Which ecosystem is "poor" depends on your own current situation.

Sure you can. I've gotten macos installed in a vm and even ran a hackintosh for a while which was remarkably easy these days.

I do realllly wish Apple would open up and let us officially install on different hardware - especially if they’re only going to update the Mac pros every few years.

Indeed, I was speaking from my personal experience.

You can do fun things, like tail logs to a file using linux and simultaneously analyze the file using windows tools.

You shouldn't access files in WSL using windows, but the other way around it's absolutely ok.

So if my projects are at C:/Development/Projects/...

Then I just open /mnt/c/Development/Projects/... on WSL

I haven't had any permission problems, not even once.

Same for Docker for Windows. It uses Hyper-V + some network disk sharing magic, which makes directory mounts into docker containers work great. So sometimes, like, when I need to debug a non-cross-platform linux program. (WSL doesn't handle process forking well, so some debuggers, like Go Delve don't work) I just do something like

docker run -v C:/Development/Projects/MyProject:/mnt/MyProject -it ubuntu /bin/bash

On the other hand, outside of ML it's not like many software developers need to upgrade to a new GPU every (other) year and current processor trends show very little performance uplift between generations to upgrade - once Apple finally gets 32GB of memory in the MBP most developers will be set for many years.

Exactly.

I wrote this last year criticising the current state of Mac hardware.

https://medium.com/@Pier/the-problem-of-osx-hardware-in-2016...

Even though you don't need lots of power, there's plenty of solid and valid reasons why others might.

Moreover

1. latency is low enough that people are playing triple AAA video games on AWS for a $1/hr.

https://lg.io/2015/07/05/revised-and-much-faster-run-your-ow...

2. Sure, that's a good reason. It had better be spewing out lots of data, though, or again, you might as well process in the cloud.

3. Being able to access your workstation via airport wifi at all is actually a benefit in this case, unless you intend to wheel it around like a suitcase.

Did you walk out of a 1980s time warp or something? The workstation in this case carries 1TB of storage and weighs 3.5 lbs. (And it still has wifi in case you need that).

Regarding your number 3. For a lot of this, we are talking about devices like the MacBook Pro line. Not huge workstations.

Apple's neglect.

- The laptop lineup only offers Intel graphics or AMD's weakest mobile GPUs. I suspect that Metal has something to do with why they've pretended Nvidia doesn't exist for the past ~5 years.

- The only non-abandoned[2] machine in the desktop lineup is a non-modular all-in-one.

- Apple ceded the creative-pro software market to Adobe. Final Cut, Logic, used to be industry leaders, and they had companion software products that Apple has either neglected or discontinued. Premiere + After Effects is a far more powerful & widely used toolset than Final Cut + Motion, plus Adobe's software also runs on powerful Windows PCs, eliminating Apple's lock-in.

- Pen-input is iPad exclusive. Apple has no desire to bring touch to the Mac, and while I agree that macOS is not designed for fingers, I'm sure artists would like a convertible MacBook Pro that supported the Apple Pencil.

[1] Obviously this is a generalization

[2] For all intents and purposes, the Mac Pro will still be abandoned until they release the promised new one circa 2018. The current Mac Pro and the Mac mini are terrible, ancient PCs that only sell any units because Apple has neglected giving macOS any good hardware to run on in those form factors or price points.

Elaborating on it, Custom hardware (esp. GPU) support. DX 11 over Metal. Apple chose not to upgrade OpenGL or implement Vulkan.

You can stick really fast processors, tons of RAM and one or two Nvidia graphics cards in a very cheap tower. If only Apple sold a cheesegrater-style tower that could do that ;-)

Thee are even some Windows laptops that do the job now. Wirecutter picked the Dell XPS 15 as The Best 15-Inch Laptop for Photo and Video Editing https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-15-inch-laptops-for-p...

There's also a fair amount of peer pressure.

I was at a big software company and I choose a Lenovo with Windows instead of a Mac. I was the only one, and the other members of the team constantly tried to get me to switch, and trolled me, as if they were embarrassed with me. Now I'm at another big company, where Windows is more prevalent (legacy), but team members are still shocked that I chose again a Lenovo with Windows and Ubuntu VM on top.

If you were to interview to a startup and the founder coded on a Windows, what would most devs feel about it?

I dunno why people say that one or the other is superior for work (except if you work with some special software that exists only for one OS). Both of them are equally good, since everything is moving to the cloud, for most non-specialized tasks you need one app - a browser. If you look at other fields like programming, graphics work, 3D,.. they are the same again (except for special cases like C# or Swift development).

And things like iStatMenus is not something that is used for work, its a widget that you like. Perhaps you simply like the look and feel of OSX more?

Not really. The features I want could be easily developed in Windows, or Linux, but for some reason this isn't the case.

A good example of this are launchers. Once you start using a launcher you wonder how you could have lived without it.

MacOS offers Spotlight which is very limited but there are 3 very good third party options: Alfred, Launchbar, and Quicksilver. These offer a lot more than simply opening files and applications.

There are launchers for Windows too (launchy, Wox, etc) but the functionality is very limited compared to the macOS options. I suspect this may be cultural. Maybe there are no good commercial solutions like in macOS because there is no market.

Even Linux has better free launchers than Windows. For example: https://github.com/qdore/Mutate

I have found this same problem with other types of applications. For some reason the macOS options are simply better. And again, this is completely unrelated to the OS. It seems there is simply no interest in the Windows world for these types of things.

For example macOS has Karabiner which allows to configure you keyboard in a myriad of ways. Terminals like iTerm are also better in macOS, maybe because of the *Nix tradition. Monitors like iStatMenus which offer you one click access to deep information on hardware, network, etc, are non existent. BetterTouchTool which allows to deeply configure gestures on your trackpad, again, nothing on Windows like it. I could go on, but you get the idea.

The ecosystem on windows 10 is poor but then again I just download from one of the million win32 applications. I just don't use "apps" from store.

Just last week I played a game of Age of Empires II with my cousin, a game which was "released" in 1999 on a Surface with Windows 10. While on my MacBook I have issues because every major OS upgrade breaks something and I have to repurchase newer versions or give up if the dev isn't interested/around anymore.

OTOH I've found that it's not such a big deal in practice. In my 10+ years as a mac user I've only hit this problem a couple of times. Likewise in Windows I rarely open old outdated software.

That is of course my anecdotal and personal experience.