Hacker News Reader

Comment by woahAcademia | Hacker News Reader

Dev here, the burden of Apple far exceeds any claimed time savings. I think every dev knows exactly what I'm talking about. And if you aren't a dev, Apple treats us like replaceable Dogs.

Apple has killed any good will among nerdy developers by treating them like shit for 20 years. Sure there are still corporate developers that are forced to make iOS apps, but it's not like a hobbyist is going to buy an Apple computer for embedded, web dev, gaming, PC applications, etc...

Until Apple treats us(and maybe their non dev customers) better, I don't see any reason outside iOS Apps to ever buy a macbook for dev.

View on HN

> it's not like a hobbyist is going to buy an Apple computer for embedded, web dev, gaming, PC applications, etc...

Yeah, this is simply just false.

Apple being a consumer grade Posix OS is exactly why hobbiest choose it. It has first tier support every consumer app you need, with no configuration headaches and has all the tools you want for modern development.

This is why most web devs today are still carrying Macbooks. Even if Apple has not been prioritizing building machines with beefy specs.

I’ve been doing web and server dev, and personal computing, on a Mac for those same last 20 years and I honestly can’t relate one bit to any of what you’re saying either as a dev or just an end user. In fact, the companies I feel most mistreated by are those who have pushed more and more cross platform (Electron & out of place UI/UX) onto the platform.

(A notable exception to that feeling is VSCode. While I would quite prefer a native app with its features, I’ll gladly pay the Electron tax because it’s the best editor I’ve ever used.)

> but it's not like a hobbyist is going to buy an Apple computer for embedded, web dev, gaming, PC applications, etc...

This may surprise you, but yes, it's what people seem to be doing.

Almost all the full stack web developers I know are using MacBooks for both front and back end codebases across half a dozen languages. It’s an advanced, modern operating system with nearly complete Linux compatibility.

It’s fine if it’s not for you, but to stereotype an entire part of the industry like this isn’t fair.

As they say, to know where the ball is headed, watch the full stack web developers. I know it was a half dozen because I had to use both hands to count.

Dev here, as well.

I really don't know what you are talking about. All my development work could probably be made on a linux computer, or windows, but I choose to use Mac just because it makes embedded work and web development so much easier.

I've long been a Mac user but never done embedded development. Just curious. What makes the Mac better for embedded development?

I’ve gone through dozens of tutorials for installing tool XYZ for Mac to develop with embedded, and not once have I had to install drivers or mess with udev rules. Things just work when you plug them in.

Maybe unavailability of workbenches is a catalyst for creativity, har har.

Nothing.

Most of the toolchains are OSS

Maybe most developers are professionals that just want to solve problems for their customers, on the platform that their customers are using, instead of shipping 2nd grade experiences based only on unsubstantiated assumption of what future Apple will do?

This is certainly a hot take. Every event for “developers” I’ve been to recently Macs outnumber anything else by a significant margin.

I can say for me personally that yeah I have my issues with macOS, but the amount of fiddling I have to do with Linux and the different patterns I have to learn with Windows means macOS will likely continue to be my choice for years to come.

As a hobbyist developer I definitely use a MacBook and will definitely buy another MacBook as soon as a 16inch 32gb MacBook comes out.

You can order it. Just not yet with an M1 CPU ;)

Yes, but that one is barely any better than my 15.4 MacBook Pro. Pointless upgrade

I’m a dev; fled to MacOS in 2005 or so because Linux on a laptop was just such a nightmare, and never really looked back. I gather things are better now, but still not _great_, and life is too short to have to sacrifice a goat every time a kernel update breaks your Bluetooth audio or whatever.

Apple’s far from perfect, but there is something to be said for ‘just works’.

Heh, been running Linux for a decade plus and don't remember any such problems recently.

Amusingly you mentioned bluetooth, apparently the new M1s are having serious bluetooth issues, so much that those with the apple bluetooth mouse and keyboard are resorting to wired devices.

> Dev here, the burden of Apple far exceeds any claimed time savings.

I have the complete opposite experience. I don't feel any burden from apple when using a mac. MacOS being a unix like operating system makes developing on it a breeze. On windows i need to use archaic developer tools like powershell. Linux commands I use on my production servers don't work on my development environment. If I want to use git in a sane manner from the command line i need to install an emulator that has its own issues.

There is a reason almost all companies in silicon valley use macbooks for their developers.

> but it's not like a hobbyist is going to buy an Apple computer for embedded, web dev, gaming, PC applications, etc...

As someone else has said, this is exactly what people seem to be doing.

> On windows i need to use archaic developer tools like powershell. Linux commands I use on my production servers don't work on my development environment.

I mean, you can dislike Powershell and love Unix tools, but your choice of words is remarkably funny.

If anything, Unix tools are archaic, generally organically grown and not that designed or designed based on principles from 50 years ago, in many cases principles that have been superseded.

Powershell actually has a design and a modern one.

Again, you might like one and dislike the other, it depends a lot on personal preference and familiarity.

But... Poor choice of words :-)

> On windows i need to use archaic developer tools like powershell.

What makes PowerShell archaic, in your opinion?

It's not bash. It's proprietary garbage. It's not what I'm going to be using on my production servers. Why it exists? I have no clue.

I'm not sure what you're referring to specifically when you say "proprietary", but most of PowerShell is available under the MIT license.

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell#legal-and-licensing

Hey Apple stuff is also proprietary garbage, why are you using it for your development work then?

Two weights, two measures?

Apple's terminal environment is POSIX-like. PowerShell was always a bit of a lame duck, or Microsoft wouldn't have bothered with WSL to get real power users to stick with their platform.

Powershell is the only mainstream shell that is close enough to the Xerox PARC workstations REPL experience.

As for WSL you got it all wrong, after the failure of Project Astoria (running Android apps on UWP), Microsoft found a business opportunity in selling Windows to folks that buy Apple devices to do GNU/Linux work instead of supporting Linux OEMS, unhappy with Apple no longer caring for them as they no longer need their money.

So they picked up the infrastructure, redone it as WSL, and start selling the feature to that crowd, now they can get the hardware that Apple doesn't sell them, while keep paying proprietary garbage vendors instead of supporting the vendors in the Linux community.

I don't use windows but in your case it solves this problem better with wsl2 since you can have the same real linux that runs on your servers.

I really wanted to like WSL 2 but it has a lot of bugs that may take years to get ironed out (unusably slow disk IO, memory leaks, virtual disks that grow forever, etc.)

I think it would probably work for web development as long as you keep everything inside WSL, but for other development tasks you're going to run into issues real quick.

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/873

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4166

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699

I use WSL 2 for full time development on the stable release of Windows 10.

The last 2 issues are an issue as of today but you can workaround them where it becomes a non-issue in the end by setting 1 config file value and running 1 command maybe once a month.

Also if you keep your source code inside WSL 2's file system then the first 2 issues are non-issues in practice.

Anecdotally I've been doing development in C++, Rust, .NET and other languages just fine in WSL2.

i got a feeling we are not the target of their hardware

> I think every dev knows exactly what I'm talking about. And if you aren't a dev, Apple treats us like replaceable Dogs.

No. Stop presuming to speak for all of us. Apple has generally treated me a lot better than Microsoft did, as a user and as a developer.

Downvoting the other side may give the impression that everybody is of the same opinion in this echo chamber, but it won’t change the reality that many people are happy with Apple and excited for the direction they’re taking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com