[C1sc0cat]

I realy don't get this fetishization (and I am using this in its medical sense) of macs as laptops/workstations for developers.

You PC (Mac or Wintel) is just something to run your editors xwindows what have you like company C

[bryanrasmussen]

Mac fetish started when Mac went BSD based, and hardware was higher quality than common company hardware running windows. So developers wanted Mac.

Windows has seen the light and plenty of Unix possibilities on Windows, but they have lost nearly a generation of Developers who don't want to move back.

I personally don't care, I have two macs, one windows, one Ubuntu, and several tablets to work on. OS's are pretty commodified.

[mattmanser]

WSL2 is extremely recent, so in context of the question, the fetishization of Macs is because using Linux on windows used to be pretty laborious.

Setup a VM, getting networking going on the VM, blah, blah, blah.

Mac actually supported Linux commands, windows didn't.

That or you had a Linux laptop which had a massive overhead in breaking a lot. Never did it myself, but the complaints tended to be that drivers broke constantly and it was hard to use a lot of commercial software, including games.

As far as I remember, it was common even 10 years ago to see Linux users on HN openly say they'd given up on trying to get their soundcard to work as it wasn't worth the hassle as it would just break in 6 months again.

[C1sc0cat]

So run an xserver on your pc and work on the development server or your local Linux workstation.

And why would you be running games on your companies Linux systems ?

[mattmanser]

Hehe, this feels like the typical oblivious hacker answer that begins "So do X complicated thing instead".

People paid for simplicity. Engage your empathetic brain to understand why people don't want to make their lives complicated, instead of trying to invent another jury-rigged workaround.

You can go dig through the HN archives around 2005 when everyone started switching to Macs. You will see the people delighted with their purchase in the comments, how much easier it made developers lives to have a working, powerful laptop that actually supported Linux commands.

[C1sc0cat]

UM having a native x access to your dev machines (which are full tech copies of live) is simpler - rather than this more modern method of every one developing locally on different hardware and a different os.

[TheCoelacanth]

They have good touchpads and touchpad drivers. Other than that, there's not much to set them apart from other laptops.

[ricardobeat]

Except the fact you won't need to restart to install updates every other weekend, worry about driver issues, which of the 457 always-on background services is hogging the CPU, why the video/audio output is suddenly stuttering, why it won't come back from sleep sometimes, it runs *nix and has some of the nicest tooling available both in GUI and CLI form.