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."

Comments

Hard to take someone seriously...

[SuperBanana]

...when they refer to Apple Filing Protocol as "AFS", and it shows that Infoworld has idiot editors. There's nothing except an anonymous programmer's opinion to back up the claims made.

AFP is not strange, twisted, or any sort of barrier for programmers. Over the years, I have found AFP performance (to netatalk) out of the box trounces Samba by almost a 1:2 margin on raw file transfer speed, and 10:1 on directory-intensive operations. It supports international character sets without fuss, and folder/file name restrictions are downright amazing compared to the shit that is SMB/CIFS.

Don't like AFP? Fine. Use SMB (and yes, you can turn off the "annoying dot files".) Or NFSv4. Or SSHFS with MacFusion, making any Unix box you've got a file server with the installation of one package. There are installers for AFS and (I may have this wrong) Coda.

Re:Strange Complaints

[LWATCDR]

Hey it was one programmer. And frankly if you are having issues with swap put more ram in.

I have to live this line.
"The sting of ka-ching
While the price of Macintosh hardware continues to be competitive with the best commodity laptops and desktops, Apple offers nothing in the rapidly expanding lower tiers. It's possible to build a quad-core PC running Eclipse and Gimp for less than $400 with refurbished hardware. At the time of this writing, the Mac Pro with one quad-core CPU begins at $2,300. Adding Photoshop and other tools can push the bill closer to $4,000."
Okay guess what folks? You can run GIMP and Eclipse on a Mac!
Not only that but it seems a bit unfair to compare a Mac Pro with a refurbished box!
Heck I a not an Apple fan but this seems very slanted to me.

Why do developers like the MAC?
1. It is Unix so if are doing Unix server work this is a piece of cake.
2. It will run Windows, Linux, BSD, and Mac OS/x so if you are going multi-platform on the PC it is the way to go.
3. It will run the Google Phone development stack and the Iphone/IPod stack.
It is just more flexible. Makes me want to get one now.