Why is the Mac the developers platform of choice?

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

opethdisciple

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When I say developer I mean content creators, developers and professional video and photo editing etc....

I'm a DevOps and have been using a windows laptop with a Ubuntu VM for years but it causes me a plethora of issues so work have switched me to a M4 Mac Book Pro.

Its looks nice etc... but why is Mac the developers/content creators platform of choice?

Why is windows not able to replicate?
 
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Maybe run Windows as VM on an Ubuntu Laptop.

Windows is software not hardware. Mac is hardware the software is MacOS.

The technical reasons why Apple was dominant in certain creative industries is long gone. You can get most of the software on either platform. But the habit of creative industries using Macs remains. Ironically most of my creative work/jobs have used PCs though I've used Macs from time to time. I think people just find something they like or get familiar with and stick with it.
 
Content creation is an interesting one. I have it on fairly good authority that socials favour content uploaded from iPhones.

I'm a professional video editor and animator by trade. My 5800X 3080 Windows PC got replaced with an M1 Pro Max as I needed something portable, which has been utterly rock solid since I got it, and I barely use the Windows machine now unless I've got a heavy render to leave.
 
Mainly because Apple laptops are leagues ahead of any Windows offerings, the hardware is just better all round for the money.

The media engines on the M4 are amazing (for handling video files). I edit 6k/4k multi stream on my M4 Mac Air no problems.
 
For the 'DevOps' side of things - hisortically enviornments were more accepting of Mac's than Linux/Unix machines, and having native unix tooling was superior to the Windows tooling. This is less of an issue now with the native Linux capabilities built into Windows via WSL, but now Apple make sleek, nice looking hardware which is super optimised and MacOS has had shall we say less hiccups in the last few years than Windows.

I love Mac hardware, don't think you can beat it. Not as in love with the OS, and would give anything for proper native *nix on there. But I use Mac for work and much of the time at home for DevOps, Infra, Code, Gaming etc and it works really well for everything I do. Windows supports so many different hardware parts, specs etc - MacOS is so optimised to support only Apple hardware. That's the brilliance.
 
Software development-wise, the inherent Linux-ness (yes, I know it's more like BSD) of OS X meant that the wealth of free Linux-based tools were easily available. About 15 years ago, most tech start-ups were either cash-strapped or keen to use similar tools to the big players at the time (Facebook, Google etc. - mainly PHP and Ruby, as I recall), and these were generally easier to work with on Linux-based systems. Apple offered off-the-shelf computers which could work with these tools, and I think now the trend has basically continued.

Certainly the larger companies I worked with often used Windows machines, but a lot of new devs coming into them around 2010 onwards were starting to be more familiar with Macs. I did work with one start-up which was Windows-based, but that was mainly due to its very enterprisey origins. By about 2015, lots of dev teams I encountered were using Macs even in large multinationals where the 'normal' office workers predominantly used Windows.

Nowadays, I don't think that the gap is particularly big, but I personally still find it pretty difficult to develop on Windows because I have grown so used to the Linux CLI and its more-or-less guaranteed 'base' of useful tools. I suppose if I was extremely familiar with Powershell it might be different, but honestly, I've never met any developer who has been particularly hot on it :p I think it's more aimed at sys admins.
 
Historically, on a lot of tech stacks it just works, whereas on windows you have to jump through hoops and find workarounds and workarounds to get it to work. That’s wasted time and effort that they could otherwise use productively.

Lots of developers have only ever coded on macOS so they don’t want to change their workflow, and windows offers pretty much nothing that could even be remotely interesting.
 
Throrik said:
Chances are it's a work laptop, and OS is mandated, and in fact the laptop will be centrally managed. WSL is a 'better' choice although it's still a level of virtualisation.
Click to expand...
Ah, locked out from the BIOS etc. I'd forgotten about that. Those naughty admins! :cry:
 
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