I happen to care for fellow developers, and outside our Fortune 500 customers orgs, I haven't seen anyone being so lucky, and even then, Apple hardware tends to stay at MBA levels, unless they are doing iOS development.
I have seen devs teams where iMacs are timeshared across teams.
>Lucky you to work for such wealthy organisations.
Are we talking about enterprises here, with say, millions in revenue and a few millions in profit, or small shops that can't afford webservers and maybe use some shared hosting?
>I happen to care for fellow developers, and outside our Fortune 500 customers orgs, I haven't seen anyone being so lucky
Well, outside of the virtue signalling (and/or implying that I don't care for fellow developers), this is neither here, nor there.
It's not developing world SMEs that set industry trends, or have historically done so.
And we were talking about whether there will be a trend towards ARM in datacenters (helped because of the fact devs will now get more familiar with ARM, with M1 and similar ARM moves from MS).
It's not about whether Macs (or ARM) will be the architecture of choice for cash strapped companies in Freedonia.
(Plus, IT demand and ability to work / compete across the world, makes devs an exception related to their countries average wages. A local dev wage might be 1/2 or 1/5th of what a dev gets in Silicon Valley, but it's not 1/10 or 1/20 - as their national average across professions can often be. And such salaries still have them afford nice tools, Macs or high end PCs or similar).
(Also, Fortune 500? Never worked in one such company, and the ones I did are more like Fortune 1,000,000 but still Macs are extremely popular with devs).
>OP was the one asserting how M1 is relevant for the data center.
And I think his assertion is on point, in the sense that the widespread availability of desktop ARMs on developers hands will help drive ARM adoption to the datacenter (and that's just with the M1/M... line, not to mention further ARM adoption by MS that's also possible).
For what is worth, Linus Torvalds made a similar point regarding the influence of developer architecture options to server architecture choices (and especially regarding ARM).
I think that the objection "but developing world / poorer companies don't use Macs/M1" is valid, but not really relevant, kinda moving the goalposts. It's not those that set industry trends (and surely not in the US).
>As for the rest I won't bother to reply.
Well, I've replied to the arguments, with what I think is the case (and what I've seen).
Not sure if you were bothered that I took offense to the "I happen to care for fellow developers" line. But it sounded like an insult that wasn't called for, and was not relevant to the discussion.
Given the rest of their comment, I thought "care for" meant "support". That is, system administration and developer support, rather than "care about"...
Ah! I thought it was about the parent "caring for" fellow less compensated developers (who can't afford an M1), vs me not caring and dismissing their importance in my argument.
Mac mini might be $700/€800, but 1) for an inadequate configuration, you need €1260 for something usable and 2) the cost of integrating the first Mac into Windows-optimized infrastructure is way above that. If you want things like Kerberos SSO (i.e. Active Directory), you need Apple-blessed MDM system to provision it. That one isn't coming in the price of the Mac mini.
So most companies, if they have a mac, it is one on the side, so they can avoid 2).
(How do I know? I'm the only guy using mac in our org).
The bit that I’ve been impressed by is the life span. Machines used every day for 8-13 years and still ok. The amount of pain they cause due to various bits of software beginning to fail and workarounds being required obviously grows, and the security side of things isn’t great either. But the machines end up rather cost effective when spread over that many years.
Not sure about minis but that was true for macbooks ten years ago, when you could easily upgrade memory, storage and batteries, and you could install a recent and fully working linux distro when apple stopped supporting you. That unfortunately hasn't been true for a while. My mid 2010 MBP is still perfectly usable, I don't expect my M1 air to last more than a couple, maybe half a dozen years.
I happen to care for fellow developers, and outside our Fortune 500 customers orgs, I haven't seen anyone being so lucky, and even then, Apple hardware tends to stay at MBA levels, unless they are doing iOS development.
I have seen devs teams where iMacs are timeshared across teams.