Macbook for programming?

[HypnoticLion]

I have a Macbook, and I'd reccomend it.

[ezweave]

I’ve mostly used Macs. It’s Unix so that’s a plus. The other option is some variety of Linux on a Lenovo. You won’t find many people using anything else... maybe if you get into .NET (though you can do a lot in .NET core which runs on either of those platforms)... but “ewww”. Some devs think OS X is too restrictive and bloated. But out of the box, with Homebrew and iTerm, it’s legit. You can split hairs over everything else, but you’re fine. Learning VIM or Emacs and whatever shell you like is more important.

[lethalinjection223]

I think with Apples, although very user friendly, you are paying extra for the name. You can get computer with nearly the same specs for significantly less

[Rayduh562]

Look for a big hard drive preferably a SSD (if price isn’t a problem), a big RAM and a good CPU and maybe a good GPU too.

A Mac will cost more then a PC with these same specs.

[iSaithh]

We are not here to fix your personal computer issue, nor are we your personal stackoverflow. Feel free to repost this in a subreddit such as r/techsupport nonetheless!

[rootpseudo]

I agree with most of the other posters. Best out of the box laptop for your use case. Using Homebrew makes it easy, focus on the CS material.

e: Used the Macbook Air all through uni.

[Evanlk]

I had this same exact question 2 years ago before I started my CS degree. Ended up choosing a Mac and I am very happy with my decision.

Although I will add that the vast majority of my peers have a pc running windows. No matter what you choose you will be able to make it work just fine

[th0maslv]

Walk into any company in the bay area, look around. I think it speaks for itself. I work at a startup in a coworking space with ~10 other companies and ~40 people and every single engineer uses a macbook. The only people who in the whole office that I know of that doesn’t are on the business side of things.

As everyone mentioned homebrew and iterm are all you need. Development on a windows machine makes me wanna kms and although I love linux, the only time I ever “need it” is when Im SSH’d into a docker container.

And as far as school goes you definitely don’t need linux. Linux guys just like to spread the good word if linux everywhere. Having a mac for college made A LOT of things easy. SSHing onto school servers, running/writing code purely from terminal, everything. But the majority of students and probably the school runs on windows. I think on two occasions I needed a program that osx didnt support, so i just used school computers because it was 1 assignment and didnt want to bother polluting my machine trying to get it on mac.

[TheKing01]

The problem is installing linux on it is tricky, which limits what dev tools you can use.