For long, developers (devs) have swum in the waters of pure Unix/Linux ecosystems or Microsoft Windows. However, in recent years, more devs seems to be jumping on the Mac OS X bandwagon as their preferred platform for programming.
You only need to attend tech events, like the recent Nairobi Tech Week that ran from April 27-30. The numbers of laptops that were glowing with the Apple logo were hard to miss. One would be tempted to think, most people like pulling out their MacBook just for the show.
Apparently, to distinct yourself as a top-tier dev or a high-end consumer, Apple devices works best in delivering that message. Well that is on the surface, but a report by Stack Overflow’s 2016 developer survey also backs this up; that most devs are increasingly preferring Mac OS X to Unix/Linux or Windows for coding.
According to Stackoverflow, “Last year, Mac edged ahead of the Linuxes as the number 2 operating system among developers. This year it became apparent that trend is real. If OS adoption rates hold steady, by next year’s survey fewer than 50% of developers may be using Windows.”
A distributed system engineer, Dmitri Zagidulin backs this up saying, “Go to a tech conference or developer event. At Amazon AWS Conferences, at game programmer conferences, at Node.js and Ruby on Rails events, etc. It’s about 98% Macs. And mine is among them, as much as I’ve resisted and kicked and screamed all these years.”
The numbers of Apple Macs at tech events only goes to prove its growing popularity among the dev community.