Developer/Devops here. I've been using MacBook pro going on probably 13 years now professionally. Being that Linux isn't supported by the enterprise at work and the other option is windows, it's really a no brainer.
But the larger issue among the professionals I spoke to, and one that will likely take many more product cycles for Apple to truly fix, is one of trust. Apple, the business behemoth that it is, still has a reputation to build in the enterprise space. In order to become a go-to purchase for studios, Apple doesn’t just need to make the Mac Pro more competitive on price — it needs to reestablish itself as a brand that industries can rely on for years to come. And it needs to make some amends.
This, basically. Is it going to sell in huge numbers? No. But canceling it would be bad for the brand.
Well, I've worked for the government (as contractor), corporations, and small businesses, I could count a few times I've seen people using Apple Mac Pro devices on one hand (more often seeing Macbook Pro rather, but very rarely for development) and more time than I can count on either Linux or Windows workstation computers.
We use Linux desktop often, because most of our servers are running on Linux so it helps to have version conformity when matching up with server's versioning and we occasionally use Windows for Visual Studio, proprietary software and so forth. But there are a few times where we get discounts for buying software for Linux rather than Windows.
Employees in my office switched from Apple Macbook Pro to Windows/Linux based laptops like Framework Laptop, because Macbook Pro often time lacked GPU that you would find on Linux and Windows workstation. Apple is going off on it's own little world with their own Metal API/GPU and it doesn't reflect the reality in real world emerging technologies. For instance, there are some computational challenges that in my office, we make use of Vulkan Compute so that we can purchase both Nvidia GPU and AMD GPU to generate real-time data, had we used Metal API and Apple's products, it would've been cheaper to purchase cloud compute servers. (We wanted to ensure each developer can test the given Vulkan code on their own desktop/workstation.)
My experience has been all GPU-intensive workflows have been pushed to the cloud. It works a lot better for CI/CD purposes as well, and most of the larger datasets are too practically large for your laptop, it ends up being prohibitively slow to download datasets from databases to your own laptop and then train on your local machine.
I could be biased since most of my network is in the startup scene in SV, where hardware cost is generally the LAST thing most companies worry about. I haven't seen a non-mac software company that's not a 5000+ dinosaur person company.
I cannot think of a single person at any of the places I've worked in the last 7 years, small or large, that has used Windows with a single exception. That exception was me because I needed to use Visual Studio, and I was miserable the whole time. Now that I've swapped to a MBP you couldn't give me enough of a raise to get me to go back. Pretty much everyone I know in DevOps, SRE, IT, and development avoids interacting with Windows unless it is physically impossible. I don't think I am an exception either. My entire college education was done on Macs (not I chose to use a Mac; every computer in the comp sci building was a Mac). Everyone used Macs while I was interning at Good Year. Everyone used Macs when I was doing ML research in academia. All of my friends who have stayed in the industry use Macs regardless of what role have used Macs. Honestly, it would be surprising to me to hear someone didn't use a Mac, unless they got a laptop and installed a flavor of Linux as the main OS.
MacBooks are super popular in a variety of professional fields. They are still the go-to machines for photography and video editing. They are popular in software development for providing a good UNIX environment out of the box while also being very solidly built machines.
The more my software engineering career matures, the more I see my peers using MacBooks.
Windows still absolutely dominates government and enterprise, but the idea that professionals don't use Macs is pretty nonsensical. It's the kind of thing I believed when I was 20 and working in tech support, back when I still thought it was cool to call Apple users "sheep".
This. Good enterprises offer both options. I think people are starting to realize that its best to let people pick the tool that works best for them in this circumstance. Also, equivalent Dells (I have mainly worked at Dell shops lately) are actually more expensive than a MacBook Pro.
Another thing is that enterprise tools lock down Macs a lot less in my experience. This usually pushes people in the direction of Mac when you don’t have to go through an approval process to install an app or package you want to test.
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There's no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they're writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don't make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
I think Apple is going to lose that edge with developers as WSL and its ecosystem keep improving. There's no Apple servers, so a lot of that code they're writing runs on Linux, but Macs only look like Linux. They actually work differently, and you have to use homebrew and a lot of tools are different. But I can load up just about any distro with WSL, so all the packages install the same. Add on top of that the difficulty of making Mac work with AD and having a different version of Microsoft Office. Plus their licensing terms for virtualization are terrible, and they don't make multi-session servers anymore, so developing IOS apps usually means you have a small fleet of Mac Minis instead of some nice enterprise hardware.
What? I'm a software engineer (a so-called "professional") at a major corporation and we get the choice between Windows and Mac. Every single person I know in the company has chosen Mac.
This is always weird to me. Running containers on my Linux machine is way faster than all of my coworkers on Windows. But they still are able to run containers way faster than our coworkers on Apple.
I don't see the appeal of an apple machine for coding unless you're making Apple specific software. To each their own though.
Not everybody is running containers, or is constrained by the performance of those containers, I guess?
I think the primary aspect where Macs are more appealing than Windows machines for many programmers is just that it's a unixy machine and many of the tools that you'd care about from Linux / *BSDs / whatever are easily available. I guess this is maybe different in an era with WSL, but that's a relatively new development, and since I've only used Macs and other unixy machines before I have no idea if that's a viable option personally and I'd be skeptical...
In terms of "why a Mac over Linux?" I think it's partially a matter of Macs being well supported and that most people don't seem inclined to fiddle with Linux on their primary work computer.
Beyond that, though, I think MacBooks are just nice laptops with fewer compromises than most other laptops in my experience. They have good build quality and pretty much every aspect of them is pretty solid... Good keyboards, good chassis, good battery life, good screens, good trackpads, good speakers, good performance. I think it's actually pretty hard to get something that's as solid all around, I feel like with pretty much everything else there's something that stands out to complain about. Like I love my Thinkpad, but god I wish I had an Apple trackpad, or an Apple silicon chip and the performance / watt that comes with it.
I mean, it's just a really bad value compared to the rest of the lineup. It's basically a Mac Studio in a larger case and a PCIe breakout board bolted on. That's it. But for twice the price of the Mac Studio and 10 times it size.
The only unique features is has are PCIe and SATA ports. So unless you really need a ton of local storage or a ton of GPU-power, there's no reason to buy it.
If you need a ton of local storage, it would be cheaper to buy a NAS and some 20TB drives for it than to upgrade from a Studio to a Mac Pro. Especially with a 10-gig Ethernet connection.
It’s an absurd product. It’s a Mac Studio gingerly placed into a behemoth of a case that, itself, costs $3k, And for what? Can’t upgrade the memory or storage. Can’t add dGPUs. All you get is more ports and the ability to add internal PCI cards, both of which could be accomplished with the Studio with far cheaper external solutions. And it’s gigantic and weighs a ton.
not when you’re differentiating between “consumers” and “professionals” with regard to product classes, and in this context we’re discussing a product specifically targeted at professionals, not consumers.
if you want to play word games, this isn’t the place or time.
So I was confused at first, until I realized the headline said "Mac Pro", not "Macbook Pro".
Plenty of professionals use MacBooks, Mac Minis, and even Mac Studios.
The question is, who wants the new Mac Pro? The vast majority of professionals are better suited by a laptop, or can get all the same work done with a Mac Studio.
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