Is a macbook the PHP developer’s choice?
This week I was at the International PHP Conference. It was a nice conference with interesting topics. It was however a bit of a pity that the PHP conference got 'cornered' by the Webinale conference, which was a lot bigger and caused the PHP sessions to be in way too small rooms. But most of the sessions I visited were interesting, so all in all it was a nice conference.
There was one particular thing I noticed though: the amount of people using macbooks. I know that it's a popular notebook, but almost half of the laptops there was a mac!
See picture:
4 of the visible laptops are macbooks, and there were even more not directly visible on this picture.
Maybe my own laptop got scared of this, because it decided to die during the second day of the conference. 
It's probably a motherboard failure and repair will be expensive, so I'm thinking of buying a replacement.
Now I'm stuck with a dilemma. Should I buy a macbook?
Regardless of it's Cool Factor, what makes a macbook useful for PHP developers? What are features that are good, what are features that are hard to get used to for a developer switching to mac? Any ideas?
One thing I will miss if I buy a mac is the ability to write on it; I had a tablet pc and since I got it, all my notes were digital. So the alternative is a new tablet.
Tough choice!
(If you're curious, the picture was taken during Stephan Schmidt and Frank Kleine's talk on Annotations. Interesting presentations, although I have my doubts abusing the docblocks for declarations)
Tags: apple, conference, developers, ipc, laptop, macbrook
Entries (RSS)
May 25th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
A closer look will reveal that the laptop in the foreground is really an HP laptop with an APPLE logo sticker on the top.
May 25th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
The one in the front is not a MacBook. That’s just a sticker on a regular laptop. Also, there are a couple of MacBook Pros on the picture. While to non-Apple folks this might seem nitpicking, there’s a difference.
On the quesiton: Yes, right choice, get a MacBook!
Cheers,
Jan
–
p.s. you might want to wait some more weeks until after WWDC.
May 25th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
The reason MacBook (pros) are so hot with developers in the OSS world is that you get a Unix environment with a great UI. I used Linux on a Dell for a year. Dual monitors sucked. Sound sucked. the laptop was not made for linux. And hardly any are I would bet. But, the MacBook is made for its OS. I can compile PHP, apache, mysql etc. on my MacBook Pro and have a dev environment more similar to my Linux servers.
May 25th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
I do like my Mac laptop a lot, and the flexibility of UNIX without the hassle of running it is probably the key. It fairly easy to get a LAMP stack up and running on it (although I think it’s easier on Ubuntu if you’re comfortable using apt-get and the command line). The package managers you can get for OS X aren’t great, and that’s probably my biggest beef with them. Otherwise, they’re very solid computers with good support behind them, a clean, pleasant to use OS, and the ability to run any other x86 operating system whenever you need to do so (either via virtualization or dual-booting).
But, if you really dig tablet computing, there is at least one option for you in the Mac universe, called the ModBook:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ModBook
May 25th, 2007 at 10:46 pm
One very good reason is that you can install software called “Paralells” that let’s you run multiple OSes on your Mac.
I have a friend that runs (I believe) WinXP, Vista and Win98 on his Mac. Of course, there’s also OS X.
And, I believe, you can run Linux too.
Of course, all those Windows licences can be costly.
Look into it.
May 26th, 2007 at 7:00 am
I would say stick with Linux.
I’ve been a mac admin at work for over a decade. While MacOS is now pretty Unixy you will find there are added frustrations due to the Apple Flavoring (file system structure sill pretty much HFS+) SMB networking (sigh – if only Apple could make it work as fast and bug-free as Linux), installing X11 apps (especiually trying to find good OSX native versions of FOSS apps like OpenOffice, Scribus, etc.) and Apple producing some updates only for the current OS (i.e. the latest Java version is only available on 10.4, they not available for 10.3, sorry, expect that to happen as they update (re-sell) the OS over time).
If you like the GNU/Linux programming tools, do a check first before making the switch to see if you like what is available for OSX.
Now that Beryl is going good the nifty windows management of Expose is not that unique anymore; and feisty has put together a nice package that also makes the Mac more OK than wow.
May 26th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Thinkpads with gentoo are for the pro’s!
May 28th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Nice thing about MacBook Pros is that, underneath, they’re Intel-based laptops. And damn good ones too. They’re thin, lightweight, sturdy, and very fast. The little features, like the MagSafe power supply adapter, the excellent trackpad, and the illuminating keyboard all add up to make the MBP much nicer to use than (say) Dell.
OS X is nice (nothing renders text anywhere near as pretty as OS X does), and it does have killer apps (OmniGraffle Pro for diagraming / layout, Merlin2 for project management, Aperture for photography, Keynote for presentations), but I boot into Linux for all my PHP dev work.
Parallels helps with this a lot. For demos I find it particularly handy to be able to show how an app will work in Safari, Firefox on Linux and IE on WinXP all at the same time. Try doing that on any other piece of kit
Best regards,
Stu
May 29th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Personally, I’ll stick with a Windows-based laptop. I use VMWare Server (which is free) and run Gentoo Linux for all of my PHP development. I much prefer just working with a real server OS as opposed to messing with Fink, etc. to get that stuff working under Mac OS X. Plus I can have multiple VMs for different Linux environments if I want, and I don’t have to bog down my desktop with server software.
Don’t get me wrong; I grew up using Macs exclusively, and while I love the OS X interface (until recently I had a Mac tower), to me it’s not worth the price. The build quality of the MacBooks is really poor when compared with similarly priced Dell Latitude or IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad machines. All of my relatives have some brand of Mac laptops and without fail they have all been in for various repairs (keyboards, optical drives, cases cracking, etc.).
Yeah, I know it’s not nearly as cool to have a cheaper, sturdier laptop, but hey, that’s how I roll. Maybe I’ll take some queues from the HP owner and get a sticker for my Dell
Hans
May 30th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
The MacBook Pro is great. Having great editors TextMate makes PHP coding a breeze. The fact that it’s FreeBSD 5 with tonnes of Apple stability patches.
I have been dragging around a laptop for nearly two years. Both HP’s and both of them way a tonne. My MacBook Pro ways a lot less and I tend to not get back pain from taking it around with me compared to the HP.