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Discussion on: Why do you choose Mac over other options?

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val_baca profile image
Valentin Baca • Edited

I use a Mac; actually I use several.

At home, I have a Macbook Pro, a Macbook Air and two PCs. The Macbook Pro is our "primary" computer and the Air is just a backup. The two PCs are for gaming. I really only need the less-powerful of the two, but the more powerful one lets me play on Ultra graphics settings most of the time.

At work I use a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini. The Macbook Pro was my main computer and the one that many of my co-workers use. The Mac Mini is a recent acquisition that took several months of begging convincing that the extra CPU cores were worth the $$$.

I also do some development on linux via AWS EC2. Some people do more on their linux host, other less. I used to do 100% though ssh. Now I only do about 1% over ssh.

I work on iOS app development, so Macs are practically required.

However, I use Macs even when I didn't have to.

In college and afterward, I put in a ton of hours trying to get a "perfect" linux setup working on my Thinkpad. I went through practically every major distro you could think of. In the end, nothing worked 99% of the time (I say 99% I know that 100% perfection is impossible). Usually it was some combination of wifi, graphics, bluetooth, and/or something else that didn't work. Ubuntu or Mint was as good as it got.

It also didn't help that I would spend way too much time customizing minutia like system fonts and aliasing and making the perfect key combinations.

Eventually I just decided that I wanted something that worked out of the box and (honestly) would limit customization to be not infinite. So I switched back to Macs. By that time, brew had come out and was a godsend. With brew on mac, linux as my primary OS was dead.

I know that Macs come at a premium cost and the hardware just seems to be getting worse with each iteration. So one day I might be forced back. In the meantime, I find that a 13" Macbook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) with 16GB RAM and a 500GB SSD to be a top-choice development machine at a reasonable price. I hope mine never die.

That said, I'm very glad I spent the time I did (and do!) with linux. I still use those commands every day on macOS and when I still occassionaly use linux directly.

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jsardev profile image
Jakub Sarnowski • Edited

"Eventually I just decided that I wanted something that worked out of the box and (honestly) would limit customization to be not infinite" - I'm coming to the same resolution after working on Linux for some time already. It really can take a lot of time to configure and customize everything to your own needs. On a Mac, it looks pretty and works excellent out of the box - this can be a really good argument to buy one, despite the high price.

Thanks for sharing your view on the topic! 😄