So I’m sitting here at work (don’t worry…I’m not charging this time to any clients) between a couple people that I never thought would start becoming the norm vs an extremely sad exception. Developers doing there development work on Macs aka TrendMachines. As any piece of hardware out of the Apple marketing monster is, the Apple laptop is just as much a piece fashion as it is a functional tool.
Someone needs to fill me in on what’s happening here. Are macs becoming that standardized that they are a viable development option…even at the application development level? I can see it happening more where I’m at, because of the fact some of our developers are starting to come from the “web person” role being moved into “web development” instead of where I come from “computer science/application development” moving into “web development”. So they already using their machine to do photoshop designs and media editing instead of strict development. Also in web development I can see it more due to the fact the “IDE’s” consist of EditPlus and firefox plugins for the most part versus the usual machine intensive Visual Studios of application development.
This all hit me in the last few weeks when I went out to the North American eZ Publish Partner Meeting in Chicago and saw 3 or 4 developers using there Macbooks at the meeting and then our newest developer being hired on requesting a Macbook vs a PC laptop. On top of that, Joe, is switching to a Macbook from his Linux based PC. What gives?
Current Developer Count:
- 2 PC’s (Deane and I)
- 3 Macs (Joe, Ben, Tim)
…we’re losing ground fast.
March 27th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
We win!
Unless you need a Windows-specific app (you can use VMware Fusion, Parallels or dual boot in those cases though), there’s not much reason (when those are your two options) to go with a Windows box, really. Everything you need can be found, identically or similarly, in a Mac app. You have the added benefit of having a subsystem that’s not horrible. While Windows no longer runs atop it, I still consider its subsystem to be DOS.
DOS versus FreeBSD (OS X being the Mach kernel on a BSD userland with some eye candy tossed in)…not a tough choice.
Of course, when cost is an issue, Apple loses. They really need to work on that. And my thoughts don’t include options of running other great operating systems (FreeBSD, BeOS, QNX, Plan 9, …)
March 28th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Oh Pele, when will you see the light?