Many people use macbooks as glorified terminals to run a text editor and a browser, while running the actual program being developed on a remote Linux machine.

Even more people use macbooks to develop for the browser, or to develop using platform-independent languages: Python, Ruby, Node, maybe even golang.

Quite a few people then package their backend code in a container and test it in a Linux VM which "Docker for Mac" helpfully provides.

But indeed the fact that Macs used to run on Intel, so the libraries you used in development were mostly that same versions of the same code as in production, must have been helping.

>If that were actually an important factor then no-one would do development on OSX

People only develop on MacOS because of how similar it is to Unix, not in spite of it. Go ahead, look at how many developers were using MacOS before OSX. I'll wait. The reason why people develop on Macs is because it's "close enough" to Linux to deploy with, and "good enough" as a desktop to keep tabs on most of your other apps.

> So while there may be some premium to being able to "develop at home", clearly many developers value other considerations more highly.

Let's clear this up: there is no development without development at home. If you work for a company as a developer, you'll be expected to maintain a machine that can consistently build and deploy your software. Unless you're working as a web developer (in which case, may god have mercy on your soul), you're probably going to end up using an x86 machine. Hell, my best friend is a die-hard Apple fan, and even he has admit that he can't really upgrade his Xeon iMac unless Apple offers him an upgrade within the x86 ecosystem.

> Go ahead, look at how many developers were using MacOS before OSX.

There were plenty of other problems with pre-OSX MacOS.

> The reason why people develop on Macs is because it's "close enough" to Linux to deploy with, and "good enough" as a desktop to keep tabs on most of your other apps.

The differences between x86 OSX and x86 Linux are bigger than the differences between x86 Linux and ARM Linux, in my experience. So these machines are also "close enough" to ARM servers.

> there is no development without development at home. If you work for a company as a developer, you'll be expected to maintain a machine that can consistently build and deploy your software.

Most developers have a local development environment and a separate production environment. Developers place some value on having them be similar, but they're also happy to introduce differences between local and prod for the sake of other tradeoffs.

>Unless you're working as a web developer (in which case, may god have mercy on your soul), you're probably going to end up using an x86 machine. Hell, my best friend is a die-hard Apple fan, and even he has admit that he can't really upgrade his Xeon iMac unless Apple offers him an upgrade within the x86 ecosystem.

Why can't he upgrade? (Genuine question)

He makes a living provisioning x86 servers, and maintaining legacy code is kinda his entire job. afaik, his main concern is that current Macs won't have enough memory (he's not upgrading to a machine with less than 64 gigs), and that he won't be able to natively debug or work on the same software that his clusters will be running.

Didn't Macbook-as-developer-machine only really take off after the switch to Intel?

That happened in 2006, and I would argue that the effect of them moving from PowerPC to Intel was dwarfed by the effect of people wanting to be able to do things like iPhone app development.

I think it was a bit of that, mixed with the iPhone launch and subsequent release of the App Store and third-party apps. Limiting app development and distribution exclusively to Macs through Xcode probably forced a lot of people into using them for the first time. Mac OS X also received UNIX certification around this time IIRC, I wouldn't be surprised if that compatibility pushed some more people tired of fiddling with their OS towards the "it just works" Mac.

Macbook-as-developer-machine started getting popular around the release of the iPhone. Apple took the opportunity to lock down their ecosystem and allow you to exclusively build and sign applications on their own platform, basically locking out anyone who isn't a Mac owner.

I'm not understanding what you're contrasting when you say they locked out people who didn't own Macs.

From 1984 to the iPhone, I believe it was the norm to develop Mac applications on Macs, except for a brief period when the very first models were starved for memory.

I wonder how did Mac software happened before, given that apparently there were no developers.

The better interpretation seems, people want their servers to look like their MacBooks.

OSX is a different abstraction layer from processor architecture. Until recently Mac hardware was x86 and all the deployment targets were x86. A VM could take care of all the other differences.

> OSX is a different abstraction layer from processor architecture.

It is, but it introduces enough differences that you're not "at home"; indeed I'd say OSX-to-Linux is a bigger difference for development than x86-to-ARM.

To your point there's nothing developed on OSX (and specific to OSX) that runs "in the cloud". There is some niche Swift offering but they are niche.

Servers don't run Windows either, but Linux still is still the preferred server platform. Being UNIX-like is way more compatible than a different instruction set altogether.