Comment by vog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vog | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

"And this, I believe, is why great developers tend to move towards OS X (yes, there are plenty of exceptions)"

With all due respect, this reads more like an Apple advertisement than a well-thought conclusion.

First, I find it somewhat strange to declare those who stay with FreeBSD or Debian as "exceptions", thus implying that moving to OS X is the norm. This is not backed by any numbers. There are just some anecdotes of some people switching to OS X.

Also, that statement implies it is meaningful that some great developers switch. However, that detail isn't relevant at all to understand to process. OS X is comparatively new, so of course people are still looking at it and some of them move over. And of course some of those people are great developers, as in any random group.

To make this more clear: Among the people who are switching, there are naturally a lot more mediocre developers than great developers (as in any random group), but the article wouldn't sound nearly as sensational if the author had written: "thousands of mediocre developers switched to OS X".

Also, a lot of people switch from a proprietary system (like OS X or Windows) to Ubuntu, Fedora and many other free software systems. However, those aren't nearly as celebrated as those who switch to OS X. Why is that?

This article is so strongly biased that it is hard not to mistake it for an Apple ad.

> First, I find it somewhat strange to declare those who stay with FreeBSD or Debian as "exceptions", thus implying that moving to OS X is the norm. This is not backed by any numbers.

Have you been to a OSS based conference in the last 5 years? Anything, from Apache to Rails to Python? The number of Apple laptops is by far greater than any other.

So are people switching to Macbook Pros or to Mac OS X?

Because I think the the industrial design of the laptop is driving a lot of people over, not Mac OS X.

Are people switching to Apple desktop machines at the same rate? I'm not seeing it. If I were to buy a desktop tomorrow it would definitely not be a Mac, but if I were to buy a laptop tomorrow it would be a Macbook Pro.

People are switching to Mac OS X on MacBook Pro.

How do you know that, if those are so many people?

Because when you pay attention to what's going on in a community, you notice trends. In the open source community, most notably the web development community, there has been a trend of moving to Mac.

Source?

I think you might have missed the point of the post you replied to. The point is that sometimes you don't need data. For instance, in the fashion world, one might notice a trend of people wearing a certain style of jeans. Nobody is going to go out and do a a random sampled study to see if this holds up to scrutiny, but the trend is noticeable to anyone paying attention. If you're involved at all in the open source web development world for example, it would be pretty hard to miss the trend of developers moving to Mac.

> I think the the industrial design of the laptop is driving a lot of people over, not Mac OS X. Are people switching to Apple desktop machines at the same rate?

I'd concur, but that's the rub: Once you have that nice, well-designed machine in your hands, you discover that it has Python and Ruby and Emacs and Vim all preinstalled, not to mention a competent X server, and a reasonably nice terminal. Heck, it even defaults to Bash!

And once you're faced with that, the cost-benefit analysis for switching the machine over to *nix starts to tip in OS X's favor. You can finally run popular commercial software (Office, PhotoShop, etc), if you want. You can finally test things in OS X. Sleep / resume, external displays, bluetooth accessories, printers... they all Just Work. And your battery life is great.

Switching means giving up most of those benefits. And for what? You have a good POSIX environment, right?

It's the nuances that get you: OS X ships libedit instead of readline, and getting the IPython to use the latter was excruciatingly difficult for quite some time. Not to mention libraries like PIL. But by the time you run up against those issues, you've already bought into so much of the Mac ecosystem...

OS X. At PyCon most laptops are Macs, nearly all run OS X.

There are also people switching to lots of other systems, but those aren't nearly as visible since you can't see that by their hardware.

I've been to these conferences. I would say it's about a 50/50 split among the attendees and a 80/20 split (towards UNIX or Windows) among the presenters.

The followers love their Macs.

Don't judge a book by it's cover. I am running Ubuntu on my macbook. So at these conferences it may look like everyone is using macs and therefor OS X, but perhaps there are more people like me running Linux on a Macbook.

I always have to laugh a bit after people ask me questions how I got OS X to look so different from the stock version. Usually I explain that you may run any OS on your Macbook. Be it OS X, Windows or Linux.

ps: For those wondering why I run Linux on a Mac. In my case I tend to develop mostly webapps which need to run on a Linux based setup anyway, so it just makes my life easier to have the environments more or less the same. Although with the current powerful cpu's and nice virtual machine solutions such as VirtualBox or VMWare I might be tempted to run each project in its own vm on whatever OS the laptop came with.

You took that statement completely out of context. Your comment show much more bias than the author. If you had read the article with any sense of objectivity, it would have been clear that the author actually makes a subtle case AGAINST Mac. He is merely stating an observation that many high profile open source developers have switched to Mac, which is true. There has a been a gradual shift to Mac from Linux in the modern generation of open source developers. Anyone who can't see that clearly isn't looking.

Also, while you are correct that many people move from Windows to Linux, it's fairly rare for someone to move from Mac to Linux, or Mac to Windows. Mac has tended to be a platform that people stick with. Again, if this isn't obvious then you haven't been paying attention.

Obviously we're never going to see RMS on a Macbook Pro, but that's the previous generation. The pioneering generation. The current generation isn't so ideological, and place more value on ease of use and aesthetics than the previous generation.

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