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A comment on ARM Mac Impact on Intel. Parent comment

Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by foobarian on Monday June 22, 2020 @06:53AM (#23598926)
I can say our company standardized on Macs for developers back when Macs were much better relative to other laptops. But now most of the devs are doing it begrudgingly. The BSD userland thing is a constant source of incompatibility, and the package systems are a disaster. The main reason people are not actively asking for alternatives is that most use the Macs as dumb terminals to shell into their Linux dev servers, which takes the pressure off the poor dev environment.

The things the Mac is good at:

1) It powers my 4k monitor very well at 60Hz

2) It switches between open lid and closed lid, and monitor unplugged / plugged in states consistently well.

3) It sleeps/wakes up well.

4) The built in camera and audio work well, which is useful for meetings, especially these days.

None of these things really require either x86 or Arm. So if a x86 based non-Mac laptop appeared that handled points 1-4 and could run Linux closer to our production environment I'd be all over it.

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Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by unicornfinder on Monday June 22, 2020 @08:51AM (#23599587)
I think you've hit the nail on the head, but you've also summarised why I think Apple should genuinely be concerned about losing marketshare amongst developers now that WSL2 is seriously picking up traction.

I started using my home Windows machine for development as a result of the lockdown and in all honesty I have fewer issues with it than I did with my work MacBook. Something is seriously wrong here.

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Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by ChuckNorris89 on Monday June 22, 2020 @01:13PM (#23602758)
I think Apple stopped caring about devs marketshare a long time ago and instead is focusing on the more lucrative hip and young Average Joe consumer.

Most of the teens to early 20 somethings I know are either buying or hoping to buy the latest Macs, iPads, iPhones and AirPods while most of the devs I know are on Linux or WSL but devs are a minority compared to the Average Joes who don't code but are willing to pay for nice hardware and join the ecosystem.

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Re:ARM Mac Impact on Intel by tuatoru on Monday June 22, 2020 @04:33PM (#23606175)
Looking at the arch slide of Apple's announcement about shifting Macs to ARM, they want to people to use them as dev platforms for better iPhone software. Think Siri on chip, Siri with eyes and short term context memory.

And as a byproduct perhaps they will work better for hip young consumers too. Or anyone else who is easily distracted by bright colours and simple pictures, which is nearly all of us.

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