I think you are vastly underestimating how many people use Mac (or use Windows without using WSL) to develop for the cloud.
The dominance of Macs for software development is a very US-centric thing. In Germany, there is no such Mac dominance in this domain.
And why not Java developers?
They seem pretty polar opposite in terms of culture, but all still turn up using a Macintosh.
Even the famous FailOverflow said in one of his videos he only bought a Mac since he saw that at conferences everyone had Macs so he thought that must mean they're the best machines.
Anecdotally, I've interviewed at over 12 companies in my life and only one of those issues Mac to its employees the rest were windows/Linux.
The things the Mac is good at:
1) It powers my 4k monitor very well at 60Hz
2) It switches between open lid and closed lid, and monitor unplugged / plugged in states consistently well.
3) It sleeps/wakes up well.
4) The built in camera and audio work well, which is useful for meetings, especially these days.
None of these things really require either x86 or Arm. So if a x86 based non-Mac laptop appeared that handled points 1-4 and could run Linux closer to our production environment I'd be all over it.
I started using my home Windows machine for development as a result of the lockdown and in all honesty I have fewer issues with it than I did with my work MacBook. Something is seriously wrong here.
Most of the teens to early 20 somethings I know are either buying or hoping to buy the latest Macs, iPads, iPhones and AirPods while most of the devs I know are on Linux or WSL but devs are a minority compared to the Average Joes who don't code but are willing to pay for nice hardware and join the ecosystem.
And as a byproduct perhaps they will work better for hip young consumers too. Or anyone else who is easily distracted by bright colours and simple pictures, which is nearly all of us.
I've got anecdata that says different. My backend/cloud team has been pretty evenly split between Mac and Windows (with only one Linux on the desktop user). This is at a Java shop (with legacy Grails codebases to maintain but not do any new development on).
With Mac all your regular Mac software integrates well with the Unix world. XCode is not going to screw up my line endings. I don’t have to keep track of whether I am checking out a file from a Unix or Windows environment.
`git config --global core.autocrlf true`
That will configure git to checkout files with CRLF endings and change them to plain LF when you commit files.
They're not ancient, but are mostly ports of recent FreeBSD (or occasionally some other BSD) utilities. Some of these have a lineage dating back to AT&T/BSD Unix, but are still the (roughly) current versions of those tools found on those platforms, perhaps with some apple-specific tweaks.
You must be living in a different universe. What do you think the tens of thousands of developers at Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc etc etc are doing on their Macintoshes?
edit: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-pr...
I can only speak of my experience at Google, but the Macs used by engineers here are glorified terminals, since the cloud based software is built using tools running on Google's internal Linux workstations and compute clusters. Downloading code directly to a laptop is a security violation (With an exception for those working on iOS, Mac, or Windows software)
If we need Linux on a laptop, there is either the laptop version of the internal Linux distro or Chromebooks with Crostini.
SSH to a linux machine ? I get that cloud software is a broad term that includes pretty much everything under the sun. My definition of cloud dev was a little lower level.