This is a very US-centric perspective. I honestly don't know a single software engineer who uses a mac as their primary machine (except where a mac is necessary or very useful, such as writing apps for macOS or iOS). The typical machine that people who do software development use privately is rather some high-quality ThinkPad model with either GNU/Linux or Windows on it.
Apple is tolerated because some users demand them, but for the vast majority of mid and lower level employees? You’re getting a dell.
I know, hard to grok for SV crowd who often worship Apple unlike any other company, but I would fight very hard to not have anything like that.
CPU power alone is almost meaningless to me, bottlenecks are always elsewhere and Apple brings absolutely nothing on top of cheaper competition with much better corporate support package in that area.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/869211/worldwide-softwar...
https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#section-most-...
those contracts will come only when the laptops are sold. Companies aren't giving Dell contract to support Mac/HP. So, you should see the profit from both as profit of PC sale. Though, agree Apple has higher profit margin.
unpopular take around here, but here goes: after 15+ years of developing on Windows targeting Linux deployments, ~3 of which were spent on WSL2 as soon as it shipped, switched to macOS. It sucks for backend development; currently on my second year and I'm only getting more confused as to why it's so popular. I guess it's everything except actual development.
I have a theory that there are a lot of users in places like the public sector and behemoth corporations who get issued with the cheapest laptop on the market, by default.
And because Apple's laptops start at $1500 that means for people in those organisations, if you ask for Windows you get a $500 laptop with a 1080p screen and a 1-hour battery life, but if you ask for a Mac you get a $1500 laptop with a retina screen and an 8 hour battery life.
Unfortunately my section is one of those that hasn't been clear to use a Mac which means I could never do something like that.
At last few workplaces we targeted Kubernetes\Linux but we used Windows laptops. I don't know how using Macs would help us do a better job.
Compared to 10 or 15 years ago, mac laptop adoption is increasing. It feels like most tech companies or software engineers are using macs.
Dell, HP and Lenovo all ship massive amounts more laptops, but make a fraction of the margin that apple does on their hardware. IIRC apple made more profit than all 3 combined. And each one of those has software arms of their companies that help their bottom line.