What a lot of people are missing here is that it's actually about the software and operating system...

This is why the iPhone is such a success. There are a lot of higher spec phones out there. It's also why we 'Apple Fanatics' just don't want to budge from our 'horrible low spec toys'... Apple make no bones about their money coming from HW profit margins, but they strengthen this paridigm by providing the best operating system base and front end in the industry as well as wonderfully put together machines. Oh, and all the dev software is free, used by the same people who make the machines and write the OS, and the dev community is vibrant and very open.

Yes, Apple sell what a lot of people consider boutique HW. But it's certainly not as bad as dmytry is making out. If I could really put the HW for something equivalent to a high end Mac Pro together for less than $1000 even I might consider jumping ship, or at least a Hackintosh. The reality is that to build something like that for less than $1000 from new equipment, and have it useable is simply not realistic.

As others have noted, if you do a real world comparison, rather than quoting anecdotes, you'll find that the cost difference is not that huge. (Macs also keep their resale value and seem to have a longer service life overall IMO : I have a couple of laptops here bought at the same time as my first 17"PowerBook, and of similar spec, which are now gathering dust. The PowerBook is still in use daily as our home server. It's about 7 or 8 years old now... Still running the latest OS.)

If you want a machine satisfying the original posters requirements then, yes a Mac Pro is about your only option.
Or a Hackintosh. But who really writes apps that will only run on the top 1% of PC specs?

I develop both PC and Mac software. Most of it graphic intensive SW.
Out of choice I do that on Macs.
I actually do 99% of my dev work on the 17" MBPs. I have one from each generation.
I also have a Mac Pro, which I use rarely for compatibility testing.

The last big industrial project I did on the PC was a 3D ultrasonic data inspection client for the PC.
I developed this and ran it in Parallels on a MBP. Every-time I demonstrated it to my client, and their clients, they all found using it on my Mac far more satisfying than on their own PCs. To be clear this was PC software, developed in Visual Studio *for* the PC and XP / Vista. Not a port. A couple of the guys (Oil industry execs) had the latest greatest PC laptops. One even had an AlienWare machine!
And yet (especially in Vista) this SW was universally perceived to run better on the Mac in a Virtual OS.

Visual Studio has it's good sides, but I do genuinely prefer XCode. I would have to say overall I have had more catastrophes involving my source code with Visual Studio than XCode. Likewise I have had more calamaties with file systems on PCs than on any Unix based system. So when I develop generic code I do it in XCode on OS X, simply moving files over to VS for system specific work / builds.

I'd also have to say that the horrible decisions made by Microsoft with regards to legacy code in their operating systems makes system software development a horrible experience on PCs. If I was choosing a platform (for me alone) to put together a consumer productivity app I would do everything I could to maneuver the project into a situation where it's being developed for OS X.

If I am writing graphic intensive code for any API other than DirectX I can always develop it on a Mac, and moving it to a higher performance machine of any flavour later is really not an issue. It's also far more portable than writing for DirectX on a PC.

Quote: [it was] perceived to run better on the Mac in a Virtual OS

Apple has ungodly advertising.

Quote: Original post by _Sigma

Quote: [it was] perceived to run better on the Mac in a Virtual OS

Apple has ungodly advertising.

Heh. They truly do.

In the spirit of full disclosure, they are also the *only* manufacturer that when they tell me that I *might* get my new machine in about two weeks *if I am lucky*, even though it was due out and I ordered and paid for it a month ago, I still get excited like it's Christmas!

That is truly ridiculous, and sad!

Quote: Original post by scratt
I'd also have to say that the horrible decisions made by Microsoft with regards to legacy code in their operating systems makes system software development a horrible experience on PCs.

lolwut?

Have you ever used C# and System.Windows.Forms? It makes using objective-c and cocoa torture.

Quote: Original post by tstrimp

Quote: Original post by scratt
I'd also have to say that the horrible decisions made by Microsoft with regards to legacy code in their operating systems makes system software development a horrible experience on PCs.

lolwut?

Have you ever used C# and System.Windows.Forms? It makes using objective-c and cocoa torture.

Yeah, I have. Not really getting what you're driving at there, but I guess partly it must come down to what you are used to..

Although my comment was aimed more at a lot of the .NET / MFC / WIN32 stuff.
It's really a minefield at times to work your way through IMO, and sometimes on certain projects you don't have the choice to *not* use it.

Quote: Original post by tstrimp
Have you ever used C# and System.Windows.Forms? It makes using objective-c and cocoa torture.

I have come to realize that I exhibit substantial bias in favor of dynamic languages, and as a consequence prefer Objective-C over C# and Cocoa over Windows Forms. That Windows Forms is basically just a managed wrapper around Win32 and not a true next-generation windowing API doesn't help. That WPF, the "next-generation windowing API," is made of lose and fail also doesn't help.

XCode is inferior to Visual Studio in many areas - code completion and keyboard shortcuts both drive me a little bit batty - but in most areas it's just "different." And I've come to terms with that difference, though I'm still far better versed in Visual Studio. What seals the deal for me, though, is Interface Builder. Interface Builder is like a refreshing throwback to the BCB era visual designers, and makes the form designer built into recent versions of Visual Studio look quaint in comparison.

Mileage, opinions and experience vary. Use what works for you and embrace the notion that there is no "better" platform or OS or IDE in the same way that there is no "better" programming language - one thing, at least, that I think we can all agree on? [smile]

Quote: Original post by Trapper Zoid

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
I don't like this part, especially in comparison with Linux. Firstly, terminal application is truly horrible (it may come as surprise, but terminals can be good or bad), secondly, OS isn't open and you cannot do useful "hacking" anyway.

