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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.

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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.

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