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Comment by carlosdp | Hacker News Reader

Yea this is one of Apple's largest advantages as a platform, they really don't want the Macbook to fall out of favor as the developer's machine of choice.

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People dont use osx/ios because developers like the hardware. Developers develop for osx/ios because apple provides them a toolkit and lots of potential customers, and exposure through the appstore.

I've been working in Silicon Valley at tech companies for the past 15 years, and MacBook Pros have been massively dominant for the web developers, server-side developers, database developers, technical developers, and mobile developers on not only iOS but Android. None of this can be explained by "Apple provides them a toolkit and exposure." I am pretty confident that developers use OS X because, yes, they like the hardware. (Which makes developers by and large not liking the last few years of MacBook hardware a danger Apple's been too slow to recognize.)

Yes, but also, it was basically linux, which meant that it was close enough to the hosts that you were connecting to. It was a nightmare to admin Linux from Windows in the past.

I have a college aged brother, and Microsoft currently owns GitHub, and is providing the linux subsystem, which is a huge signal that "developers are welcome." His whole generation is developing on $300 Dell laptops and it's easy. Mac used to provide that, but you paid for it.

Microsoft's moves to become more developer (and Linux) friendly are undoubtedly paying off. It's my understanding from recent data -- although I can't find a linkable reference at the moment -- that Apple laptops are still the #1 choice on college campuses by a substantial margin, but this could certainly be changing. (K-12 schools are full of Chromebooks, but anecdotally, that doesn't seem to be translating into a preference for sticking with them after high school.)

True, but there is a big difference in the quality of produced software between:

* I need to develop for this shitty platform, which I hate, because my customers are on it

* I want to develop for this awesome platform, because I just love it and my customers are also on it

If Apple loses touch & favor with developers, their platform will slowly but surely die out over a decade or two. Apple is expensive, the only reason for Apple to even exist is because they deliver quality products. If they ever go down the road of consistently failing this core value, they will die more quickly than reindeer thrown down a cliff.

That’s quite an assertion. I love (loved?) OS X and the hardware behind it. It’s the most polished unixy system money can buy. I don’t like the current generation of hardware, though.

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