I doubt there would be much difference. I was started on an old brick-style Mac before switching to PC and am now the most technical person in almost any group I enter. It’s not as if Mac devices are entirely void of programmers and other technical users.
I’m a backend dev and the last 3 companies I’ve worked for are exclusively apple only. It feels, to me, like apple took over US tech startups. Obviously pretty poor sample size.
My anecdotal observation is the same. Most of my friends in Silicon Valley are using Macbooks, including some at some fairly mature companies like Google and Facebook.
I had a 5-year sysadmin career, dealing with some Microsoft stuff especially on identity/accounts/mailboxes through Active Directory and Exchange, but mainly did Linux specific stuff on headless servers, with desktop Linux at home.
When I switched to a non-technical career field I went with a MacBook for my laptop daily driver on the go, and kept desktop Linux at home for about 6 or 7 more years.
Now, basically a decade after that, I’m pretty much only driving MacOS on a laptop as my normal OS, with no desktop computer (just a docking station for my Apple laptop). It’s got a good command line, I can still script things, I can still rely on a pretty robust FOSS software repository in homebrew, and the filesystem in MacOS makes a lot more sense to me than the Windows lettered drives and reserved/specialized folders I can never remember anymore. And nothing beats the hardware (battery life, screen resolution, touchpad feel, lid hinge quality), in my experience.
It’s a balance. You want the computer to facilitate your actual work, but you also don’t want to spend too much time and effort administering your own machine. So the tradeoff is between the flexibility of doing things your way versus outsourcing a lot of the things to the maintainer defaults (whether you’re on Windows, MacOS, or a specific desktop environment in Linux), mindful of whether your own tweaks will break on some update.
So it’s not surprising to me when programmers/developers happen to be issued a MacBook at their jobs.
I’m pretty old an have been working in IT for almost 20 years now. Back in the day in would be more like this “hey welcome to the team, here’s your PC”. Someone would point to a desktop with Windows (XP) on it. If your company was “good” at IT you would have roaming profiles, so you could use any desktop with your own profile. If you would get a laptop (usually if you did IT consultancy that would be the case) it would be some locked down version of Windows where you would not even have admin rights.
In one of my first jobs a colleague (developer) couldn’t do his job because his pc was so slow and locked down. One day he came into the office with a CD-ROM that had Ubuntu on it. He just wiped the desktop and installed it. As a young office worker I was shocked! You can do that???
Yeah, we’re Apple only as well, but that’s largely because we didn’t want to deal w/ the BS of the corporate images, and they only support Windows. I could probably argue a case for Linux, but we’ve been on Apple for years, so that would be an uphill battle.
I doubt there would be much difference. I was started on an old brick-style Mac before switching to PC and am now the most technical person in almost any group I enter. It’s not as if Mac devices are entirely void of programmers and other technical users.
Well you have access to a lot of the same CLIs that Linux users get, right?
I’m not a fan, but I know a handful of professional developers who main apples.
Yeah, Apple computers are disproportionately common at tech conferences and meetups.
I’m a backend dev and the last 3 companies I’ve worked for are exclusively apple only. It feels, to me, like apple took over US tech startups. Obviously pretty poor sample size.
My anecdotal observation is the same. Most of my friends in Silicon Valley are using Macbooks, including some at some fairly mature companies like Google and Facebook.
I had a 5-year sysadmin career, dealing with some Microsoft stuff especially on identity/accounts/mailboxes through Active Directory and Exchange, but mainly did Linux specific stuff on headless servers, with desktop Linux at home.
When I switched to a non-technical career field I went with a MacBook for my laptop daily driver on the go, and kept desktop Linux at home for about 6 or 7 more years.
Now, basically a decade after that, I’m pretty much only driving MacOS on a laptop as my normal OS, with no desktop computer (just a docking station for my Apple laptop). It’s got a good command line, I can still script things, I can still rely on a pretty robust FOSS software repository in homebrew, and the filesystem in MacOS makes a lot more sense to me than the Windows lettered drives and reserved/specialized folders I can never remember anymore. And nothing beats the hardware (battery life, screen resolution, touchpad feel, lid hinge quality), in my experience.
It’s a balance. You want the computer to facilitate your actual work, but you also don’t want to spend too much time and effort administering your own machine. So the tradeoff is between the flexibility of doing things your way versus outsourcing a lot of the things to the maintainer defaults (whether you’re on Windows, MacOS, or a specific desktop environment in Linux), mindful of whether your own tweaks will break on some update.
So it’s not surprising to me when programmers/developers happen to be issued a MacBook at their jobs.
I’m pretty old an have been working in IT for almost 20 years now. Back in the day in would be more like this “hey welcome to the team, here’s your PC”. Someone would point to a desktop with Windows (XP) on it. If your company was “good” at IT you would have roaming profiles, so you could use any desktop with your own profile. If you would get a laptop (usually if you did IT consultancy that would be the case) it would be some locked down version of Windows where you would not even have admin rights.
In one of my first jobs a colleague (developer) couldn’t do his job because his pc was so slow and locked down. One day he came into the office with a CD-ROM that had Ubuntu on it. He just wiped the desktop and installed it. As a young office worker I was shocked! You can do that???
Yeah, we’re Apple only as well, but that’s largely because we didn’t want to deal w/ the BS of the corporate images, and they only support Windows. I could probably argue a case for Linux, but we’ve been on Apple for years, so that would be an uphill battle.