I actually rejected a job offer when heard I will be given a macbook pro.
Apple, been the most closed company these days, should be avoided as much as you can, not to mention its macos is useless for linux developers like me, anything else is better.
its keyboard is dumb to me(that stupid command/ctrl key difference), can not even mouse-select and paste is enough for me to avoid Macos at all costs.
> I actually rejected a job offer when heard I will be given a macbook pro.
For what it's worth, I've had a good success rate at politely asking to be given an equivalent laptop I can put linux on, or provide my own device. I've never had to outright reject an offer due to being required to use a Mac. At worst I get "you'll be responsible for making our dev environment work on your setup".
I've had 50/50. These days I'm fairly okay with just taking the Macbook Pro. I did have one instance where I got one my first week and used my Dell XPS with Linux the entire 10 months I was at the place. I returned the Macbook basically unused.
Only one time did I interview with a place where I asked if I'd be given a choice what hardware/OS I could use. The response was "We use Windows". My response was, "no we do not. Either I will not be using Windows with you, or I will not be using Windows NOT with you". I didn't get an offer. I was cool with it.
> its keyboard is dumb to me(that stupid command/ctrl key difference)
Literally best keyboard shortcuts out of all major OSes. I don't know what weird crab hands you need to have to comfortably use shortcuts on Windows/Linux.
CMD maps PERFECTLY on my thumb.
any thing runs Linux,even wsl2 is fine,no macos is the key. and yes it costs the employer about half of the expensive Apple devices that can not even be upgraded, its hardware is as closed as its software.
Employers typically also care about costs like “how hard is it to provision the devices” and “how long is the useful life of this” or “can I repurpose an old machine for someone else”.
Provisioning is a place where Windows laptops win hands down, though.
Pretty much everything going wrong with provisioning involves going extra weird on hw (usually for cheap supplier) and/or pushing weird third party "security" crapware.
> "I don't even know what you mean by mouse-select and paste."
Presumably they mean linux-style text select & paste, which is done by selecting text and then clicking the middle mouse button to paste it (no explicit "copy" command).
macOS doesn't have built-in support for this, but there are some third-party scripts/apps to enable it.
On Windows these days, you get WSL, which is actual Linux, kernel and all. There are still some differences with a standalone Linux system, but they are far smaller than macOS, in which not only the kernel is completely different, but the userspace also has many rather prominent differences that you will very quickly run afoul of (like different command line switches for the same commands).
Then there's Docker. Running amd64 containers on Apple silicon is slow for obvious reasons. Running arm64 containers is fast, but the actual environment you will be deploying to is almost certainly amd64, so if you're using that locally for dev & test purposes, you can get some surprises in prod. Windows, of course, will happily run amd64 natively.
> the actual environment you will be deploying to is almost certainly amd64
that’s up to your team of course, but graviton is generally cheaper than x86 instances nowadays and afaik the same is true on google and the other clouds.
Arm is an ISA, not a family of processors. You may expect Apple chips and Graviton to be wildly different, and perform completely different in the same scenario. In fact, most Arm cpus also have specific extensions that are not found in other manufacturers. So yes, while both recognize a base set of instructions, thats about it - expect that everything else is different.
I know, amd64 is also technically an ISA, but you have 2 major manufacturers, with very similar and predictable performance characteristics. And even then, sometimes something on AMD behaves quite differently from Intel.
For most devs, doing crud stuff or writing high-level scripting languages, this isn't really a problem. For some devs, working on time-sensitive problems or with strict baseline performance requirements, this is important. For devs developing device drivers, emulation can only get you so far.
No, I said you won’t always be deploying on amd64. Because arm64 is now the cheapest option and generally faster than the sandy bridge vcpu unit that amd64 instances are indexed against (and really, constrained to, intentionally, by AWS).
I never said anything about graviton not being arm64.
Its not about price, its about compatibility. Just because software compiles in a different ISA doesnt mean it behaves the same way. But if that isn't obvious to you, good for you.
I actually rejected a job offer when heard I will be given a macbook pro.
Apple, been the most closed company these days, should be avoided as much as you can, not to mention its macos is useless for linux developers like me, anything else is better.
its keyboard is dumb to me(that stupid command/ctrl key difference), can not even mouse-select and paste is enough for me to avoid Macos at all costs.