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Why Developers Are Switching To Macs
snydeq writes "Programmers are finding themselves increasingly drawn to the Mac as a development platform, in large part due to Apple's decision to move to Intel chips and to embrace virtualization of other OSes, which has turned Mac OS X into a flexible tool for development, InfoWorld reports. The explosion of interest in smartphone development is helping the trend, with iPhone development lock-in to the Mac environment the chief motivating factor for Apple as a platform of choice for mobile development. Yet for many, the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development, with developers citing its virtual memory system's poor performance in paging data in and out of memory and likening use of the default-network file system, AFS, to engaging oneself with 'some kind of passive-aggressive torture.' What remains unclear is whether Apple will lend an ear to this new wave of Mac-based development or continue to develop products that lock out uses programmers expect."
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap. :-/
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
OS X is really a good middle ground between Windows and Linux. OS X supports many of the Windows Protocols (a lot better then linux in some ways) as well there is a better selection of high quality closed source applications, then linux has. However being Unix based it it is more stable then Windows and less prone to viruses and other malware. Then combined with virtualization you can run Linux OS X and Windows all at the same time for cross testing your code.
It has a clean interface and performs well. You are not fussing with simple stuff. all in all it is good for development. (And the Apple keyboards have extended function keys that makes compatibility with old Vax systems much nicer too)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You would think that the fact that OS X is UNIX 03 certified might be of some interest to developers as well.
Sure, maybe not as much as the reasons stated above, but... it is worth mentioning. And just the fact that it is any flavor of Unix-like OS is attractive to many.
once again macs seem to be innovating, the dual gpu thing
You mean the severely limited, non SLI-hydra-whatever GPU thing that requires a restart/logon-off cycle just to switch?
That thing was actually released on a few toshiba laptops (and sony laptops?) long before el-jobso did his magic.
Of course, the (software) inflexibility of that configuration is actually a feature, according to apple. So, I digress.
Almost as bad as the Ron Paul trolls on Digg.
I can think of a few reasons why Macs are becoming more popular (especially in this field). Like the first commenter said, has this guy used Vista? 1. More and more programs are coming Linux. Like today we have Flash. 2. Stable OS/Well built systems. 3. More people are realizing that you don't need windows to read windows files. Just format your junk to FAT instead of NTFS. This is just brushing the surface...
Uh...isn't the point that you can run any OS you want on Mac hardware? Isn't that what makes them good development machines? If the paging system or AFS is torture, just boot frickin Windows. These flamebait articles are so tiring.
Facebook is the new AOL
I have spent the last 8 years writing visual basic applications in Windows
At Christmas last year I got myself a Nokia internet tablet - it runs Maemo Linux.
Surprisingly now, 11 months later I am comfortable back in C, have a nice little library and *know* I have found a better path.
Its been a kind of torture as well, everything was new and sometimes finding information is a brutal experience.
If it hadn't been for the great community around maemo.org I wouldn't have gotten as far as I have.
It was this community element which was missing with other devices and systems when I was looking around.
liqbase
Apple needs a mini tower not a over priced mini laptop with out a screen in a small box.
The mac pro is nice but $2300 and only a $30-$50 video card?
AIO also are not that good.
Where is the mini tower that can do dual display?
Sigh, not this one again. Apple will likely not ever make an inexpensive mini tower because the profit margins are too small. Their strategy is to aim at the high end of the market and let Dell and HP fight it out over the market for cheap computers.
This ain't rocket surgery.
As a PC fanboy for 20+ years, I have to say...when the games I play work natively on Mac, I'm switching.
Yes, I know I can buy a Mac now, buy Windows, and dual boot. But I don't want to do that, and I don't want to spend $100 on Windows when I just dropped $400 more than I'd pay for a Windows system to begin with.
I've priced it: comparable hardware with OS, the Macbook that meets my specifications is $400 more than the Dell equivalent. I can't justify spending $500 to do exactly what I do now. If I'm going to switch, it's a complete switch or not at all.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Yes, it is a pain to set up, but once there, you can scale from a workgroup to global filesystem. That is, you'll need a dozen AFS admins compared to 100 CIFS admins in a large organisation. Not only that, with a global filesystem the amount of duplicated data drastically falls, and with that goes storage costs.
