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What are your experiences using a Macbook for back end work?

1 points by markbnj ↗ HN
Serious question. I'm considering joining a company that requires all its back end devs to work on company Macbooks. I have used a Macbook briefly for IOS work in the past, but I have never used one to do python-based back end development in Vagrant. All other things being equal I would just get a fat Asus laptop and put Ubuntu on it, and save some cash in the process. Am I being too narrow minded here? Anyone care to sing the Macbook's praises as a serious back end development platform?

2 comments

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there4
The Macbook is a solid bit of hardware with great durability. For development with Vagrant, you should make sure that the machine has the maximum RAM installed, and if it's an older one, you can do a SSD upgrade.

In addition, I cannot say enough good about the dotfiles project from https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles for making OSX a nice developer environment. Be sure to completely read through the .osx file before applying it though, and comment out the bits you don't like. If you maintain the .brew file and use it to install new apps (including apps via cask), you'll have a system that is very easy to replicate. iTerm2 with tmux is great for use with Vagrant environments too.

markbnj
Excellent tips. Thanks!