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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I work in games where we write c++ in a multi-million LOC base. Every developer in my company has a minimum of 12 cores, and 96GB RAM. All of the offices are backed by build farms on top of this. There are entire industries that rely on very high end hardware. (Of course we also rely on lots of windows-only software too, but that's only an issue once the hardware is solved)

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Fair, and we could spend ages listing all the different kinds of people who have really specific job descriptions that require them to have traditional, stationary workstations. And then we could follow that up with lists of all the reasons why they need to be running Windows or Linux on said workstations, and couldn't choose comparable Apple hardware even if it were available.

But I don't think that we need to beat a dead horse like that. The more interesting one would be to figure out some interesting and non-trivially-sized cross-section of people who both need a workstation-class computer, and have the option of even considering using OS X for the purpose.

The main reasons to buy Apple x86 machines for any OS developer was that Apple has to keep their number of hardware variants to a minimum and you can run compatibility (and truly same hardware performance) tests against any OS as OsX was the only one locked to it's hardware. The same might be true for Arm if there are adequate GPL drivers to not exclude Linux/Android, etc.

I'm not sure that's true. At least in my experience, Bootcamp seemed almost designed to cripple Windows by contrast to OS X

The last time I used it (the last MBP with Ethernet built in. I want to say 2012 or 2013?) some of the features "missing" in Bootcamp

- No EFI booting. Instead we emulate a (very buggy!) BIOS

- No GPU switching. Only the hot and power hungry AMD GPU is exposed and enabled

- Minimal power and cooling management. Building Gentoo in a VM got the system up to a recorded 117 degrees Celsius in Speccy!

- Hard disk in IDE mode only, not SATA! Unless you booted up OS X and ran some dd commands on the partition table to "trick" it into running as a SATA mode disk

The absolute, crushing cynic in me has always felt that this was a series of intentional steps. Both a "minimum viable engineering effort" and a subtle way to simply make Windows seem "worse" by showing it performing worse on a (forgive the pun) "Apples to Apples" configuration. After all, Macs are "just Intel PC's inside!" so if Windows runs worse, clearly that's a fault of bad software rather than subtly crippled hardware

I think we used rEFIt.. I remember it would be a bit finicky, but I never really had to boot windows since my product had no equivalent, and these days I don't boot OsX, though firmware updates would be nice.

What if Apple decided that they don't get to gain that much out of AAA games so they don't care offering hardware that those companies might ran on?

I have the feeling that Apple just cares about Apps for iOS (money wise). What's the minimum they need to do so people write iOS apps?

If this hardware, incidentally, is good for your use case, all is good. If not, they might just shrug it and decide you're too niche (i.e. not adding too much value to their ecosystem) and abandon you.

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