Deleted
not worldwide. Maybe I shock you, but outside the US apple is a niche market that its only used for graphics design- you know, a heritage of the 80s. In the old Europe you would find much more projects for linux than for OSX (and both are a minimal percentage of the total projects, because everyone still use some version of Windows). Even the ipod is a rare avis in the mp3 market. Of course Apple started an agressive campaing to catch the academic world few years ago, financing laptops for teachers and student, but it's too early to move the trend.
So, no. I work in a mid-size software factory and I can assure you developers aren't going anywhere.
I went desktop, but the principal is the same. I dualboot into XP to play my Windows games, and for anything serious, I use the Mac side. I have no regrets. I just fine everything more intuitive and stable under OS/X and I can use the native software, or run *nix programs or run an emulator for anything I have to run in Windows under OS/X. I don't think the extra cost was a waste at all, as my 20" Imac at home is a very slick system, and extremely well thought out overall.
From 1988 until just last year I ran PCs only and I have no regrets over no longer having to fuck around with system configurations or fight the OS to get it to do what it says its doing, etc. I am glad to be out of the business of constantly incrementally upgrading my system every time MS issued a new version of their OS etc. I am sure I spent far more on all those little transaction than I would have if I had just bout a Mac originally. Now, its true that when I go to upgrade I will need to buy a whole new machine, but the old one will have retained considerably more value than a comparable PC would so the difference should be less than you would think.
At work my company bought me a brand new 24" Imac and its a glorious system to do development on.
I am not a fanboi, just a thorough convert. If games are all thats keeping you from buying a Mac, go buy a Mac and a cheap copy of XP. I think you will be quite happy with the results. After using OS/X for the past year, I now think of Windows as a "Toy" Operating system suitable for games only. Anything else requires a professional and well design OS (Yes, I could be running Linux, and have done so in the past, but OS/X offers me everything I need and is a *nix in any case).
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
You may 'sigh' yet again, but the reason this keeps popping up is because it's a valid criticism that hasn't yet been addressed. Perhaps it's true that Apple wouldn't make as much money in that particular market; most people don't care! They just want a certain product at a certain price point, and Apple isn't delivering it. Sigh'ing that someone else is complaining about this oversight won't make the problem go away. Apple systems in general are either too underpowered or too expensive. There's no middle ground, and they're losing a lot of business because of it.
This is one of the major issues that keeps me on Linux.
Despite the fact you can get almost anything to run on OS X eventually, for most software it's much much harder to get up to date software versions then "apt-get install fizzbuzz" on Ubuntu or debian testing.
For my needs, Ubuntu is much closer to the "just works" ideal then OS X.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Apple do not need a mini tower. It's something a lot of people want, but firstly, it dilutes the product line, and secondly, it would cannibalise their own sales of other products. I would personally love a cheaper tower from Apple, but I don't confuse my own personal desire for one with a need for Apple to build one.
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap. :-/
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
As opposed to the Windows paging system? Has the author used a Windows OS lately? Swapping is a *bleeping* killer! Especially when you have more than enough memory not to swap. :-/
So don't use it. Macs support CIFS/SMB pretty darn well these days. I keep hoping that someone will come up with a better replacement, but CIFS/SMB will continue to work until that day comes.
It always amazes me to see an OS article turn into a M$ Bashing ground. I am using Windows for over 8 years now and _it_works_. i have tried my hand at UBUNTU and for starters it cant configure my sound card out of the box and sorry i am not interested in searching a driver because if canonical dident care to write one for Toshiba laptops i dont care to search for one and install it. Mac's they dotn have Back space oops... documentation well, check MSDN, every thing else seems rooted in the 80's
With a Mac base you've got better cross-platform options than anything... you've got UNIX at the base, and a decent and consistent GUI, and two virtual machine vendors tripping over each other trying to give you the best Windows experience, and for Linux development... well, it's UNIX. UNIX is UNIX is UNIX. Portable apps run on OS X with "./configure; make install" and if you need something that's written to "all the world's Red Hat" standards... well, Linux runs REALLY well inside virtual machines.
Dev tools, libraries, and compilers? You have the same GNU toolchain you have on Linux.
