Actually, Apple is being used in the enterprise more and more. Its a developer darling and because for a few good years now there's real Office for Mac and combined with very good MDM capabilities it stopped being a consumer device quite a while back.
Industry applications are calling for general purpose computing. Yet Apple only delivers products and services aimed at end consumers.
> Apple only delivers products and services aimed at end consumers.
That is categorically untrue
I mean, they're certainly not the price leaders, but you seem to be saying that Macs are downright unsuited to things "businesses" do.
Replace car manufacturer by medical equipment manufacturer, etc.
You are confusing computer parts with devices. Yes, it is true Apple won't sell you a CPU to put it on the motherboard of your choosing, but it is also true they don't operate in this market.
80% of worldwide desktop users are business users.
general purpose computing
Now you've focused on a subset of general purpose computing: embedded computing options.
Well, you are correct. Apple, like many computer manufacturers and chip makers, does not compete in the embedded space. Seems like a curious thing to point out since nobody was talking about it and nobody was under any illusions that competes there but hey, you're right.
Can I play too? Apple does not compete in the toaster oven market. Apple does not compete in the inertial guidance systems market for cruise missiles. Apple does not manufacture sneakers. Look at me, being correct over here.
which sucks balls, if I may say so, as a self-appointed Office expert
While this is undoubtedly true, I still don't comprehend why.
The development workflow on linux is an order of magnitude better than on OSX. Package management is built into the distro, the directory structure is sane, LUKS is (probably) less likely to be backdoored by the NSA than FileVault, you can use keyboard-centric window managers, tiling window managers, etc, far more of the system is available/configurable via scripting or terminal, you don't get grey screens of death regularly, it doesn't send tons of telemetry back to the mothership, and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
OSX is probably only a "good" comparative developer experience if you're forced to use XCode for something. Otherwise, it's a disaster.
If you want to make ios apps you need an Apple computer. Then people get used to it and like most people they will say they prefer whatever they are used to.
Is this a thing that happens to people? I haven't seen one in a decade.
> and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
The last time I did that was maybe 5 years ago.
If one develops apps for Apple ecosystem then it is must have. If not - I'd say it is a darling of some specific categories of users. Not your general developer.
Personally except couple of encounters I do not need to develop for Mac, hence I do not have it and could not care less if the brand disappears tomorrow. You can't really generalize here
I guess your workflow doesn’t include getting Linux to work.
As in, if you run into an issue, you’re somewhat on your own because of your unique Linux setup. Maybe except if you’re on Ubuntu or something.
On Mac, you can more easily Google search for people with similar environment settings who failed building dependencies in the same way
But uhh, I do just use Ubuntu? I haven't even changed the wallpaper. Everything works, nothing has broken in years.
Surely Linux doesn't have to mean some kind of special snowflake Gentoo setup.
> you don't get grey screens of death regularly, it doesn't send tons of telemetry back to the mothership, and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
I’ve been using Macs only for 5 years straight and have no idea what you’re talking about.
Also, shortcuts on Mac just make sense, unlike Windows and Linux.
And friend, this is nonsense right here:
you don't get grey screens of death regularly, [...]
and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every
goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
Brew can be installed with one command and a couple minutes of waiting time.
> you don't get grey screens of death regularly [...] and you don't have to reset the PRAM and SMC every goddamn week just to get the thing to boot.
I've been using a Mac for a year now and I have no idea what you're talking about. So far it hasn't crashed once or had any other problems except for a few bugs in preinstalled applications.
I'm not saying it's better than Linux but everything is preconfigured well enough so I don't constantly get annoyed by about everything that comes out of the box. The terminal and browser work pretty much exactly the same on both operating systems. OSX isn't great but at least it's not Windows and the hardware is amazing.
For developers, MacOS brings the UI friendliness of Windows with full capability of a *NIX machine. Basically you get the best of best worlds and with MDM capabilities on top which companies actually like and need very much.
MacBook Air.
I am a developer. And for the last three workplaces we used Windows laptops, even if we targeted Kubernetes\Linux.
Some business people had Macs, though.
I've seen this at companies that started in the 90s or earlier. Newer ones are mostly Macs.
Apple targets the premium consumer, SMB, and enterprise markets.
But it's directly related. If you save money on salaries, you'll save money on IT equipment, office rent, perks, as well.
I've been working in central Europe for a decade and never worked at a compony offering Macs to its workforce. If you move to the super expensive cities, Munich, London, Stockholm, Amsterdam, etc, where wages are much higher, you'll start seeing more Macbooks being offered by emplyers because when you pay a single worker 100k/year and spend millions on your office building, what's another 3k/employee for a laptop? Peanuts. Similarly it's rare to see jobs paid 2k Euros/month but get a 3k Macbook from your employer.
what's another 3k/employee for a laptop
For mundane business use we're talking about more like $1K (USD) for a Macbook Air versus roughly $700 for a halfway decent Dell.
Or then again... maybe $200 for a Chromebook is a better comparison, for companies that just want to give their employees a way to run web apps and check email.
8GB RAM and 256 SSD? Even my phone has double of that.
Is $200 a good deal for that extra 8GB? Oh hell no. But we're still an extremely long way away from $3K as initially claimed and the idea of "basic" business users needing >8GB is pretty debatable.
This discussion is ridiculous. If somebody is going to claim that Product XYZ is overpriced but obviously had no idea what they're talking about and are objectively off by a factor of greater than 2x -- 130%! -- that's worth pointing out.
By the way. Looking at Dell's mainline 13" Latitude laptops with 16GB, guess what? They start at $1,065 and most of them are more than that.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/scc/sr/laptops/latitude-lapt...
I certainly do know you can certainly get a new Dell with 16GB for less, or even just buy a carload of old laptops from a local e-cycler for like $100 each and slap some DIMMs in them. I've done it. I mean I get it. I'm not saying everybody should roll out a fleet of Macs, I'm pointing out that it's not some totally outlandish thing that costs "$3K" per user.
My first job (small dev agency) after moving to Amsterdam was all Macs despite peanuts salary.
They regularly offered decommissioned Macs on a big discount, so that brings some return.
Anything to back that?
It's really no big secret but of course HNers will love to think that technical merit plays a large role in their selection. The average Apple consumer does not care about the underlying hardware.
Most people who buy Apple for their personal use buy it for the status.
Or someone that saw me getting coffee and were like “woooow, that guys rich! He has an iPhone!”
Who the hell thinks like that?
Then again, there are those people who claim to be repulsed by non-Apple products, which I assume is some kind of social status proxy: https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/26/owning-an-android-is-a-major-...
Apple makes consumer electronics.