> absolutely solid product that is actually sufficient for the large majority of full stack devs

Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box. The news here isn't "The M5 Air is a disappointment", it's "Laptops are commoditized and boring".

As a developer my quality of work life improved radically when they let me have a Mac instead of the Windows laptop I was using.

Were you 3x as productive though? That's the analysis "they" tend to be doing.

I don't even use windows (beyond gaming). The Jedi and I are just off on the ends of the bell curve pointing and the stupid numbers on the stupid price tag.

> Were you 3x as productive though? That's the analysis "they" tend to be doing.

3x productive, is that because the Mac is 3x more expensive than the windows?

that is a logic error if so. You should look at the total output of the human / cost + equipment.

If the output of the human is 10% higher but the cost is only a fraction of their monthly salary, then it is worth it.

And I repeat, you're doing a meme like performance art:

Me: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.

You: "You should look at the total output of the human / cost + equipment. If the output of the human is 10% higher but the cost is only a fraction of their monthly salary, then it is worth it"

Jedi: The windows junk is three times cheaper and does the same thing.

I mean, I'm not actually as dumb as the chad in the meme. I know how to do division. I'm just unwilling to accept your framing like "10% higher output" without evidence, and am pointing to the bleedingly obvious and extremely large signal (price) that I can measure.

99.999% of the time, the obvious hypothesis is the right one. And the obvious hypothesis is that macs are outrageously overpriced and you should just by an Asus Whatnot instead.

As a Windows-based developer from 1996 to 2015 and then Linux from 2015 to 2020, I can say that my dev experience is immeasurably better using a Mac.

The ranking is MacOS >> Linux >> Windows. The Apple ecosystem is expensive but worth it if you can afford it (iPhone + Watch + iPad + AirPods + Mac.)

$350 windows box probably isn't silent like the MBA

> Worth pointing out that the same thing is true for a $350 windows box

Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?

I mean... it really doesn't matter.

There are only a couple of relatively niche spaces where things like cpu performance are really the bottleneck right now.

Hell - RPi 5 is perfectly fine for a huge range of development tasks. The 8gb version is very reasonable $125.

Can you find things that these boxes can't do? Absolutely. Do most developers do those things? ehhhh probably not. Especially not in the webdev space.

Would I still pick a nice machine if given the chance? Sure, I have cash to burn and I like having nice laptops (although not Apple...).

But part of the "AI craze" is that hardware genuinely is commoditized, and manufacturers really, REALLY wanted a new differentiating factor to sell people more laptops. There's not much reason to upgrade, especially if the old machine was a decent machine at time of purchase.

I have 8 year old dell XPS laptops that do just fine for modern dev.

> Depends. Are you doing dev on Microsoft's stack, or are you doing dev on all of the other stacks?

You can run docker in WSL better than you can on a Mac. You can run Linux natively on that box, too. "Stacks" is sort of ambiguous (my world is embedded junk, and the answer for using a mac with these oddball USB flashers and whatnot is pretty much "Just No, LOL"), but to claim that the mac is more broadly capable in these spaces when it is clearly less is.... odd.

Macs are popular among the SV set, so macs are strong in whatever the SV set thinks is important (thus "I bought a Mac Mini for OpenClaw!"). And everything else runs on $350 windows garbage.

It's a bit slow, but still workable for Rust too. I prefer doing my daily work on a much more powerful 9955HX though.

Makes sense; according to Geekbench, 9955XX has about a 25% lead in multi-core over the base M4, and about a 5% lead in multi-core over the base M5. And more cores, so better for parallel Rust compilation.

I'm comparing it to my M2 laptop, but in practice the 9955HX is substantially faster than even the M4 Pro I have in my Mac Mini, about 30%~ or so in wall clock time for Rust compilation.

Yep, Pro only has 12 cores, and a third of those are efficiency cores. Even the Max loses some of its performance to efficiency cores. This is why I was so upset to see Intel replace a bunch of performance cores with efficiency cores. (Remember how Intel used to offer enthusiast chips with up to 18 full fucking cores? Now they think 8 full cores + 16 small useless cores is the answer? I am appalled. Even aside from HEDT they used to offer up to 10 full cores.) More, and more performant, hardware threads is almost always the path to faster Rust compilation. Lose a few of those to efficiency cores and even Apple can fall behind.