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Comment by mikro2nd | Hacker News Reader

I'm willing to accept your argument that a Mac is not a general purpose computer. It then begs the question of why these devices are so popular for software development...?

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According to the Stackoverflow 2021 survey, it's not as popular as we might be led to believe.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo...

MacOS comes in at 25.19%. Even Linux is higher at 25.32%.

Meanwhile, Windows is 45.33% (over 48% if you include WSL, which was counted separately).

82,719 responses on the operating system question too...

Software Development is also a specific purpose. One that has a much broader range of requirements than (e.g.) a microwave, but still. It is entirely possible that Macbooks fulfill those requirements while lacking some other properties required of a general purpose computer.

(I'm not claiming that that's true - simply that your implication that "it is necessary to have a general purpose computer in order to develop software" is untrue)

Yep. My notion isn't so much that you need a general purpose computer to do software development, but more that people who are interested in doing development are more likely than most to be interested in general-purpose computers.

I think it’s more of a trajectory than the current state of the world to be quite honest, but if you’ll engage with my more conspiratorial speculations — you can imagine software development would have to be one of the last activities to be subject to severe tool restriction out of the box.

I think a lot of this will happen under the goal of unifying the laptop and phone/tablet experience.

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