of the market. But if you were just watching the consumer market, perhaps you didn't notice?
It's interesting to see the shift; I know some old-school techies who've moved to Macbooks despite using Linux/BSD laptops for as long as laptops have been practical.
I switched to the thinkpad (currently, lenovo carbon x1) and honestly it's fantastic. Never had a better laptop in my life (way better than Macs).
At least those are my reasons. I'd rather have something else, because I don't agree with Apple on many points (like their walled garden) but there are no alternatives.
I use OS X for the same reason, but it's a great Linux box as well.
My reasons:
+ The iPad was my gateway drug to the iPhone. The iPhone was my gateway drug to the Apple ecosystem. All of the "relearn an OS" cruft I was expecting to hit was greatly, greatly shortened by the experience of being on iOS.
+ Apple is a monoculture in the development communities most of interest to me. Ruby gems would break randomly on Windows due to e.g. using `ls` to get the contents of a directory rather than using any of the stdlib functions. All tutorials start with the assumption you're using homebrew. The final straw for me was when I started needing infrastructure pieces that just wouldn't run on a Windows machine -- Redis was, IIRC, the motivating technology. (MS sponsors a Windows Redis these days. Good call, a few years late. Sorry guys.)
+ I'm no more immune to social pressure than anyone else is, and my peer group was actively mocking me for running Windows since, minimally, five years before I switched.
+ I do a lot of international travel and need a laptop with me. Previously I used "the best Dell makes", generally a Dell Studio, with a big screen and lots of RAM. I affectionately called my Dell "the aircraft carrier", because it was heavy and bulky. My most recent Dell was a replacement for one which, when on a shoulder-mounted laptop bag, swung out an inch too far and caused the power button (side-mounted) to collide with a door frame, breaking it. (I had to turn that machine on by shorting the two wires attached to the power button which now strick from the case!) Every time I got back from the airport I complained bitterly about how heavy the bag was, and was mocked again by friends who ran functionally equivalent computers which seem to weigh about half as much.
+ Might not be relevant to everyone, but highly relevant to me personally: my main development machine also has to play video games. This was a major thing keeping me on Windows, and literally the day before I bought my first Mac, I said "I might get myself a Mac purely for programming, but my main machine has to play games." "Which games?" "Recently, League of Legends and Starcraft 2." "Both are available on Mac." "I'm buying a Mac tomorrow."
+ As Thomas said, every Macbook looks like it has been sculpted out of aluminum. Equivalently powerful PCs are... am I allowed to say ugly? I used a Dell machine made and marketed specifically to artistic professionals -- it's literally called "Studio" -- and even to my very limited standards it seems to lack artistic taste, particularly when it is sitting next to a row full of Macbooks.
This was big for me. I actually could run almost everything I wanted on Linux too, but it wouldn't, well, work. It did on OS X, and as a bonus, OS X has wider support.
Having spent so much time on the Windows side of things, is there some aspect of that ecosystem that you find yourself missing even after the year or so you've been on a Mac?
Personally, it's the only choice if I'm going to work on iOS, and conveniently I can do Android work as well. Basically (and again, personally) it does everything a Linux box is going to do, plus iOS dev.
Also, it's easier to run Windows on an Apple machine than it is to run OSX on a non-Apple machine. As someone who has to test websites in OSX, it's just easier having native access to OSX.