> If you have to develop cloud software, you'll do so on linux (or wsl or whatever).

I think you are vastly underestimating how many people use Mac (or use Windows without using WSL) to develop for the cloud.

I can say our company standardized on Macs for developers back when Macs were much better relative to other laptops. But now most of the devs are doing it begrudgingly. The BSD userland thing is a constant source of incompatibility, and the package systems are a disaster. The main reason people are not actively asking for alternatives is that most use the Macs as dumb terminals to shell into their Linux dev servers, which takes the pressure off the poor dev environment.

The things the Mac is good at:

1) It powers my 4k monitor very well at 60Hz

2) It switches between open lid and closed lid, and monitor unplugged / plugged in states consistently well.

3) It sleeps/wakes up well.

4) The built in camera and audio work well, which is useful for meetings, especially these days.

None of these things really require either x86 or Arm. So if a x86 based non-Mac laptop appeared that handled points 1-4 and could run Linux closer to our production environment I'd be all over it.

I think you've hit the nail on the head, but you've also summarised why I think Apple should genuinely be concerned about losing marketshare amongst developers now that WSL2 is seriously picking up traction.

I started using my home Windows machine for development as a result of the lockdown and in all honesty I have fewer issues with it than I did with my work MacBook. Something is seriously wrong here.

I think Apple stopped caring about devs marketshare a long time ago and instead is focusing on the more lucrative hip and young Average Joe consumer.

Most of the teens to early 20 somethings I know are either buying or hoping to buy the latest Macs, iPads, iPhones and AirPods while most of the devs I know are on Linux or WSL but devs are a minority compared to the Average Joes who don't code but are willing to pay for nice hardware and join the ecosystem.

Looking at the arch slide of Apple's announcement about shifting Macs to ARM, they want to people to use them as dev platforms for better iPhone software. Think Siri on chip, Siri with eyes and short term context memory.

And as a byproduct perhaps they will work better for hip young consumers too. Or anyone else who is easily distracted by bright colours and simple pictures, which is nearly all of us.

> I think you are vastly underestimating how many people use Mac (or use Windows without using WSL) to develop for the cloud.

The dominance of Macs for software development is a very US-centric thing. In Germany, there is no such Mac dominance in this domain.

To be fair in the UK Macs are absolutely dominant in this field.

Depends very much what you're doing; certainly not in my area (simulation software) at least, not for other than use as dumb terminals.

Yes, in Germany it's mostly Linux and Lenovo / Dell / HP desktops and business-type laptops. Some Macs, too.

I have no idea where in Germany you're based, or what industry you work in, but in the Berlin startup scene, there's absolutely a critical mass of development that has coalesced around macOS. It's a little bit less that way than in the US, but not much.

Berlin is very different from the rest of Germany.

This. According to my experience and validated by Germans and expats alike, Berlin is not Germany :)

In Norway where I live Macs are pretty dominating as well. Might be Germany is the outlier here ;-)

When I go to Ruby conferences, Java conferences, academic conferences, whatever, in Europe, everyone - almost literally everyone - is on a Macintosh, just as in the US.

Most people don’t go to conferences.

Ruby conference goers don't represent all the SW devs of Europe :)

Why do you think not?

And why not Java developers?

They seem pretty polar opposite in terms of culture, but all still turn up using a Macintosh.

Because every conference is its own bubble of enthusiasts and SW engineering is a lot more diverse than Ruby, from C++ kernel devs to Firmware C and ASM devs.

Even the famous FailOverflow said in one of his videos he only bought a Mac since he saw that at conferences everyone had Macs so he thought that must mean they're the best machines.

Anecdotally, I've interviewed at over 12 companies in my life and only one of those issues Mac to its employees the rest were windows/Linux.

True, but it is full of developers using Windows to deploy on Windows/Linux servers, with Java, .NET, Go, node, C++ and plenty of other OS agnostic runtimes.

Given the fact that the US has an overwhelming dominance in software development (including for the cloud) I think that the claim this is only a US phenomenon is somewhat moot. As a simple counter-point, the choice of development workstation in the UK seems to mirror my previous experience in the US (i.e. Macs at 50% or more.)

