Oddly enough I think mac and windows switched professional users somehow. I don't know a single developer on a windows machine, however most people I know working in 3d, digital illustration or video work all use windows machines now.
You can do fun things, like tail logs to a file using linux and simultaneously analyze the file using windows tools.
You shouldn't access files in WSL using windows, but the other way around it's absolutely ok.
So if my projects are at C:/Development/Projects/...
Then I just open /mnt/c/Development/Projects/... on WSL
I haven't had any permission problems, not even once.
Same for Docker for Windows. It uses Hyper-V + some network disk sharing magic, which makes directory mounts into docker containers work great. So sometimes, like, when I need to debug a non-cross-platform linux program. (WSL doesn't handle process forking well, so some debuggers, like Go Delve don't work) I just do something like
docker run -v C:/Development/Projects/MyProject:/mnt/MyProject -it ubuntu /bin/bash
On the other hand, outside of ML it's not like many software developers need to upgrade to a new GPU every (other) year and current processor trends show very little performance uplift between generations to upgrade - once Apple finally gets 32GB of memory in the MBP most developers will be set for many years.
Even though you don't need lots of power, there's plenty of solid and valid reasons why others might.
Moreover
1. latency is low enough that people are playing triple AAA video games on AWS for a $1/hr.
https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...
2. Sure, that's a good reason. It had better be spewing out lots of data, though, or again, you might as well process in the cloud.
3. Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase.
Did you walk out of a 1980s time warp or something? The workstation in this case carries 1TB of storage and weighs 3.5 lbs. (And it still has wifi in case you need that).
Regarding your number 3. For a lot of this, we are talking about devices like the MacBook Pro line. Not huge workstations.
Exactly.
I wrote this last year criticising the current state of Mac hardware.
https://medium.com/@Pier/the-problem-of-osx-hardware-in-2016...
Apple's neglect.
Elaborating on it, Custom hardware (esp. GPU) support. DX 11 over Metal. Apple chose not to upgrade OpenGL or implement Vulkan.
- The laptop lineup only offers Intel graphics or AMD's weakest mobile GPUs. I suspect that Metal has something to do with why they've pretended Nvidia doesn't exist for the past ~5 years.
- The only non-abandoned[2] machine in the desktop lineup is a non-modular all-in-one.
- Apple ceded the creative-pro software market to Adobe. Final Cut, Logic, used to be industry leaders, and they had companion software products that Apple has either neglected or discontinued. Premiere + After Effects is a far more powerful & widely used toolset than Final Cut + Motion, plus Adobe's software also runs on powerful Windows PCs, eliminating Apple's lock-in.
- Pen-input is iPad exclusive. Apple has no desire to bring touch to the Mac, and while I agree that macOS is not designed for fingers, I'm sure artists would like a convertible MacBook Pro that supported the Apple Pencil.
[1] Obviously this is a generalization
[2] For all intents and purposes, the Mac Pro will still be abandoned until they release the promised new one circa 2018. The current Mac Pro and the Mac mini are terrible, ancient PCs that only sell any units because Apple has neglected giving macOS any good hardware to run on in those form factors or price points.
You can stick really fast processors, tons of RAM and one or two Nvidia graphics cards in a very cheap tower. If only Apple sold a cheesegrater-style tower that could do that ;-)
Thee are even some Windows laptops that do the job now. Wirecutter picked the Dell XPS 15 as The Best 15-Inch Laptop for Photo and Video Editing https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-15-inch-laptops-for-p...
There's also a fair amount of peer pressure.
I was at a big software company and I choose a Lenovo with Windows instead of a Mac. I was the only one, and the other members of the team constantly tried to get me to switch, and trolled me, as if they were embarrassed with me. Now I'm at another big company, where Windows is more prevalent (legacy), but team members are still shocked that I chose again a Lenovo with Windows and Ubuntu VM on top.
If you were to interview to a startup and the founder coded on a Windows, what would most devs feel about it?