Ask HN: Mac or PC - why does it matter?

First of all, the title might be a little misleading - this has nothing to do with the benefits of the two, and is certainly not an attempt to start a flame war of any kind;

My question is, why do startups make a clear distinction as to the platform they want you to work on? I was just looking through the new threads and noticed Harvest's listing for job opportunities (http://www.getharvest.com/careers) and the listing says that a "Mac of your choice" comes standard with every position. Does it really matter? If you have a top notch developer ready to work for you, does their operating environment really make a difference if you were to hire them?

Of course it doesn't matter. That's a job perk. It also helps shape the applicant pool in desirable ways, I think. If I'm doing the hiring, and you really prefer developing code in a Windows environment over any kind of Unix (which includes Mac), then that's one strike against you.

Hardware and OS choices tend to follow technology choices already made.

These can be related to the languages in use, some languages will dictate setup (.Net will be Windows, iOS will be Mac).

If language doesn't dictate it, then whatever is most commonly in use already is normally continued. There's not much point in having every developer use their own bespoke setup as you want to spin up dev environments quickly to be able to deal with growth, disaster recovery and just good practise like having your dev environments resemble your production environments.

Macs make good choices because on a Mac you can dev anything with VirtualBox.

At work I'm on a Mac Pro and dev inside of Ubuntu VMs with a Windows VM set aside for testing.

Anyhow, I don't think it matters so much about the individual, the selection of one or the other is usually to help normalise the dev environments and to keep things maintainable.

I think a company will try keep their environment the same, so if they're a ruby shop and everyones on Macs, then it makes sense to keep it that way. If you're a big enterprise shop doing .Net and everyone is on Windows, they're going to keep everyone on PCs. If the shop is really small enough to let people choose which platform they want, I guess that could work, although they make get caught out on some issues like license costs.

Almost all new technologies (NoSQL, node.js, etcs) are running primarily on Unix, so Mac is better if you don't want/like to deal with Linux style and at the same time need an Unix environment to run and debug systems with this technologies.

And a personal opinion: don't ask me exactly why, but I do prefer coding on Mac rather on Windows.