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Comment by imack | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps having Mac is more a sign that a company is willing to shell out for decent tools moreso than Macs being some super development platfrm. A developer area full of high-end macs tells me that a company is willing to pay good money for developer tools in a way that a room full of generic Ubuntu boxes does not (independent of their respective merits).

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While I agree for the most part, I'm also leery of companies showing developers a room full of Macs just to get "bonus points". I fear Macs are becoming the new Aeron chair. Given most startups are poor, I'd much rather a company spend it's money wisely. If it means I have to do development on a high-end, but generic, Ubuntu box, then so be it.

I don't know much about PCs, but you can buy off the shelf a Mac with 16G RAM and 1T of disk, that's enough for a developer to run a dozen or more VMs... You can to all intents and purposes put a replica of the production environment on every developer's and tester's desktop. That's got to be a big win for productivity.

That one mac supercomputer can finance about 4-5 high end developer beige boxes running ubuntu.

And you'd need those 4-5 boxes in a stack under your desk to run an equivalent environment.

I'm confident that a cheaper 1T disk 16gig of RAM Linux machine can just run just as many virtualized instances as a 1T disk 16gig RAM Apple machine. So if you had 4-5 Linux machines, that's 4 or 5 additional copies of this mythical production environment. Using your own math, this would be an ever bigger win for productivity.

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