*shrug*. We've got different objectives for what we want out of our computers.

Personally, I can't be bothered hacking into my OS. I've got my own projects I'd prefer to be hacking away at. I want an OS that does what I want it to do and then stays in the background while I'm doing my work.

Then why the hell you mention command line as OS X plus point at all? Ahh, wait. You cannot do your work without using command line? Then command line is a minus point!

Quote:
For me, it doesn't matter if the OS gives me the ability to hack a mouse driver; I'm not going to do it.

Linux and Windows give me ability to change mouse curve by adjusting it through nice user friendly UI dialog. Them also give ability for people to hack at system and make such nice user friendly UI, which means that someone else will make it.

Contrast this with OS X which not only lacks UI for this, but does not even let you adjust the curve through driver configuration (text file) or API calls.

Quote:
That's actually my biggest beef with Linux. Far too much of the functionality requires hacking things that really shouldn't be hacked. The 3D driver issue I mentioned is an example of this. The method for installing my 3D driver in Linux was to compile the new driver into the kernel. Seriously, sod that. That's far too much work. I just want my computer to display pretty 3D graphics, not have to rebuild the guts of the damn OS. [grin]

Well, I had 3d acceleration working right after install.

Quote:

Quote: Yea. But I'd rather do that from comfort of my Linux box where i can build for windows and osx. I even can build for iphone, but i dont know if builds work.

But you won't be building primarily for Macs, will you? Sure, you might be able to compile for Macs on your Linux machine, but it's not your prime OS.

Type
gcc --version
on terminal, on your mac that you're developing on. What is the version? I'd guess you don't even have working OpenMP support.

It might come as surprise, but your whole development environment is made for Linux first, Windows second, and OS X several years lagging because you'll be using Apple's fork.
Only portion of your environment that is made for OS X is XCode. Which IMO sucks worse than even average open source IDE. (at code completion, browsing, refactoring, etc.)

Quote:

It sounds like you're developing for Linux first, then porting to Windows, then getting Mac OS X developed as an afterthought. It's an approach I suspect a lot of triple-cross-platform apps follow, as the Mac OS version looks and feels like a port. It's a bit silly for game development to go Linux->Win->MacOS though; that's the complete opposite from the expected market share.

Come on.
OS X is essentially just linux-wannabe BSD fork, with gnome-wannabe icing on top, plus ton of marketing and other non-technical factors ("just works"... eh. all of my PCs "just worked").

I have precisely one #ifdef __APPLE__ in my code, and it is here because on other platforms I have data in executable_folder/data and on mac I have it in executable_folder/../Resources because its in bundle.
If I were developing on mac, unless I were developing for *mac only*, my code would've been identical.

Quote:
As for the "good deal" comment, Talroth is right.

Did you even read his point?

Quote:
Do you think a big company is going to care about an extra $2K for a computer for a $100K p.a. plus professional?

And? They'd buy a mac for a professional who prefers PC or vice versa? Of course not. So that's hundred percent irrelevant to what Talroth said.
If professional wants PC he will get top of the line PC (which will "just work", and also likely will be overpriced), if professional wants Mac he will get top of the line Mac. If they take their professionals seriously, there will be technical staff so if something breaks, hard drive will be moved to other identical machine by staff, to minimize interruption. (sending unit for repairs as whole is ridiculous)

[Edited by - Dmytry on March 1, 2009 3:37:26 AM]

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
What seals the deal for me, though, is Interface Builder. Interface Builder is like a refreshing throwback to the BCB era visual designers, and makes the form designer built into recent versions of Visual Studio look quaint in comparison.

Interface builder took quite a bit of getting used to for me. When you're used to the pure simplicity of dragging a button onto a form in Visual Studio and double clicking it to add code for the click event, the IB method is quite difficult to work with. IB has become much easier to work with now that I'm creating controllers in code instead of exporting them from IB. But the initial transition wasn't very smooth at all, compounded by the fact that the documentation is pretty terrible (most examples are built around IB 2). Dragging controls to connect them to the controller is still quite annoying however.

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
Type
gcc --version
on terminal, on your mac that you're developing on. What is the version? I'd guess you don't even have working OpenMP support.

Mine has the latest bundled version of gcc installed and its 4.0.1. Since OpenMP was released in gcc 4.2, I'd guess it doesn't support it either.

Quote: Original post by Dmytry
Type
gcc --version
on terminal, on your mac that you're developing on. What is the version? I'd guess you don't even have working OpenMP support.

It might come as surprise, but your whole development environment is made for Linux first, Windows second, and OS X several years lagging because you'll be using Apple's fork.
Only portion of your environment that is made for OS X is XCode. Which IMO sucks worse than even average open source IDE. (at code completion, browsing, refactoring, etc.)

I was more referring to look-and-feel issues than the development tools under the hood. Part of the reason why I started using Macs more was to get a better feel of the Mac way of doing things. There's a big difference in usability between a native Mac app and one that has been ported without consideration to the Mac GUI. For example, lately I've been comparing Komodo IDE with Wing IDE for use with Python. Komodo IDE has a very nice Mac OS feel, while Wing IDE feels like a port.

Of course, this matters less for games, which tend to be all unique. [smile] I guess it matters for the installation.

In general for my development strategy, I don't want my Mac version of my games to feel like the afterthought port, not when they're likely to be my prime market. Consequently developing on a Mac helps cement that. I'll have to see how well that goes for development greater than my little hobby games, of course. [wink]

Quote:

Quote:
As for the "good deal" comment, Talroth is right.

Did you even read his point?

Yep. I don't think a department will care that much about the price of RAM for a Mac Pro, not when factored into all the other costs (time and money) they have to deal with.