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Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

I kind of wonder if this whole 'Macs and Unix' are some post-purchase rationalization. This makes more sense than it seems, Apple is best in class when it comes to hypnosis.

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)

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It definitely was not post hoc rationalization. Anyone doing Unix or open source development - not as dominant then but still big - had been faced with paying huge sums for a proprietary box with increasingly uncompetitive hardware or dealing with desktop Linux’s driver and stability challenges (I did that for years).

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).

It was depressing reading Horace Dediu’s analysis of Apple’s accounting practices in the year or two after the iPhone’s release, knowing that Apple stock was significantly undervalued, and not having the means to take advantage of it.

Oh man, so much this. I made a college roommate so much money by telling him to put all the money his parents gave him in Apple stock after the iPhone was released. He didn’t agree (he was also a massive anti-Apple pro PC guy…he owned a Zune) until I explained Apple’s subscription accounting and what it actually meant.

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.

I put in one market order on 9/10. It wasn’t processed until after the market reopened but went in at like $17/share. I remember thinking I should buy more but 9/11 and the dotcom crater made me decide to save my cash.

Speaking for myself, I went to CompUSA to see what they had that I could use to build my next home Linux box. I didn’t expect to buy anything, just was window shopping.

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.

It was definitely a huge selling point for anyone doing web development. Suddenly you had a consumer machine that was close to what was running in production.

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.

I think I spent more days fighting with Linux power management than actually using my laptop back then. My first Macbook was a dream.

People wanted all the CLI goodness of unix (linux) with a gui that functioned. Windows had cygwin, but was otherwise anemic at the CLI. I had a solaris and later a linux desktop next to my Windows desktop, but linux on laptops was a huge PITA. I got a G4 Powerbook and had the best of both worlds, able to run something like Lightroom, and have all the familiar unix tools.

The G4 Powerbook was my first exposure to Apple as well. Just having an ssh client on the command line was very nice.

Why does being unix based matter?

If it didn't matter, Apple wouldn't have spent big money on Mac-is-Unix advertising campaign.

https://infinigeek.com/assets/apple_unix_ad-s.jpg

Boy do I miss this era of computing. From the advertisements to the competition to the innovation that was happening at the time. It all felt so exciting.

It was approachable Unix.

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.

That’s not it. The first place I saw large Mac adoption was all the long time Linux and Unix nerds in my CS dept. Suddenly there were heaps of G4 MacBooks all over CS. I got one based off the recommendation of a friend who was a FreeBSD user.

Same thing! All of my professors were using Sun Ultra 10s in 2000. OSX was the logical next step vs futzing with Linux GUIs etc for many.

The only time I see people using windows for dev work is when they are a .net shop or they have no choice.

Not at all, back when I was at CERN that was exactly the reason many researchers were going for OS X, as the Solaris workstations were being decommissioned, there was a pile of them stacked at my office.

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 switched from Linux to macOS a decade ago, and the underlying UNIX-like system meant that I could continue to use all the same development and shell tools I've used my whole career, and most of the time I don't even notice I'm on macOS.

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.

Mac was a lot less painful for installing open source software than Windows was at the time (and still is in some ways). A compatible tool chain makes porting Linux software much easier. Installing is also easier when you’ve got Bash and a file system that resembles Linux.

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.

There are a ton of dev tools that are Linux/Mac only.

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.

I don’t think “macs are unix” applied to iMacs since they didn’t run osx for the years where they mattered.

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.

With Apple, you get the marriage of great hardware with (what I consider) an okay operating system. I VASTLY prefer Linux and use it daily. Since it's Arch, and since I'm currently using Hyprland as my desktop, I sincerely doubt that would meet your criteria. Battery life is nowhere near what a current Apple product can achieve.

I know Ubuntu has been trying for years to achieve this but, we're a long way off.

The out of the box ssh experience on Linux is far superior to windows, ssh mounting of disks, easy scp and rsync access without jumping through hoops. To me, thinking of doing my job from a windows box sounds painful.

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.

This is why in hindsight it was a bad idea for Microsoft to never been serious about POSIX subsystem on the Windows NT linage.

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.

Well, as a lifelong unix sysadmin, it matters, but I'm not sure how much it matters for a typical developer.

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