MacBooks are super popular in a variety of professional fields. They are still the go-to machines for photography and video editing. They are popular in software development for providing a good UNIX environment out of the box while also being very solidly built machines.
The more my software engineering career matures, the more I see my peers using MacBooks.
Windows still absolutely dominates government and enterprise, but the idea that professionals don’t use Macs is pretty nonsensical. It’s the kind of thing I believed when I was 20 and working in tech support, back when I still thought it was cool to call Apple users “sheep”.
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There’s no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they’re writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don’t make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
This. Good enterprises offer both options. I think people are starting to realize that its best to let people pick the tool that works best for them in this circumstance. Also, equivalent Dells (I have mainly worked at Dell shops lately) are actually more expensive than a MacBook Pro.
Another thing is that enterprise tools lock down Macs a lot less in my experience. This usually pushes people in the direction of Mac when you don’t have to go through an approval process to install an app or package you want to test.
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There’s no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they’re writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don’t make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
Well, I’ve worked for the government (as contractor), corporations, and small businesses, I could count a few times I’ve seen people using Apple Mac Pro devices on one hand (more often seeing Macbook Pro rather, but very rarely for development) and more time than I can count on either Linux or Windows workstation computers.
We use Linux desktop often, because most of our servers are running on Linux so it helps to have version conformity when matching up with server’s versioning and we occasionally use Windows for Visual Studio, proprietary software and so forth. But there are a few times where we get discounts for buying software for Linux rather than Windows.
Employees in my office switched from Apple Macbook Pro to Windows/Linux based laptops like Framework Laptop, because Macbook Pro often time lacked GPU that you would find on Linux and Windows workstation. Apple is going off on it’s own little world with their own Metal API/GPU and it doesn’t reflect the reality in real world emerging technologies. For instance, there are some computational challenges that in my office, we make use of Vulkan Compute so that we can purchase both Nvidia GPU and AMD GPU to generate real-time data, had we used Metal API and Apple’s products, it would’ve been cheaper to purchase cloud compute servers. (We wanted to ensure each developer can test the given Vulkan code on their own desktop/workstation.)
My experience has been all GPU-intensive workflows have been pushed to the cloud. It works a lot better for CI/CD purposes as well, and most of the larger datasets are too practically large for your laptop, it ends up being prohibitively slow to download datasets from databases to your own laptop and then train on your local machine.
I could be biased since most of my network is in the startup scene in SV, where hardware cost is generally the LAST thing most companies worry about. I haven’t seen a non-mac software company that’s not a 5000+ dinosaur person company.
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Apple hasn’t been for professionals, for like a decade now.
MacBooks are super popular in a variety of professional fields. They are still the go-to machines for photography and video editing. They are popular in software development for providing a good UNIX environment out of the box while also being very solidly built machines.
The more my software engineering career matures, the more I see my peers using MacBooks.
Windows still absolutely dominates government and enterprise, but the idea that professionals don’t use Macs is pretty nonsensical. It’s the kind of thing I believed when I was 20 and working in tech support, back when I still thought it was cool to call Apple users “sheep”.
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There’s no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they’re writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don’t make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
This. Good enterprises offer both options. I think people are starting to realize that its best to let people pick the tool that works best for them in this circumstance. Also, equivalent Dells (I have mainly worked at Dell shops lately) are actually more expensive than a MacBook Pro.
Another thing is that enterprise tools lock down Macs a lot less in my experience. This usually pushes people in the direction of Mac when you don’t have to go through an approval process to install an app or package you want to test.
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There’s no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they’re writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don’t make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
Too bad the Reddit migration attracted trolls like this.
Disagree.
All the software companies i work with has switched to MacBook Pros as their mainline professional laptop of choice in the past decade.
It’s literally a better product for most of developer work and much easier to support.
In fact, I’m confident that MX MacBook Pros have cannibalized a good chunk of Mac Pro sales because they are just that good.
Well, I’ve worked for the government (as contractor), corporations, and small businesses, I could count a few times I’ve seen people using Apple Mac Pro devices on one hand (more often seeing Macbook Pro rather, but very rarely for development) and more time than I can count on either Linux or Windows workstation computers.
We use Linux desktop often, because most of our servers are running on Linux so it helps to have version conformity when matching up with server’s versioning and we occasionally use Windows for Visual Studio, proprietary software and so forth. But there are a few times where we get discounts for buying software for Linux rather than Windows.
Employees in my office switched from Apple Macbook Pro to Windows/Linux based laptops like Framework Laptop, because Macbook Pro often time lacked GPU that you would find on Linux and Windows workstation. Apple is going off on it’s own little world with their own Metal API/GPU and it doesn’t reflect the reality in real world emerging technologies. For instance, there are some computational challenges that in my office, we make use of Vulkan Compute so that we can purchase both Nvidia GPU and AMD GPU to generate real-time data, had we used Metal API and Apple’s products, it would’ve been cheaper to purchase cloud compute servers. (We wanted to ensure each developer can test the given Vulkan code on their own desktop/workstation.)
My experience has been all GPU-intensive workflows have been pushed to the cloud. It works a lot better for CI/CD purposes as well, and most of the larger datasets are too practically large for your laptop, it ends up being prohibitively slow to download datasets from databases to your own laptop and then train on your local machine.
I could be biased since most of my network is in the startup scene in SV, where hardware cost is generally the LAST thing most companies worry about. I haven’t seen a non-mac software company that’s not a 5000+ dinosaur person company.