https://www.quora.com/Question-That-Contains-Assumptions-1/Why-do-most-software-engineers-use-a-MacBook-instead-of-a-Windows-or-a-Linux-laptop
Several big things coincidently happened around the same time in late last decade:
- iOS and Android - 2007-2008
- Amazon Web Services - 2006
- x86 MacBook and Mac OS - 2006
- Startup booming - post 2008-2009 recession
- Git and GitHub - 2005 (git) and 2008 (github)
Combined together, they are why MacBook is so much more popular today than a decade ago (circa 2005):
1. Mobile app
The population of iOS and Android app developers is huge. It makes a lot of sense to develop iOS and Android apps on Mac. iPhone and Android were born around 2007/2008.
2. Amazon Web Services
Public cloud, especially AWS, made it much easier to provision servers. However, AWS, the leading and dominant public cloud provider launched in2006, didn't support windows in the first a couple years. It added Windows support in EC2 in 2008 as a beta feature. In the following a couple years, as far as I remember, the developer community was still staying away from running Windows on AWS because the glitches here and there. Therefore, in order to take advantage of the cloud computing, many people had no choice but start to pick up Linux.
3. Startup
Tech startups started taking off soon after the 2008-2009 recession. One of the reasons was that AWS made it much easier to do startup. Startup prefer use AWS for cost saving and other cloud computing benefits. Startup attracted many best programmers, for many reasons including the potential huge financial return. Because of having joined startups, many people started to pick up Linux. Also, good programmers make their work platform better. An example in the history was that VB/Delphi/VC++ programmers on Windows 95/98, in their side project, created a lot of great softwares to scratch their own itches, such as to download/upload files (remember those FTP clients and HTTP downloaders?), play MP3 and video (WinAmp, ...), editing text file, etc.. Similar thing happened to OS X platform in the last several years. That is the power of developer ecosystem, which helped make Windows successful.
4. OS X on x86
In 2005, Apple announced to change OS X to x86 architecture. The transition started from 2006, when Apple released the first x86 MacBook, and completed in 2009 when OS X 10.6 was released which only supported x86.
This switch has two major impacts:
First, Mac hardware changing to x86 allowed us to install Windows on MacBook, using Boot Camp (released in 2006). That made it a lot more comfortable for people to buy a MacBook as their only personal computer. Because prior to that, although many people loved the build quality and form factor of a MacBook, they were afraid of the software issues. For example, there were a lot of websites using ActiveX which weren't very well supported on Mac OS X. Now with dual systems, they have a way out: when necessary, they can boot into the Windows.
Second, now lots of the tools that work on Linux can be much more easily ported to Mac OS X, because the tools are mostly written for x86 architecture and now OS X is also x86. Like many others said, now OS X is a much nicer Linux workstation.
5. Git and GitHub
Because git was created by the creator of Linux, git works really well on Linux. Because of git, GitHub was possible and got popular. Because of git (2005) and GitHub (2008), it became much easier to do open source, compared to the days when we only had SourceForge, CodePlex and Google Code. When it's easy to do open source projects, more open source tools and lib are created, which leads to more applications on the platform (Linux/Mac OS).
p.s. I previously partially misunderstood what the asker meant. The asker was saying that the hardware MacBook is the most popular. S/He didn't say Mac OS X was the most popular. The asker seemed to have said that many MacBook hardware is running Windows.
Having admitted the misunderstanding, I would like to keep my above answer, since it still explains my view of why MacBook (running Mac OS X) has become very popular among developers.
Personally I don't see many people running Windows as the primary OS on their MacBook.
No comments:
Post a Comment