Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by yourapostasy 1348 days ago
That’s likely more a function of the OS’ “It Just Works” factor than the hardware, and Apple’s grasp upon that factor is increasingly fragmenting and growing more tenuous because mobile form factor products and profits have taken leadership focus off of the overall product ecosystem experience.

The ascendancy of Macs in technical staff ranks commenced simultaneously with the ascendancy of Linux in the datacenter. The Windows tooling to integrate with Linux wasn’t as smooth as Macs. Back in the Dark Ages, about half of the battle IMHO came down to Cygwin and similar weren’t as nice as Terminal.app and Homebrew. And Terminal.app was a better ssh client than PuTTY. Back then if your backend heavy iron lived on Linux, then the overall development experience was simply lower friction on a MacBook Pro.

This has changed these days, of course. macOS’ low-friction edge is narrower now but a lot of what remains like mobile power and video management continues as especially challenging areas for Windows and Linux. VS Code is doing a lot to decouple developers from their hardware.
1 comments
mattarm 1348 days ago
> That’s likely more a function of the OS’ “It Just Works” factor than the hardware...

That is exactly my observation. When the good power Mac laptops came out a lot of my ThinkPad Linux laptop using co-workers jumped ship. Number one reason stated: battery life. Number two reason stated: suspend works reliably. Number three: it is POSIX/UNIX-ish enough that it is familiar and I can do my job.

link
yourapostasy 1348 days ago
> …and I can do my job.

Apple came close to capturing developer mindset at that time. Carting around a Unix workstation in a laptop, and if you spent the money to max out its memory, be able to simultaneously emulate a small Windows laptop at that time was a game changer for those who could leverage that kind of power.

Unfortunately Intel started slipping and Apple couldn’t really push laptop boundaries as much soon after.

Apple’s new architecture opens up that possibility again by decoupling from Intel, but I’m not sure Cook’s vision sees the advantages of a 128GB RAM MacBook Pro.

link