not a valuable mindset at an early startup?
You're falling into the consumer trap of thinking of the value of an item as its initial, un-depreciated cost. Apple products are almost liquid assets--you can sell them for large fractions of their original purchase price for years after you buy them. Whereas most PCs, like cars, plummet in value the moment you take them off the "lot." Which do you think a startup would rather put on its balance sheet?
Also, because Apple products don't tend to depreciate very quickly in the market, Apple is willing to re-attain their own products after lending them to you for a while: they maintain a very competitive leasing program for businesses (http://www.apple.com/financing/business.html), which you can get into as soon as you want to lease $5000 worth of hardware (i.e. as soon as you're at least a two-person shop.) This is basically the Heroku/AWS of computer hardware: you need fifty laptops for a year? Pay as you go. Want to upgrade? Return them and get new ones, no charge. Business fail? Send everything back, you're good. Business succeed? You can buy the stuff out.
I would bet [fairly large amounts of money] that the majority of startup in SV/SF who keep Apple hardware are on that leasing plan. As soon as you mention anything about "starting a business" around an Apple Store employee, they throw someone in a black shirt at you to explain it.
Your anecdote was exactly the refutation of this statement. :) Game developers are often encouraged to work on median-spec systems because games are expected to run on a variety of configurations. You don't want to develop The Sims on a quad-core Xeon with multiple GT680s, only to find that it doesn't run on your mom's 2005 Core 2 Duo with integrated graphics. The people working with the asset pipeline/level editor might want some extra horsepower (end-users aren't expected to be able to run the level-editor, so it's usually not very optimized) but the programmers don't frequently need it.
Also, though, I disagree with this:
> a startup doesn't have to think of liquidating their assets unless they are going out of business
The most important thing to keep in mind, as any sort of business owner, is your BATNA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiate...). It drives all your major decisions--should we raise funding, should we get acquired, should we IPO, should we declare bankruptcy, etc. And the "baseline" BATNA is always "how much money would we have as runway if we just liquidated everything, fired everyone, and started over?" It shouldn't be a consideration, but it should always be a benchmark to observe your distance from. More liquid assets means more negotiating room, basically.
But really, my point wasn't about liquidating assets, it was mostly about cashflow. A startup, like any business, both earns and spends money. Leasing means you have more cashflow. It's the same reason you don't buy physical servers right away--you don't want to lock that money up if you don't know if you'll need it.
...
> to build quality
What, praytell, did you buy?
* Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB RAM, 160GB SSD
* 1600x900 14" IPS "Radiance" panel
* Switchable graphics (Intel integrated / Radeon discrete)
* Backlit island-style keyboard with oversized multitouch touchpad
* Amazing build quality (aluminum-magnesium alloy case, no plastic, slot-loading disc drive, edge-to-edge glass)
It was, essentially, an MBP clone, with an objectively better display panel, lower price tag at the same configurations, and Windows 7 instead of OS X. 3 years later it's still in perfect condition it was built so solidly. Unfortunately HP ruined the brand name by applying it to cheaper, inferior laptops in the years since, so you can't compare it to an "Envy" today.
@bluedino: It was just as sleek, with the same pixel density as the best screen you could custom order for an MBP, but better brightness & contrast. Here's what it looked like next to an MBP of that time: http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2011/11/d929dd...
There was a story of a failed startup on HN a month or so ago that had a co-founder who stated (jokingly) that they'd no-hire engineers who used Linux as their primary OS. They ultimately folded in part because of technical issues with their infrastructure.
In that respect, it wouldn't surprise me if there's a real correlation between crummy sysops and PC-hostileness in startups.
This blows my mind. I'd think that would be a prime quality, since you're almost certainly going to be deploying on Linux platforms. Intimate knowledge of your production platform is invaluable.
I even had Linux on a laptop, around 2000
Probably a looooooooong stretch from just saying "Justify a PC" to you are building a uncompromising team but I would just say "The Best Equipment (We mostly use Apple)" would accomplish the same goal with less annoying language
"Pick whatever will make you most productive: we'll order it overnight."
Even if there are one-time integration costs involved in adding a PC user to the team, that candidate may still be more productive in Ubuntu. Trust their judgement.
That's important to a business; not so much at home.
This is why I don't want people building their own PC, even though generally they can pick any tool they like: it shows they have the wrong priorities (at least for our team). Unless your job involves something really resource intensive, a high-end laptop (combined with external screens, keyboard and such) is more than good enough and much more practical.
Don't get me wrong, I love building my own machine, I build my own home server from scratch just for the hell of it every few years.
But simply the fact that you call it "half as expensive" suggests you have no realistic idea of actual costs. The time you spend searching the parts together is already more expensive than a MacBook.
Actually, judging by your comment and the ensuing replies, it looks like listing the benefit this way is doing a great job attracting the people they want and filtering out those who wouldn't fit in there.
Even PG's Lisp versus Blub argument is tenuous. Languages and OSes are a dime a dozen. What matters are algorithms and real world results. If you don't see that that's fine, but some real machine learning company thinking at the level of algorithms and not tools will eventually come along and eat your (company provided) lunch.
If you don't see that that's fine ....
You sound very defensive about this, which leads to the flip side of your argument: any prospect who can't take the lightest of jabs at their pet platform is not a person many "high level" startups would be interested in at all.
I understand you are making an app on iOS though and it would be perfectly legitimate for you to have constraints on employee setups because of that. But for a company working on a RoR project where the window manager doesn't matter, who seem to be having trouble recruiting, I'd suggest the data here clearly indicates they should drop the phrase as there is no way (looking at those numbers) it is helping them filter out some trouble making characters with a bad attitude towards Apple, it's turning a huge number of people off. And as I said elsewhere, there are companies certainly paying more and certainly working on more interesting problems who don't do this.
It makes sense to standardize and to have a reason if you want to deviate (said from the perspective of someone that would want to deviate). However, I'd still reword it if I were them, based on this reaction.
Hypothetically, if Mac went under and ceased to exist, do you really want to be that business that relies entirely on Mac ecosystem?
IMO Linux is simply the safest OS to rely on because it's open source.
Anyone who buys brand new hardware can attest to the contrary, because of the lack of drivers.
Windows is the safest OS to rely for business. It's also way overpriced, in part, because of business.
I know I will not buy an AMD HD 7000 series yet for my Ubuntu rig because some things don't work in the OS driver.
We both love OSS, but please be objective and look at the issue from all perspectives.
Think about it. If you're a Mac user, would you work for a startup that says " This is a pure .NET shop and proud of it! You won't find any of those Apple hipsters here!"? If not, why do you assume the opposite is somehow very attractive?
It's like saying a Windows user wouldn't want to work at a Node.js shop. What does the dev tech have to do with the OS? And yes, it's a fair comparison, especially since Xamarin.
"Shiny Apple Products Seriously, get whatever you want (PC users may have to justify themselves)."
That will simply turn off some people and there is no reason for a self-interested business to do that. Apple computers actually are PCs, and always were but especially now they are PCs, so you should make a distinction regarding Linux. The top machine learning company in the world even has their own distribution of Linux[1](or flavour of Ubuntu, however you want to put it). They and many others who don't make such snarky remarks almost certainly pay more than you and are working on more interesting problems than you, you are just narrowing down your potential employees without any reason. So, even though it's in jest, remove that statement from your hiring page if you are serious.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goobuntu