Yes, Apple bears watching, but for something that right now Just Works, get a Mac. And if you write portable code, if Apple decides to rip its belly out on DRM and wander around bleating and tripping over its own entrails? You can still jump ship to Linux, BSD, or even (if you're a masochist) Vista and Cygwin.
On the downside, running PC games on the 360 isn't all that pleasant. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion *feels* like a port of a PC game: here's where you'd use a mouse. And here. And here. And here is where a keyboard would be really handy. And here.
I'm all for gaming on the 360 - and maybe it's just adventure games that suffer (or maybe suffer most). But there is still a place for a crap PC box for game playing.
Apple decides who will make their crap batteries, like every other corporation they choose the lowest bid and then sell for the highest amount they feel they can sell them for.
In the end it's Apple's responsibility to make sure their batteries are functional, don't try to pan off Apple as some victim, the only victims here are the people that bought Apple products.
The question is still "why would anyone pay 3 times the amount when they can get it for cheaper and frankly better".
I can't tell you how many times I have heard stories like " I bought a 5000 dollar mac pro so I could start a music studio and now it isn't working" and I tell them "you could've bought 4 PC's that do the exact same thing for that price and if you had you would still be working right now thanks to redundancy".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
"The explosion of interest in smartphone development is helping the trend, with iPhone development lock-in to the Mac environment the chief motivating factor for Apple as a platform of choice for mobile development."
This is why Apple is retarded. They miss out on developers by restricting the platform/IDE and not supporting Java or Mono. Then they place absurd restrictions on iPhone applications. Anyone who is thinking of getting a mac just so they can develop on the iPhone should ask themselves this question.
WHY SHOULD I SWITCH PLATFORMS IF APPLE CAN LOCK DOWN MY iPHONE APP WITHOUT REASON!!!
Not one developer I interact with on a daily basis uses a Mac or has expressed an interest in using one for his or her "real work". If they own one, it's for lesiure purposes; casual browsing and iTunes. For development of apps that we use at work, it's Win32 or Linux. While the vast majority of development is in Win32, most long for linux adoption for dev work, not MacOS.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Maybe because Apple DON'T LET Sun doing it?
Or any open source alternative doing it? (Not using Cocoa)
Or maybe because if you want Java 1.6 you have to BUY the new OSX - ?
I stopped to try using Apple only for that.
Apple sales are now over 60% laptops. If you want a desktop of any kind, you are a minority customer in the general computer market and a member of an even smaller minority in the Apple market. If you want an expandable desktop, you are a minority in a minority. If you want a cheap, expandable, desktop then you are a minority in a minority and don't have much money. Who in their right mind would design a product to cater to you?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
and none of us seem to have received this shitty memo, or even heard of it.
...
this article is absurd out of the scales. just check how belong sentences compare to each other :
"scientists now agree that evolution does not exist", as voiced by various creationist propaganda sources
and
"Programmers are finding themselves increasingly drawn to the Mac as a development platform", as voiced by the shitty article we are being made read. in its summary at least
Read radical news here
Cost nothing? Documentation is _hard_, and coder are usually chosen because they like to solve problems by coding, not documenting, so you have to hire some special people and they have to spend lots of time on this. Documentation is expensive and slows down development a lot.
Unfortunately documentation is also necessary if you want anybody to use your software. I have depressingly often found it necessary to abandoned the idea of using some API simply because I found myself spending way to much time trying to accomplish even simple tasks due to the complete inadequacy of the documentation. If figuring out how to do simple stuff requires a disproportionately large effort it often isn't worth the risk of continuing to use that API because the effort you have to put into figuring things out once you move into the API's more complex features will slow your project down unacceptably. When you are being pressed for results by your PHB and have to meet a deadline it is often preferable to use a less elegant API/Framework that may have been your second choice simply because is better documented. I don't really care if that documentation is in the form of good well written traditional API/Developer/Administrator/User guides or, alternatively, in the form of a large number of forum-posts, articles or blogs by frustrated users who painfully found out how to do things not mentioned in the scanty documentation by reverse-engineering, debugging and even painfully weeding through the source code. I do very much prefer the former but browsing through endless pages of google hits also gets me there in the end.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow