

Ask HN: Programmers, Macs, and Hackathons - fadelakin

I've been watching some videos lately about hackathons. While watching the videos, one things kept bugging me. Why are all these people using Macs? Is using a Mac a Silicon Valley standard nowadays? If you watch some of the videos on Facebook's career page, you can see Macs all around. My question is why are they so popular to use? Is getting a Mac worth it as a programmer?
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orangecat
The OS has a good UI, with Unix under the hood. And the hardware is generally
excellent, while most PC vendors have spent the last several years making
their products worse. For example, 5 years ago laptop displays were commonly
1440x900, and 1680x1050 wasn't hard to come by. Now on everything but Macs
it's the atrocious 1366x768, or 1600x900 if you're lucky.

~~~
jamesbritt
One reason I've not gotten a mac is because I wanted a 15" laptop with
1920x1200.

I'm using a thinkpad W500 now. With kubuntu; I find Spaces to be practically
unusable compared to true multiple desktops.

But to each their own. We each need to pick the hardware and OS combo that
works for us.

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smashing
No.

Being an expert in your field is the only thing that is important.

Use whatever you require to achieve that goal, but remember they are only the
tools: "It is not the tools we use which make us good, but rather how we
employ them."

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brandoncordell
Mac's are a popular choice for programmers. They offer a great balance. Great
UI (to each their own), they generally just work, but best of all the tools
(mostly) just work. Getting Git, Ruby, Rails, PHP, Apache etc installed on Mac
is a pretty painless experience (most of the time). Out of all the platforms
I've used (Windows, Linux, Mac), I've spent the least time trying to get my
environment "right" on my Mac.

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PStamatiou
Or you can always build your own Mac: <http://paulstamatiou.com/hackintosh-
computer>

My Air wasn't quite cutting it for me.

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sbisker
As people are starting to put their development servers and even their
development environments entirely on the cloud, it makes less and less sense
to tie your home OS so tightly to your work OS. Why struggle getting Ubuntu
sound drivers to work on your laptop when you can enjoy your Mac's sound
drivers and SSH into the dev server on Amazon?

Similarly, see the recent rise in virtualized dev environments (VMware,
Virtual Box, etc.)

The Linux laptops with the penguin stickers are disappearing from the
hackathons because its easier to decouple work from play than it ever used to
be - and when you're done coding for the day, you can just fire up Chrome and
surf Facebook like the other 99% of the internet.

~~~
ImprovedSilence
This seems to be an antiquated view of Linux, I've been running it for a year
or so, and Ubuntu seems to work perfectly. And I have zero problem firing up
Chrome and surfing FB on my Linux box...

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steventruong
These are _some_ of MY reasons for using a Mac. Can't speak for others.

1\. The hardware and quality is second to none (personal opinion) to any PC
equivalent regardless of operating system. Not even a Thinkpad which is what
most PC users would often tout in my experience. Apple also leads the way in
some areas of innovation here in terms of the hardware arguments.

2\. The trackpad is amazing. I haven't found an equivalent elsewhere.

3\. In terms of OS, Linux and Windows are both designed to be installed on
almost any computer, including all Macs. You can do this by bootcamp, booting
directly into the OS, or running virtual machine (what I do) and can run
simutaneous OSes for various different testing and stuff without a problem.
For the longest time, the opposite was not true (up until Lion) i.e. it wasn't
legal to do so and even now its not very compatible. Doing a hackintosh sucks
and have major drawbacks for anyone that has done this.

As a result, with a Mac, I get superior hardware, all the software options,
and it runs phenomenally. And having used some Linux distro, Macs, and
Windows, I can tell you I strongly prefer OS X first, Linux second, and forget
Windows entirely.

There really isn't much of a competition. This is of course a vague overview.
There are tons of other underlying reasons I won't get into as its too much to
write about in terms of the OS and software/tools and how that adds to the
development process itself which for my workflow, there are many non-
comparables in either of the other two categories of OSes, especially Windows.

BONUS: You can develop for anything with a Mac, especially for the setup I
laid out, but you can't say the same is true for everything else given that
iOS requires a Mac.

------
vlad
In my first visit to Silicon Valley in 2007, one of the hosts of the "Super
Happy Dev House" hackathon said he saw as many Macs as PCs at the event for
the first time.

First, the release of new Intel-based MacBook Pros around that time enabled
developers to try OS X while taking Windows along with them.

Second, the new Intel MacBook Pro became the best Windows laptop, rivaling the
keyboard of IBM Thinkpads but with a much better display.

Third, students got a one-time 25% discount on any Mac if they joined the
Student Developer program for OS X, making prices more reasonable.

Fourth, the success of the iTunes App Store a year later made purchasing a Mac
a no-brainer for iOS developers.

Fifth, hundreds of dollars of discounts and free iPod Touches have been
offered to students for many years, many of whom have graduated and brought
the Mac to their workplace and replaced them with new Macs.

Sixth, the release and refinement of the ultra-thin and light MacBook Air over
the years culminated in affordable 2011 models that people could take with
them wherever they went, such as hackathons, thus further 'advertising' the
Mac to observers like you.

Seventh, the general reduction in price of Macs over the years, the
improvements in the operating system like Time Machine and cheap upgrades
between major releases, tie-ins with iPhone, iPad, iTunes, and iCloud, and the
cool factor of owning a Mac are many factors which also contributed to
increased ownership of Apple products.

Edit: from reading other responses to this question, I agree that hardware
features like compatibility with Linux distros and the multi-touch trackpad
have been amazing advantages of the Mac as well.

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lost-theory
Silicon Valley is a scene and Macs are part of that scene. If you want to fit
in, use a MacBook Pro. If you don't care about fitting in, use whatever you
like the best.

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malandrew
Regardless of what OS you have running on Apple hardware, the build quality
and aesthetics of a Macbook Pro beats anything available from manufacturers
like Dell, HP, Lenovo, IBM, etc.

OS X provides a good trade-off between developer friendliness (because it's
unix) and usability when you don't want to mess around with stuff. However, I
have on more than one occasion read about developers who are pushing the limit
of their development productivity get fed up with OS X and install Linux as
well for when they are developing.

~~~
ixacto
Thinkpads aren't nearly as sleek looking, but they are IMO much easier to work
on, and no integrated battery, and on some (T400 in my case) 100% hardware
support for Debian/Ubuntu/CENTOS out of the box.

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mpercy
Have you ever tried web browsing on a mac with the trackpad gestures? The
efficiency gains are awesome (this is what got me to switch)

Also, it's Unix so if you normally work with Unix/Linux all day, then you get
a great terminal environment that works similarly to your server environment.
It ships with ssh, rsync, vim, etc etc and you don't have to install cygwin or
worry about hitting that stupid backslash key.

That said, a lot of great hackers I know use e.g. a Thinkpad running Linux or
Windows. To each their own.

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ImprovedSilence
I think the big selling point for macs among the hacker community is that it's
Unix, but without the hassles of Linux.

If you find yourself asking why Unix over Windows, it's really because the dev
tools and the command line environment it offers are much more powerful. I
recommend starting with Linux. Play around with it for a few months, learn as
much as possible, you'll be pleasantly surprised. The get a mac cuz it's a
million times more convenient and polished.

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var
I would say any operating system which is Unix based is pretty good for
programming. At least I feel like that.

If you take the famous ones, Ubuntu (Linux) is awesome for programming stuff
and that command line makes development a lot better.

Along with the power of *nix, Mac has very good UI so many people are choosing
it these days. Use what you have for now, don't spend your money buying a Mac
because other people are using Macs.

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tjpick
Why is it a problem?

I personally get a Macbook because it's a good balance -- I can run all the
unix/dev tools I want, and my wife can plug in the digital camera or printer
and I can plug in my iPod and have it do something sensible.

She's much happier on OSX than on FreeBSD. I'm much happier on OSX than
windows.

~~~
fadelakin
I'm not saying it's a problem. I'm just wondering why some many developers
choose to use them rather than Windows or a Linux distro.

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DaveChild
A macbook pro runs Ubuntu (or most other distros) beautifully. Pretty hardware
with a decent OS ... can't beat it :)

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betadj
Only after I got a Macbook Pro I realized how much time I had wasted dealing
with all kinds of linux configurations before. Macbook Pro lets you focus on
what you do.

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sejje
Use what you have.

No compelling reason not to.

