Ask HN: Why do people think Macs are terrible for hacking?

1 point·_g2lm··6 comments

Long story short, I'm getting a new computer and all of my friends (mostly non-programmers) are telling me that if I want to program I'm going to hate the Mac. From what I can tell from recent trends this isn't the case at all, especially since OS X is basically a variant of Unix.

Why is there such a widespread idea that hackers and Macs aren't friends?

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If you were a plumber and your non-plumber friends told you what tools to use would you listen to them? The Mac is a nice gui on top of a BSD based unix system. You have access to all the nice command line tools and programs of unix. You get XCode for free if you want to do Mac/iOS development. Basically unless you are doing .Net development it's a great machine, and even then with Bootcamp that is possible.

I'm going to get a Mac anyway (well, I would if I had the money). I'm just wondering why people think the Mac sucks for hacking. Did it suck initially?

I think were it comes from is this: Ask yourself what your target audience is for your projects. Where will your code run later on? Is it going to be a Mac or possibly some UNIX/Linux server?

Your problem is going to be that you won't be able to have a development environment close enough to production as needed to test properly.

As long as you add a proper Model M to the Mac, VirtualBox should take care of the rest.

Macs are the only machine on which you can legally use all major OS's, and thus the only machine on which you can legally compile software for all major platforms.

If that doesn't take the cake, I don't know what does.

My hacker friend convinced me to switch to Mac. It's a great host OS to run your virtual machines. (And fun to explore something different.)

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