Apple hasn't been for professionals, for like a decade now.
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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What? I'm a software engineer (a so-called "professional") at a major corporation and we get the choice between Windows and Mac. Every single person I know in the company has chosen Mac.
This is always weird to me. Running containers on my Linux machine is way faster than all of my coworkers on Windows. But they still are able to run containers way faster than our coworkers on Apple.
I don't see the appeal of an apple machine for coding unless you're making Apple specific software. To each their own though.
Not everybody is running containers, or is constrained by the performance of those containers, I guess?
I think the primary aspect where Macs are more appealing than Windows machines for many programmers is just that it's a unixy machine and many of the tools that you'd care about from Linux / *BSDs / whatever are easily available. I guess this is maybe different in an era with WSL, but that's a relatively new development, and since I've only used Macs and other unixy machines before I have no idea if that's a viable option personally and I'd be skeptical...
In terms of "why a Mac over Linux?" I think it's partially a matter of Macs being well supported and that most people don't seem inclined to fiddle with Linux on their primary work computer.
Beyond that, though, I think MacBooks are just nice laptops with fewer compromises than most other laptops in my experience. They have good build quality and pretty much every aspect of them is pretty solid... Good keyboards, good chassis, good battery life, good screens, good trackpads, good speakers, good performance. I think it's actually pretty hard to get something that's as solid all around, I feel like with pretty much everything else there's something that stands out to complain about. Like I love my Thinkpad, but god I wish I had an Apple trackpad, or an Apple silicon chip and the performance / watt that comes with it.