I don't know, starting with OS X a lot of devs used Macs because 'it's a UNIX system', and for a while their hardware was relatively consumer-friendly (battery, RAM and disk were user-replacable/upgradable on my 2009 MacBook).
Yes to this!
I was in academia when I switched from Windows to Mac, and UNIX was a big factor.
Incidentally, my first Mac was an iMac G4.
Even Docker, for example, runs natively on Linux and Macs and doesn’t on Windows (or didn’t initially at least…heck it wasn’t even available on Windows for many years until MS itself worked with Docker to bring it to Windows).
NodeJS took 2 years to come to Windows, again with MS having to work with Joyent yo achieve this, but was available on Linux and Mac from the outset.
It runs natively on Linux. On Macs it starts a Linux VM and then does containers inside that, which adds overhead (and seems to preallocate a lot of ram).
Other than that yes, you can have a working GUI and a unixy enough command line on the same machine. And that's why I switched to macs... from linux.
Why does being unix based matter? I imagine if you are doing server stuff you are on Linux/Unix. If you are doing C stuff, you are doing it closer to the end device. If you are doing visual stuff you are doing it on Windows since they have us by the balls.
Maybe if you are making iOS apps, but that wouldn't be until the end of the semi-replaceable era.
Maybe doing web dev? Yeah probably not, you'd be doing windows with firefox, chrome, and IE for front end.
Even in this modern era where Microsoft cannot be trusted and Linux Desktop still cannot handle NVIDIA, people are still choosing to do dev work on those system. The only time I see using Macs is for iOS dev only. (Maybe you might SSH into a server for backend stuff, but 25 year old computers can do that)
I'd imagine these necessary tools for Linux server dev/admin are also readily available on Mac, if not installed already. Now, is that worth the price delta? Probably not, but given the sparsity of pre installed, supported Linux hardware I can potentially see the appeal.
That is why I even bothered with GNU/Linux to start with.
OS X adoption by UNIX crowd proved the point that for a large majority of development community, GNU/Linux itself is irrelevant, what they care about is a POSIX like experience.
Hence Microsoft learning by their Windows NT/POSIX management mistakes, and creating WSL to fill that gap.
For those of us running Virtual Box and VMWare for years, it only brings the convinience of one product less to care about.
I wanted to check the Internet price on something, and asked an employee whether any of the demo computers had connectivity. It turned out that only the Mac did.
As I started using it, I remembered that I used to be an Apple user, and it would be easier to find commercial software that worked for it, and it was actually UNIX. Terminal and everything.
So, I stopped component shopping and headed to my local Apple Store later that week. Bought a G5 tower and I’ve never looked back.
The other alternative was Windows 2000/XP, almost no one was caring for GNU/Linux other than on the servers.
I was part of the initial group having a go at Scientific Linux, and there weren't that many users of it when I left in 2004.
In fact for many years, not sure about nowadays, the IT official policy was that installing GNU/Linux, even Scientific Linux, meant the users were on their own, the only UNIX desktop that they would officially support was OS X.
I also prototype natively and locally even though I eventually deploy to Linux. Lower level C code (with the odd #ifdef), and compilers and tooling for more niche languages all work perfectly fine.
The latter is a bigger point than it may seem. There is still a lot of open source software that is not working well as it should on Windows, particularly compilers and libraries.
If you were a kid or wanted to get involved with web development or other stuff you had a supported consumer platform, with consumer software and this hidden mode that gave you access to all of the Unix toolset.
You have to remember - there was no docker back in the day, no WSL, and linux laptops were for a tiny niche group of hard core people.
When OS X came out, you could buy basically for the first time a good, lightweight but powerful laptop which would run most of your favorite Unix code as well as Office, Photoshop, etc. and had 5-6 hours of battery life because you didn’t have to disable power saving to avoid kernel panics. That wasn’t perfect, of course, but a ton of early web stalwarts like Perl, PHP, MySQL ran better than on Windows with decent fidelity for anyone deploying on Linux or Solaris.
I bought Apple stock starting around 2001 when I noticed that in addition to traditional markets like design, I was going to hackathons or conferences like USENIX and seeing half the attendees with titanium PowerBooks. It’s hard to imagine now but at the time that was pretty speculative since their finances were still lean in the pre-iPod era (if I’d been willing to make a bigger gamble I’d probably be writing this from a yacht).
I still don’t understand why investors didn’t understand Apple’s subscription accounting and how it meant that their quarterly iPhone profits were something like 1/16th their actual iPhone profits.
But I really only use Macs because it’s the easiest unix machine for me to use. I don’t know of another laptop where everything works and I also natively have a shell and unix. I know there are ways to get close to this but they are all one more step and I don’t care enough to bother.
If there was a Linux laptop with a decent desktop and packaging manager I never had to think about that cost the same as mac, I would switch in an instant.
I know Ubuntu has been trying for years to achieve this but, we're a long way off.
If it didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have spent big money on Mac-is-Unix advertising campaign.
MS didn’t rewrite Windows internals to support WSL for the love of open source. They did it because most dev work happens on Linux (and now macs). Macs get to use that for free. Microsoft had to do work itself to support NodeJS and Docker, for example, and they became available on Windows many years after they were available on Linux/MacOS.
Docker, especially, was a piece of software that for many years was almost necessary for dev teams. And for many years you couldn’t use it if you were on Windows.
And having a Unix shell out of the box was/is easier than dealing with Cygwin and its alternatives.
Windows is better these days because the cloud dragged Microsoft into doing something about its shell experience. But even now Windows versions of things like Curl are half-assed versions.