My experience in Germany and Austria mirrors GPs experience with windows/linux laptops being the majority and Mac being present in well funded hip startups.

Same in South Africa (50% mac, 30% windows, 20% ubuntu) and Australia.

> You don't develop cloud software on a mac anyway

I've got anecdata that says different. My backend/cloud team has been pretty evenly split between Mac and Windows (with only one Linux on the desktop user). This is at a Java shop (with legacy Grails codebases to maintain but not do any new development on).

Mac is actually way better for cloud dev than Windows is, since it's all Unix (actual Unix, not just Unix-like). And let's be honest, you'll probably be using docker anyway.

Arguably now, with WSL, Windows is closer to the cloud environment than macOS. Its a true Linux kernel running in WSL, no longer a shim over Windows APIs.

Yep. WSL 2 has been great so far. My neovim setup feels almost identical to running Ubuntu natively. I did have some issues with WSL 1, but the latest version is a pleasure to use.

Do you use VimPlug? For me :PlugInstall fails with cannot resolve host github.com

I do use VimPlug. Maybe a firewall issue on your end? I'm using coc.nvim, vim-go, and a number of other plugins that installed and update just fine.

That is just utter pain though. I’ve tried it and I am like NO THANKS! Windows software operates too poorly with Unix software due to different file paths (separators, mounting) and different line endings in text files.

With Mac all your regular Mac software integrates well with the Unix world. XCode is not going to screw up my line endings. I don’t have to keep track of whether I am checking out a file from a Unix or Windows environment.

Your line-ending issue is very easy to fix in git:

`git config --global core.autocrlf true`

That will configure git to checkout files with CRLF endings and change them to plain LF when you commit files.

Eating data is hardly a fix for anything, even if you do it intentionally.

If the cloud is mostly UNIX-like and not actual UNIX, why would using “real UNIX” be better than using, well, what’s in the cloud?

Agree, although I think this is kind of nitpicking, because "UNIX-like" is pretty much the UNIX we have today on any significant scale.

macOS as certified UNIX makes no sense in this argument. it doesn't help anything, as most servers are running Linux.

I develop on Mac, but not mainly for other Macs (or iOS devices), but instead my code is mostly platform-agnostic. Macs also seem to be quite popular in the web-frontend-dev crowd. The Mac just happens to be (or at least used to be) a hassle-free UNIX-oid with a nice UI. That quality is quickly deteriorating though, so I don't know if my next machine will actually be a Mac.

True, but then the web-fronted dev stuff is several layers away from the ISA, isn't it ? As for the unix-like experience, from reading other people's accounts, it seemed like that was not really Apple's priority. So there are ancient versions of utilities due to GPL aversion and stuff. I suppose docker, xcode and things like that make it a bit better, but my general point was that didn't seem like Apple's main market.

> So there are ancient versions of utilities due to GPL aversion and stuff.

They're not ancient, but are mostly ports of recent FreeBSD (or occasionally some other BSD) utilities. Some of these have a lineage dating back to AT&T/BSD Unix, but are still the (roughly) current versions of those tools found on those platforms, perhaps with some apple-specific tweaks.

It works great though, thanks to Homebrew. I have had very few problems treating my macOS as a Linux machine.

> You don't develop cloud software on a mac anyway

You must be living in a different universe. What do you think the tens of thousands of developers at Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc etc etc are doing on their Macintoshes?

> What do you think the tens of thousands of developers at Google ... are doing on their Macintoshes?

I can only speak of my experience at Google, but the Macs used by engineers here are glorified terminals, since the cloud based software is built using tools running on Google's internal Linux workstations and compute clusters. Downloading code directly to a laptop is a security violation (With an exception for those working on iOS, Mac, or Windows software)

If we need Linux on a laptop, there is either the laptop version of the internal Linux distro or Chromebooks with Crostini.

They individually have a lot of developers, but the long tail is people pushing to AWS/Google Cloud/Azure from boring corporate offices that run a lot of Windows and develop in C#/Java.

edit: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-pr...

>What do you think the tens of thousands of developers at Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc etc etc are doing on their Macintoshes?

SSH to a linux machine ? I get that cloud software is a broad term that includes pretty much everything under the sun. My definition of cloud dev was a little lower level.