Comment by trueno

> Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?

i dont think anyone asks this question in good faith, so it may not even be worth answering. see:

> I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.

yea fwiw macs own for multi-target deployments. i spin up a gazillion containers in whatever i need. need a desktop? arm native linux or windows installations in utm/parallels/whatever run damn near native speed, and if im so inclined i can fully emulate x86/64 envs. dont run into needing to do that often, but the fact that i can without needing to bust out a different device owns. speed penalty barely even matter to me, because ive got untold resources to play around with in this backpack device that literally gets all day battery. spare cores, spare unified mem, worlds my oyster. i was just in win xp 32bit sp2 few weeks ago using 86box compiling something in a very legacy dependent visual studio .net 7 environment that needed the exact msvc-flavored float precision that was shipping 22 years ago, and i needed a fully emulated cpu running at frequencies that was going to make the compiler make the same decisions it did 22 years ago. never had to leave my mac, didnt have to buy some 22 year old thinkpad on ebay, this thing gave me a time machine into another era so i could get something compiled to spec. these techs arent heard of, but its just one of many scenarios where i dont have to leave my mac to get something done. to say its a swiss army knife is an understatement. its a swiss army knife that ships with underlying hardware specs to let you fan out into anything.

for development i have never been blocked on macos in the apple silicon era. i have been blocked on windows/linux developing for other targets. fwiw i use everything, im loyal to whoever puts forth the best thing i can throw my money at. for my professional life, that is unequivocally apple atm. when the day comes some other darkhorse brings forth better hardware ill abandon this env without a second thought. i have no tribalistic loyalties in this space, i just gravitate towards whoever presents me with the best economic win that has the things im after. we havent been talking about itunes for like a decade.