Grant’s Grunts » Apple and Developers
Grant’s Grunts » Apple and Developers
As a follow up from this year’s ApacheCon:
I had 30 people in my Lucene Boot Camp training class this time around and I would guess that at least 15 were on Apple laptops (50%, well above the general Apple market share). I also would guess that there were more Mac users at the general conference as well. As one open source developer put it: “I want the power of Linux without messing with device drivers”. Mind you, these aren’t artists and photogs, but hard core developers looking to build powerful search engines.
After all these years, I am still bullish on Apple, and I mean Apple computers, not the iPod and iPhone. The iPod and iPhone are nice game changers and make Apple ever more profitable (my stock thanks you), but OS X (especially Leopard now that most of the kinks are worked out) and the Mac Pro and Macbook lines are the real reason I am an Apple fan. The thing is, the best computing platform is going to be the one that has the most developers. Back in the day, Microsoft had the hearts and minds of developers AND had the best tools for development. As Steve Ballmer so infamously put it “Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers…” Nowadays, I am not so sure Microsoft can lay claim to that idea. While Apple can’t quite it either, they have been executing on the idea for quite some time, thanks to nice dev. tools and UNIX under the hood. That doesn’t even count the fact that many great tools like IntelliJ and Eclipse run just fine on Mac as well. Or that most of the Ruby on Rails core developers are on Mac.
