And the amount spent on actual hardware must be at an all time low. The first lab I interned at in high school in the early 90s, every programmer had both a Symbolics workstation and a NeXTcube on their desk. (In a private office, of course). That represented a pretty significant investment. At my first "real" job, I got a Sun Ultra 5 workstation. These days you get the same Macbook Pro that everyone else can pick up at the Apple Store. Often tech folk will have faster personal computers at home.
Right, it was not uncommon in the 80s and 90s for your workstation to cost significantly more than your car did. The Ultra-5 was the cheap Sun work-station at $4k base price, as by 1999 Intel based workstations were starting to put pressure on Sun from below.
I could seriously do with more RAM, but I don't need a $4k computer.
In fact, since I have a MacBook but would be more than happy with a (Linux) ThinkPad, it might not even cost more.
My point is, we don't need 'hardware investment' for the sake of it. If places started doing that I'd rather BYO device, and pocket the difference between what I need and what they budget for.
I think it's the disconnect between "You can't have 50 square feet of office space" compared to in the 90s where you had potentially 5 figures worth of hardware under your desk.
From what I understand their market is basically companies that have already bought into a Mac based workflow and for whom the switching costs (retraining on new software, rebuilding tools etc) would be so high that Apple can practically charge whatever they want. This doesn't seem like a good long term strategy though.
I’m at a two person company and we work fine on both Linux and Mac. There’s no need for a top end mac to do dev work, and frankly no one does a MacBook quality PC in terms of battery optimization (auto graphics switching, battery optimized web browser), ease of use (still top of the line trackpad), whole-disk-encryption, seamless sleep and wake while preserving whole disk encryption.
They designed a laptop for a laptop user whereas most PC makers have no idea what they designed their laptop for. Even if you get good PC hardware the Windows side becomes lacking because Windows has to be optimized for many use cases. Many people who don't get it are using their macbooks as desktop replacement, at which point you should probably just get a mac mini and backpack that around.
> we work fine on both Linux and Mac. There’s no need for a top end mac to do dev work
Absolutely agreed.
> frankly no one does a MacBook quality PC in terms of battery optimization (auto graphics switching, battery optimized web browser), ease of use (still top of the line trackpad), whole-disk-encryption, seamless sleep and wake while preserving whole disk encryption
I haven't had anything else for a while, but I agree. My ideal would be smooth-sailing Linux on macbook hardware. Unfortunately while it used to work, it's only gotten worse, and the pretty much deal breaker is WiFi:
> Many people who don't get it are using their macbooks as desktop replacement, at which point you should probably just get a mac mini and backpack that around.
What? No! If I was going to do that it'd be a similar SFF device, running Linux. (And more powerful for the same budget, probably.)
Yeah but that's because that Sun Workstation probably provided significant value over regular consumer PCs at the time. Do you actually need more than a MacBook Pro and a couple extra monitors to do your job comfortably? I doubt it.
That Macbook Pro is probably also much more powerful than your Sun Ultra 5 workstation though. Technology has improved. The important question is whether the stuff they give you enables you to effectively do your job or not.
