Comment by Brainspackle
10 hours ago
I've been a software engineer for 25 years, doing Linux stuff at startups and big companies (the biggest even). In all my time as a software engineer, I've seen maybe 3 people who didn't use a MacBook Pro for work. Apple makes the bulk of its money from tech companies and schools and they cater very well to both. If it stops being Unix-like, they lose the thing they make the most money from. They are smarter than that.
I don't think apple makes the bulk from professionals at all, the iphone is their flagship product and their laptop line has been expanding towards casual markets with budget models.
They absolutely do not want their developers to mass migrate to another platform. Walk into any SF startup and you'll see 100% Mac laptops, except for the Finance guy who needs Excel on Windows, and that one dev who insists on Linux, and all those devs build webpages that work on Safari, and iOS apps before they (maybe) eventually get around to making an Android app.
Apple is highly incentivized to keep devs on Macs, even if it turned out to be a loss leader for them.
Right but in this thread it is pretty clear we are talking about the money they make from MacOS.
They don't make any money on macOS anymore. You get it preinstalled on their computers, you can't buy it separately, you can't install it on other computers, and major upgrades are free.
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The money they make from MacOS is a footnote compared to the money they make from phone hardware, the app store transaction tax, and ads. To a first approximation, the only reason that Apple cares about MacOS is so that people can make iOS apps.
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Backend developers are already conditioned to use Linux VMs when developing in Mac OS.
And so are developers on Linux. 99.5% of your backend stuff will run just fine on macOS without any modification, but it's been a good practice for a long time now to run stuff in containers (Docker/OrbStack/podman/etc.) in order to have a reproducible environment free of contamination. My development process in macOS is basically no different than it was on Linux.
I bet you are located in US.
You’re in a bubble. Windows is still huge, especially in middling companies that dictate it and standard HP/Dell/Lenovo hardware for all 3k staff.
It’s insanely common.
His point isn’t that it’s common, it’s that a unix-like environment is a key selling point.
Given that Windows made WSL in an attempt to capture developer mindshare, that tends to support his comment
You still end up in uncanny valley often enough, with commands that are missing, or working unexpectedly differently. It often feels like macOS could be made so much better for developers, but Apple just doesn't care because people buy their devices anyway.
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