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 tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers.

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.

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.

> Has apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years?

i dont think anyone asks this question in good faith, so it may not even be worth answering. see:

> 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.

yea fwiw macs own for multi-target deployments. i spin up a gazillion containers in whatever i need. need a desktop? arm native linux or windows installations in utm/parallels/whatever run damn near native speed, and if im so inclined i can fully emulate x86/64 envs. dont run into needing to do that often, but the fact that i can without needing to bust out a different device owns. speed penalty barely even matter to me, because ive got untold resources to play around with in this backpack device that literally gets all day battery. spare cores, spare unified mem, worlds my oyster. i was just in win xp 32bit sp2 few weeks ago using 86box compiling something in a very legacy dependent visual studio .net 7 environment that needed the exact msvc-flavored float precision that was shipping 22 years ago, and i needed a fully emulated cpu running at frequencies that was going to make the compiler make the same decisions it did 22 years ago. never had to leave my mac, didnt have to buy some 22 year old thinkpad on ebay, this thing gave me a time machine into another era so i could get something compiled to spec. these techs arent heard of, but its just one of many scenarios where i dont have to leave my mac to get something done. to say its a swiss army knife is an understatement. its a swiss army knife that ships with underlying hardware specs to let you fan out into anything.

for development i have never been blocked on macos in the apple silicon era. i have been blocked on windows/linux developing for other targets. fwiw i use everything, im loyal to whoever puts forth the best thing i can throw my money at. for my professional life, that is unequivocally apple atm. when the day comes some other darkhorse brings forth better hardware ill abandon this env without a second thought. i have no tribalistic loyalties in this space, i just gravitate towards whoever presents me with the best economic win that has the things im after. we havent been talking about itunes for like a decade.

Apple had real Unix a decade before the Linux crap was made, a bad unix copy. Nextstep was much better than Linux crap. "A budget of bad ideas" is what Alan Kay said about Linux [1], he invented the personal computer.

My 1987-1997 ISP was based on several different Unix running on Apple, probably long before you where born.

Apple built several supercomputers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmsIZUuBoQs

[2] Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o

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.

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.