[robenkleene]

> Until iOS development made Mac's the default dev machine.

I'd argue Mac's were the default developer machine before iOS. E.g., Paul Graham from 2005 (http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html):

> All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.

From my anecdotal experience, the rise of the Mac among creators, including developers, was meteoric, and immediate, once OS X was stable. Not to say it was everybody, but I'd say by the mid-2000s it was the default choice, as in I rarely ran into anyone using any other platform in the web startup circles I was in at the time.

[foepys]

HN ist a bubble. There are millions of developers writing software for embedded controllers and other hardware which is done on Windows and Linux. Plus a plethora of B2B software HN never heard of because it runs in corporate environments powered by Windows.

[maxwell]

Yeah, I was in college and startups through the mid-00s, adopting Mac at Tiger. It seemed like maybe Leopard was the breakthrough anecdotally, where Boot Camp took away the "but-it-can't-run..." that was the last factor keeping people away, even though no one ever seemed to actually end up ever running Win after all.

I'm not sure what IT purchasing looked like in enterprises and SMBs through the '00s, but I wasn't able to get an Apple machine at a non-tech mid-size employer in the late '00s and it seemed like developers at big employers still had PCs.

I've always been issued (and supplied) Macs since the early '10s, and I'd say at this point, given how bad macOS has become, it ultimately does boil down to the fact that "being able to build an iOS app" is a valuable feature, and no other company can offer it.

[hu3]

With due respect, that's a rather elitist and miopic view that considers mac usage within bubbles only, albeit popular in HN. Specially considering that surveys report macs being used only by a third of the developers that answered it. That's a farcry from "most".

See StackOverflow survey.

[robenkleene]

I didn't say "most", and even the framing I used of "default machine" came from the comment I was responding to:

> Until iOS development made Mac's the default dev machine.

I was just pointing out that based on my personal experience, it started earlier than that.

I don't know what to say about the elitist comment. I'm only pointing out my anecdotal experience. I'm well aware of Stackoverflow's developer statistics, but I just don't personally run into developer machines that aren't Macs very often. But then, I transitioned to iOS development myself around 2010, which is obviously going to skew things. Frankly I'm super curious where all the non-Mac using developers are, because they aren't on the web teams, or mobile teams (Android/iOS) that I usually work with. I know Windows is by far the most popular choice for game development, but that's far from my career.

(I guess actually, for the elitist point, I only really care about the hardware being used by people doing work I admire, because I want to do work like that too. I suppose if that's elitist so be it, but to me, that's just being practical.)

[hu3]

It depends on what you work on. Of course if you work with iOS development your surroundings will be mostly macOS machines since it's a hard requirement, no surprises here hence my comment about bubbles. Otherwise statistically speaking, macs are not the default developer machine as per surveys.

It also depends on who you admire. For example Linus, someone I admire, uses a AMD Threadripper 3970x. And the best engineer I personally know, uses a Thinkpad with Debian.

On my team, currently responsible for heavy backend engineering, we have been replacing macs with Dell XPS + Linux due to mac's horrible support for Docker which is a hard requirement for us.

[robenkleene]

> It depends on what you work on. Of course if you work with iOS development your surroundings will be mostly macOS machines since it's a hard requirement, no surprises here hence my comment about bubbles. Otherwise statistically speaking, macs are not the default developer machine as per surveys.

Again, I didn't framed it as default machine, that comes from the comment I was responding to. Personally, I probably would have said something like "default machine for developers working on products that target non-developers" (I'd have to think really carefully about how I'd word this actually, because I'm well-aware of the statistics).

Actually, I'd love to hear your framing of this. E.g., major tech companies usually default to a MacBook for developers. They're usually the most common machine at tech conferences. Unfortunately both based on anecdotal experience again, maybe you disagree with those too? But if you agree, how would you describe that if not the default machine for developers then? Not being rhetorical, I honestly struggle figure out the best way to describe it.

(Also regarding this "Of course if you work with iOS development your surroundings will be mostly macOS machines since it's a hard requirement, no surprises here hence my comment about bubbles." I was specifically drawing on my experience before iOS development existed, when I worked in web development.)

> It also depends on who you admire. For example Linus, someone I admire, uses a AMD Threadripper 3970x. And the best engineer I personally know, uses a Thinkpad with Debian.

Clearly, but why is my following the work of people who I admire (mainly product-centric apps and website) elitist, but your following Linus, etc... not elitist? That was my question here.

[hu3]

Default machine for developers is a very broad term. It is heavily biased on what and where they work on. Sometimes it's not even a choice. Perhaps we agree on that and are talking past each other.