[minimaul]

Being Mac only can be an advantage - I’ve been on both sides of trying to maintain & use non-trivial dev environments and the more OSes you bring in for people to work on, the harder it gets.

Bringing in Windows or Linux has a set up cost and a maintenance cost that may exclude it from even being considered.

Edit: plus, Macs are ARM, other options are inevitably x86. So it’s also two CPU architectures to maintain support for, on top of OS specific quirks - and even if you use eg Docker, you still have a lot of OS specific quirks in play :/

[smoldesu]

My biggest issue with Mac-only shops is that almost nobody actually deploys to Mac. The majority of Mac-only firms I've worked at deploy to x86 Linux and develop in a VM on their Macbook (even pre-M1). Unless your business is writing Mac-native apps, MacOS is probably going to be a second-class deployment platform for you.

Even in an ideal scenario where your app already works on ARM, you will be dealing with OS-specific quirks unless your production machine runs MacOS.

[minimaul]

These are fair points, and definitely a rough spot.

Eg at work we use M1/M2 macs and dev on those using docker - so that’s a Linux VM essentially with some nice tooling wrapped around it.

We certainly see differences - mostly around permissions (as docker for Mac doesn’t really enforce any access checks on files on the host), but we also mostly deploy to ARM Linux on AWS.

We went Mac only from a mix of Linux, Windows and Mac as we found the least overall friction there for our developers - Windows, even with WSL, had lots of problems, including performance issues. Linux we had issues finding nice laptops, and more support issues (developers are often not *nix experts!). Mac was a nice middle ground in the end.

[db48x]

> Linux we had issues finding nice laptops

This is the same issue as before. Laptops are shiny so people don’t even bother considering a regular desktop machine. And yet desktops can be so much more powerful simply because they don’t have the thermal and power delivery restrictions that desktops have.

[minimaul]

Laptops have advantages though - for a remote team, they're often a lot more convenient. A lot of people don't have space for a full permanent desk setup for a work desktop on top of their personal use - UK houses aren't huge!

Desktops work if you have an office, but our dev team is entirely remote. But you can't take a desktop into a meeting, or take a desktop on the train to our office for in-person meetings/events.

[db48x]

Those are all bad excuses. And they all have fixes other than compromising on the quality of your computer. Laptops for managers who go to meetings, workstations for engineers who actually accomplish things.