Ask HN: Is it necessary that a developer own an Apple laptop?

First of all: a good company will let you choose your own tools, whatever you feel the most productive with.

So why Apple? The hardware is nice but i think the key here is the operating system. It gives you a painless UNIX experience out of the box, without the Desktop Linux quirks (driver incompatibilities, multimedia issues etc.).

What are you using right now? Windows? The majority of "modern" software development seems to happen on UNIX-based systems (see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674), so Windows is often treated as a second class citizen. It misses many essential command line utilities and in general simply does not encourage a command line workflow. Setting up a decent Node/Ruby/Python/whatever environment can be a real pain on Windows. I'm not saying it's impossible, just very painful. So unless you are working exclusively with Microsoft technology, Windows seems to becoming worse every year in regards to software development.

By the way this is coming from someone who has used a Debian/Windows dual boot setup for many years and switched to a MacBook just two years ago.

I am surprised at how many developers I see at meetups with Apple as opposed to x86 + Linux, and I am an oddball running Windows!

Is it worth it? Oh gosh yes!! Like a hundred times yes!

My development productivity has been measurably an order of magnitude greater after getting the laptop. Just the simple act of opening the laptop and getting to work in a couple of seconds with the machine running at full speed is such a blessing. My experience with windows and even Linux (on laptops), has been that there's a slightly long delay in waiting for everything to come alive. Reopening apps would cause slight bits of sluggishness. And overall the performance degraded with each screen close and open cycle (this last bit mostly applies to windows)

And the battery life is nuts! Having my MBP has meant that I can pack it up and take it to the car wash place and hack from there since I know the battery is going to last more than 2 hours effortlessly (it actually does 6+ when doing just dev work on a slightly dimmed screen).

If someone ever made a linux laptop with this kind of quality and no hardware issues, I'd switch in a heartbeat. But that laptop doesn't exist yet (from my experience), so hands down, for development, if you can afford it, buy the macbook! Zero regrets guaranteed :)

I have encounter Windows laptop (you bet even a Lenovo Yoga 3 screw is defective itself, loose screw) faulty too many times due to defective parts. It's why Macbook are well built the most and although it doesn't have any tools to control power management that Windows have, intensive running programs e.g. video processing or may overheat Macbook to 105'C but it's still working fine if you read SSD could still lasted a few more years depending on the temperatures.

Get Intel Power Gadget which is certainly useful to monitor the temperature and such.