Not really. 90% of Mac users don't care or know what Unix is. They don't know that OS X's toolchain and userland are based on FreeBSD. All they care about is ease of use.
Developers like OS X because it is Unix, and if OS X wasn't, they would just be using GNU+Linux or BSD anyway.
> Not really. 90% of Mac users don't care or know what Unix is.
This is exactly why it is brilliant. The average user is NOT a unix user, but the average developer is. The reason OS X is doing so well the same reason Facebook Home bombed. Developers are actually using the systems they are writing code for.
In a sense, however, this is egregious. Since 10.6 OS X has been about abandoning developers and professionals and catering to consumers. The removal of 2-dimensional workspace management, inconsistency in NATIVE application look and feel (this is ridiculous, I can understand when there's inconsistency in third party applications, but to have in-house apps look and feel completely different is absurd) and the inability to easily remove unneeded or unwanted "features" in the OS has made OS X a pain in the ass for many, including me.
I've vacillated on switching back to Ubuntu for quite a while now. I always end up making a Linux partition, installing Ubuntu on it, but I come back to OS X, just because
1. Less worry about configuration
2. Greater OS-wide service communication and integration
3. Laziness
I've been considering creating a GNU+Linux distro with an OpenStep-compatible toolkit at its core (http://gnustep.org/) so that I can get the famous Cocoa look and feel, but with the modularity of Linux.
Not really. 90% of Mac users don't care or know what Unix is. They don't know that OS X's toolchain and userland are based on FreeBSD. All they care about is ease of use.
Developers like OS X because it is Unix, and if OS X wasn't, they would just be using GNU+Linux or BSD anyway.