Comments on: Is a macbook the PHP developer’s choice?

By: Jacques

Jacques — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:26:21 +0000

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.

By: Hans

Hans — Tue, 29 May 2007 14:55:18 +0000

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

By: Stuart Herbert

Stuart Herbert — Mon, 28 May 2007 10:35:07 +0000

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

By: foobar

foobar — Sat, 26 May 2007 13:19:28 +0000

Thinkpads with gentoo are for the pro’s!

By: Larry

Larry — Sat, 26 May 2007 06:00:25 +0000

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.

By: Chris D

Chris D — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:46:03 +0000

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.

By: Ed Finkler

Ed Finkler — Fri, 25 May 2007 21:43:29 +0000

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

By: Brian Moon

Brian Moon — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:35:48 +0000

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.

By: Jan Lehnardt

Jan Lehnardt — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:25:55 +0000

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.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:21:39 +0000

A closer look will reveal that the laptop in the foreground is really an HP laptop with an APPLE logo sticker on the top.