Very funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform without Apple's permission or only a certain number of VMs on the hardware they own .
Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?
I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.
At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas but this is a big chunk.
So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.
For me at least, not being Linux is a feature. Linux has always been “almost Unix” to the point where now it has become its own thing for better or worse. OS X was never trying to be Linux. It would be better if we still had a few more commercial POSIX implementations.
That is fair but in my experience most devs are targeting linux servers not BSD(or any other flavour) which is helped by OSX. If OSX was linux derived it would suit them just as well.
edit: I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.
Heterogeneity is the feature. The Linux echo system is better off for it (systemd, Wayland, dconf, epoll, inotify are all based on ideas that were in OS X first) and not being beholden to Linux is a competitive advantage for Apple everyone wins.
It is a weird situation. Apple products are consumer products but they make us use them as development hardware because there is no other way to make software for those products.
Anything being developed for the Apple ecosystem requires use of the Apple development platform. Maybe the scope could be called "unserious," but the scale cannot be ignored.
However having used Xcode at some point 10 years ago my belief is that the app ecosystem exists in spite of that and that people would never choose this given the choice.
This is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.
Apple had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the world of virtualization and the idea of macOS running on anything besides "metal built by Apple." They've been pretty clear for decades that they only care about customers who buy Apple aluminum and silicon.
That kind of tracks as the source of the concern. My first thought was it’d be something IDMS-related as well. I don’t know enough about that system to pinpoint exactly what.
Plenty of hate out there of apple alongside the love.
I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.
So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in the US.
edit: I suppose I should also note the vast majority of people developing on mac books (in my experience anyway) are actually targeting chrome.
Point taken. Most developers probably make do with Linux containers rather than MacOS VMs.
However having used Xcode at some point 10 years ago my belief is that the app ecosystem exists in spite of that and that people would never choose this given the choice.
That’s what I would be worried about if my primary source of income was hardware sales.
it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.