Fully agree. I recall in particular reading John Carmack a few years back talking about how he was glad Apple wasn't as dominant as Microsoft, because they were far harder to work with.

I wish I could remember the quote well enough to search accurately for it.

This may be it:

http://kotaku.com/5397908/carmack-working-with-apple-is-a-ro...

I read that too, but that's way too recent. What I recall is maybe 3 or 6 years ago.

I think the "can't marshall any evidence to support this claim" is pretty critical here, because the vast majority of developers who actually write software for the Mac have loved it since OS X came out. They've loved Cocoa and they loved that the IDE and development tools were made free.

And while there was a dead period due to the technically deficient underpinnings of the late Classic MacOS, before that, the Inside Macintosh days, I hear folks loved programming Apple too.

After having been deeply involved in the Mac dev community for the last 10 years, the implicit claim that Apple is a company pro developers do not love working with sounds, frankly, a little bizarre.

All available evidence suggests that OSX developers love the technology. Fully agree with that.

I make Mac apps for a living and have, over a few years built up nice relationships with Apple. In spite of only being a small, not US-based, company (11 people now, but only 5 when we won our first Apple Design Award), it was never hard for us to get noticed by Apple, or to get in touch with the people at Apple we needed to talk to at any given point.

Our first app was built using 'unsanctioned' technology, PyObjC (before PyObjC shipped with 10.5); the app would have never seen the light of day on the iPhone, but then again, we would never have built it in PyObjC for the iPhone to begin with. Everyone we've ever met at Apple has been supportive from day one, and we owe a lot to many of those people.

We have not shipped any iPhone apps, so I can't say how I'd like that, but as a Mac app developer I love working with Apple.

You've shipped PyObjC-based apps for the Mac? We should talk. :)

Drop me a line anytime :) — my first name at madebysofa dot com

In high school, I thought that the CodeWarrior IDE (which was, as far as I knew, the dominant development environment) was absolutely terrible. I'm not sure how good my judgment at that time was.

That said, with OS X they really became a lot more developer friendly just because they adopted a UNIX base. At this point, I'd say they're the default platform for ruby/web development. Look at all the rails job postings for small startups promising 30" Mac Pros, etc.

Yeah, I have terrible experiences with codewarrior as well. I had one programming class in the late 90s that required macs and boy did that make me hate macs with a passion.

But I dont think it was purely a codewarrior issue. The overall apple OS at that time was simply terrible and 10 years behind windows (i wont even count how far behind unix they were) -- they still could not get multitasking to work right. Which meant that any pointer error causes your computer to hang. And when you are coding for a data structures class in C all of your errors are pointer errors.

So I am sure a lot of developers abandoned the mac platform around those times, but maybe many of them are coming back now.

Unfortunately, CodeWarrior was still way better than MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) - that was pure pain.

Oh man, I had so many CodeWarrior shirts... "Blood, sweat, and code," "X Rated" for their OSX version...

I'm pretty sure that it was dominant at the time. I remember reading a lot of examples that used it.

The relevant times under discussion are: the era of the Apple II which came with built-in Basic, and the era of post-OSX but pre-iPhone

The Apple II... A computer you could turn on and start programming in 3 seconds... When will we be able to do that again ;-) ?

I think there might have been a difference between Mac-only programmers who, it could be argued, were leaving a lot of potential money on the table by not developing for Windows and therefore must be doing it mainly for love of the platform or the company (remember all the Boo's Steve Jobs got when he announced the "investment" from MS in Apple?), and developers who's main product was on Windows and who, perhaps reluctantly, also had to support a Mac version.

Mac developers mostly did (and still do). If you're developing anything other than Mac applications, you probably don't know a lot about what it's like either.

Yeah and to think at one point in time, they were literally begging programmers to write software for their Mac platform...

Yeah Cocoa dev was never took off if only b/c Macs used to be much more niche than they are today.