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Comment by antishatter | Hacker News Reader

When you say "Starting To" I presume you mean from about 2015 on. It's clear Windows is trying to pick up slack and also be cloud developer friendly with WSL integration.

Apple sticking with Intel and now reverting to a terrible proprietary cpu architecture, locking software down more and more, releasing pro versions with inadequate options and keyboard all acts to ensure they lose their status as top developer environment

Before they dropped powerpc for intel, no one would have considered using a mac for dev work.

It's clear they don't understand the developer market at all or are only interested in Mobile because the revenue is insane.

They had a good ten years as the best dev environment but as they say "The King is dead, long live the King".

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>terrible proprietary cpu architecture

Err, there are more cpus with ARM than x86 by an order of magnitude...

It's also less proprietary...

>Before they dropped powerpc for intel, no one would have considered using a mac for dev work.

Huh? Where did you get that from? OS X Macs where quite popular for dev work pre-Intel, popular for web devs, and with good Java support...

I'm guessing when your parent said "cpu architecture" they meant precisely that and not "instruction set architecture". The ISA is ARM, sure, but the CPU architecture is Apple.

> Apple sticking with Intel and now reverting to a terrible proprietary cpu architecture

Are you referring to the ARM instruction set generally being more open for custom instructions? Going by the number of licensees and producers of ARM silicon, I'd say ARM is less proprietary compared to x86 which is basically just produced by Intel, AMD, and a Chinese licensor AFAIK.

I was already doing Windows cloud development on Amazon EC 2 back in 2011, no need for WSL.

And it was even easier before VPC, just public instances with RDP (obviously a big security issue, but a decade ago not uncommon)

> Apple sticking with Intel and now reverting to a terrible proprietary cpu architecture

ARM is more open than x86. In fact, you could start your own ARM chip design company today. Which is something you cannot do with x86 at all, even if your were to do a complete takeover of AMD or Intel.

> Before they dropped powerpc for intel, no one would have considered using a mac for dev work.

DHH wrote Ruby on Rails on a Powerbook. Microsoft did all the development of the original XBox on PowerPC Macs. A lot of developers used macs before Intel, and they will use them after Intel.

> They had a good ten years as the best dev environment but as they say "The King is dead, long live the King".

Given the Frankenstein horror show that is Windows with WSL2 and the terminal lack of a polished working GUI in Linux, Mac is still the best dev environment unless you are doing some platform specific work.

I was with you until this:

> Given the Frankenstein horror show that is Windows with WSL2

Here I will politely disagree. WSL2 is far from a monster. It is a quite nifty hack, and fast at that.

I'm normally working on a Lknux machine but I've used Windows with WSL2 day out and day in now and I am only aware of it twice or maybe three times a day, and even then it is not a horror show - quite the contrary - it is close to the definition of seamless.

> and the terminal lack of a polished working GUI in Linux,

To each their own. I won't get into enumerating everything I missed while I used Mac but I can say I tried very hard to make it work as some parts of the MacBook experience was really great.

> Mac is still the best dev environment unless you are doing some platform specific work.

As thousands of devs who are free to choose their own laptop and yet doesn't choose Mac can tell: it is a bit more complicated.

I'd appreciate if we could stop propagating this myth now.

Mac is different. Some enjoy it. Others cannot stand it.

I used to enjoy it, cant bring myself to buy a new macbook pro with what they put out lately. Will go with some ryzen based book and run some apt-get or pacman distro of linux instead. Hell, I'd take w10 Pro over apple offerings of late.

Have you used Windows lately? It's going downhill.

Ads everywhere, surprise "you don't have a choice" updates, and just the other day after an update it locked the screen to force me through a slideshow that tried repeatedly to coerce me into using Edge ("let's import your bookmarks / contacts / whatever" and the "please not now" button was de-emphasized and kept changing names and moving between slides).

> Ads everywhere, surprise

This is actually a good point.

At Microsoft guys around here: Please tell your folks that nothing says quality like when your paid business OS tries to upsell you like a really cheesy salesman /s

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