[wrong_variable]

No.

What apple is saying today is something that it has always said - but its only recently that people in america are too poor to buy american products.

I grew up around windows and linux, and whenever I tell that in a job interview - people think I am not being serious since "real developers" use mac.

In my first software job - I was told to abandon my personal cheap linux and use the company's brand new expensive apple - even though I was more productive on my cheap linux.

Apple has always been like that, its just that most people who come from money do not hear it.

Edit:

Also you will notice this in poorer countries - a strong ecosystem for recycling exists everywhere outside of the US/UK. When I brought my first bike in the UK, I wanted to repair it and was told to just ditch it and get a new one !

It was extremely odd to me since I expected that bike to last at-least 20 years.

When my 3 year old laptop stopped working - I had it repaired rather than buy a newer one - even though repairing was almost as expensive as getting a new one. It just fell really wrong ditching a laptop rather than repairing it.

Maybe you are right - western societies do worship materialism.

[kzrdude]

> Also you will notice this in poorer countries - a strong ecosystem for recycling exists everywhere outside of the US/UK. When I brought my first bike in the UK, I wanted to repair it and was told to just ditch it and get a new one !

I'd call the US, UK poor for lacking a system of recycling. And indeed in many ways they are poorer than the most well functioning societies.

[21]

Maybe OP wanted to say "reuse/refurbish" instead of "recycle". In less rich countries there are thriving second hand markets, online and offline. Many sell the obsolete hardware they no longer need instead of throwing it away.

[logfromblammo]

I still have some 9-year-old "capacitor plague" Dells. I got them gratis--due to the bad capacitors, naturally--and desoldered and re-capped them for about $15 each.

But desoldering and replacing non-SM PCB components is not the sort of repair that most people would feel comfortable doing, even if they can change the oil in their cars.

Based on the cost differential of something like an XBox mod chip versus the same mod chip plus no-hassle installation service, buying an all-new device assembled mostly by robots and low-wage Chinese people is simply more cost-effective in every country where knowing how to use a soldering iron is worth more than a few dollars per hour.

The only way around that is to teach kids how to build and repair custom electronics as part of the regular school curriculum. I don't know about you, but I learned to make sand-mold aluminum castings, silk-screened t-shirts, wooden bookends, and to spot-weld sheet metal in my 8th grade shop class. My classmates and I really would have been better off replacing the t-shirt module with custom-etched circuit boards and simple electronics soldering. That was close to the time when Heathkit stopped making hobbyist electronics kits, too.

[stuxnet79]

> I grew up around windows and linux, and whenever I tell that in a job interview - people think I am not being serious since "real developers" use mac.

How true is this? I have noticed the proliferation of Macs in the developer community and I was wondering how much it would hurt me professionally by not owning one. Do devs really make snap judgements based on your platform of choice and could this impact me professionally in the long term?

[logfromblammo]

Real real developers use a precision flathead screwdriver and a bank of DIP switches.~

One of the great triumphs of computing was abstracting the algorithm away from the specifics of the hardware using compilers. We have the good fortune to be able to configure those compilers to generate several varieties of executable containers, such as ELF, a.out, COFF, EXE (MZ), EXE (PE/COFF), JAR, Mach-O, and others. As long as the OS has an installed virtual machine or ABI that can handle the executable, it will be able to run it.

If anyone got snooty with me about my hardware, I think I'd consider myself lucky to not need to work with them.

Does it have a text editor? Does it have a compiler? Yes to both means that real developers can use it.

[Crito]

It's all fun and games until your boss's boss walks into the room and says "Why aren't you using Eclipse? Real developers use Eclipse."

If you have sufficient seniority, you can tell them to fuck off without worrying. But if you're new to the company, or worse, industry...

[emddudley]

From my experience this shift occurred over the past 10 years or so, starting around when the MacBook Pro was released. Gradually Macs gained acceptance as developer machines, not just "creative" workstations.

I think platform preference still varies widely by industry. Macs might be common in app and web development but in engineering and systems development Windows is dominant.

[FireBeyond]

"but its only recently that people in america are too poor to buy american products"

American products, like Apple?

Or like other PC manufacturers, who are quite able to sell cheaper (yes, less featured, maybe less cool) computers at more affordable pricing?