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Comment by pooriaazimi | Hacker News Reader

I've had a 15" MacBook Pro for about three years and I absoloutely love it. Its trackpad is far, far better than any other laptop's, its keyboard is very easy to type on, its display is gorgeous, its pretty, runs OS X and Linux (and on OS X, you can run most unix tools and a huge number of great development tools and editors that run only on OS X - like TextMate).

MacBook Pro is the dream machine for a developer. But if you're not in a hurry, I suggest waiting for a while. Rumors say a 15" Air-ish MacBook Pro is on its way (with fast, quad core processors and 4-8 GB ram).

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>MacBook Pro is the dream machine for a developer. But if you're not in a hurry, I suggest waiting for a while. Rumors say a 15" Air-ish MacBook Pro is on its way (with fast, quad core processors and 4-8 GB ram).

I have to oppose this. OS X's Mission Control is not at all good for a developer. Not at all as efficient as using some window manager with dedicated and numbered desktops, e.g. Xmonad.

The other thing which annoyed me when I worked with OS X machine was the absence of a good package manager for every application. I had to use my Macbook for work when I was working from home. I had to install GCC and MySQL, which took almost an hour of my precious time. Never had that kind of problems with Arch or Ubuntu.

Two options that can be used at the same time .

Use brew to install command line apps and other utilities.

Use Linux in a VM and install servers and what not in the VM. Use file system sharing to make the Linux side appear seem less.

So using native Linux install is much easier.

Too bad that other manufacturers don't build as good hardware as Apple. And too bad Apple hardware is often propiertary, so it might be hard to install Linux to it (not always, though).

My choice has been a separate work computer with two monitors, a mouse, a keyboard and Arch Linux. At home I have two computers: iMac for television and MacBook for upstairs Minecraft computer. Win-win.

You can get the same effect using a VM. Installing Linux on Mac hardware is __way__ harder than you think. After building a bootable linux usb key for a macbook, I will never do this again. It literally felt like I was using a sparc station to boot DOS.

not cool.

That said, I use linux VMs on my macs all the time. It feels natural, in fact it feels RIGHT. When I was mostly using desktop linux, I still did the bulk of my server side work in VMs under VMWare Workstation. So not much has changed, just that my window manager is made by apple.

You can download GCC and LLVM from apple's website (requires a free registration though) - a 140MB file. After that, you can use homebrew[1] to install MySQL, or hundreds of other development tools - For example, I have redis, MongoDB, Node.js, MySQL, ffmpeg, wget, ocaml, lynx, mit-scheme, gsed, cmake, ack, clock, coffee-script and about 200 other packages installed.

You're quite right that it wasn't as easy as ubuntu, but things have got infinitely better in the past year. `brew` is now comparable to `apt-get` (for everything I've tried at least).

And I'm positive things will improve still. About 70% on this topic recommended MacBooks. Last year, it'd been 50%.

[1] https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

I know Homebrew. I've been using Apple computers for the last 10 years. The first time I couldn't do my stuff with a Mac was when I started programming professionally.

There is still important stuff missing. I'd like to have rc.d for daemons and the ability to change the awful desktop to more powerful window manager.

I still like macs, but not as my work computer.

I also love my 15" MacBook Pro. I've had it for about 1.5 years now. I will never buy a different brand again.

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