Well m-series macs are decent spec and reliability wise, but repairability is a shitshow. I’d buy one if I could afford it (but I suspect the keyboard is terrible). Edit: Linux in a few years is possible.
That’s why the company buys it! I wouldn’t buy one personally either (I had a personal M1 Air but Pro is too much for me). The keyboard got improved a lot in 2019 or so, it was the 2016-2018 one that sucked ass.
Honestly, between the MBP and a similarly priced Dell as a company laptop, i choose the MBP.
The battery is better, the screen is better, performance is better, etc
Dell doesn’t know how to make a laptop & windows sucks ass. Macos is so locked down by default that all the restrictions on a company laptop don’t change the user experience all that much.
In an ideal world, id love a debian thinkpad or framework. But we don’t live in an ideal world, so had to choose between the two worst possible options
I was able to buy my M1 MBP from my company for cheap and the laptop is amazing. Its like 4 years old now but it doesnt feel like its aged a day. Easy 6 hour battery life while doing heavy tasks and it performs like a beast. It’s faster than my desktop at many tasks such as compilation.
In an ideal world, id love a debian thinkpad or framework
Then make your world ideal. Pester your boss or the IT guys with articles showing how Linux is better than Windows at security or dev work. Show them how Linux isn’t prone to the same security concerns. Show them articles or examples about how you could do your work with a Linux install.
Maybe this works for a small-medium business, but for large enterprises (i work for a massive tech company) it doesn’t work like that.
Corporate devices are bought through enterprise service agreements, which have to go through the lawyers as well as the procurement team. Although you could get a contract from Lenovo for the actual devices, a Linux distro would have no service agreement, so that would kill it right there (+ legal would probably flag the risk of malicious code being injected into the OS, i.e. xz). Ignoring thag, devices that are onboarded need to be able to fit into existing device management solutions (ABM/MDM, EDR, DLP, AD, etc etc).
And before any of that, there would be some survey that goes out to determine how many employees would realistically make the switch. For Linux, that number would likely be so low that the business teams would decide it isn’t worth a discussion because of low business impact & user desire (not to mention that now the IT teams also need to be skilled up to support it).
I couldn’t even get a FOSS browser extension approved to be installed on my device, much less spur a movement for adding a whole new set of devices to the corporate inventory.
(Editing to add, i did talk to the IT guy and he said he wished he could give me one because he wants one too lol)
As much as I would love to go over to a purely Linux system there just isn’t the support. I would not relish the prospect of trying to administer 5,000 laptops, and 300 desktops without the benefit of active directory user groups. Even with all of the messing about that Microsoft has done with Entra, it is still a far better mass device management platform than anything available on Linux and Apple haven’t even tried.
I guess you’re right, because I’ve never worked as an IT admin, or had the policy at multiple companies I’ve worked at changed to allow Linux devices for devs.
I cba to find it but there was a tweet of someone saying that buying devs M1 Pro MBPs pays off in half a year from the shrink in compilation times. Some guy got snarky in the replies implying it can’t be a very big project (in terms of the users and whatever) that OP’s team was working on and it turned out to be the Reddit Android app.
Sure, if you compare it to a thinkpad for 1k. M1 Macbook pros cost how much when they were released? 2.5k? 3k? Of you’re going to get reduced compilation times. But what exactly is it “paying of”? How is the calculation from time to money done?
“I can store so much stuff in my RAM, it’ll pay back in 6 months”. Such a random metric.
A well specced Thinkpad is more like 2-3k. Calculation from time to money is done assuming a 40 hour work week and the average salary of a software engineer in that team. The comparison was to an Intel core i9 MBP IIRC. And the comparison wasn’t two laptops, it was replacing the year or 2 old ones for the new model, not accounting for resale value on the old ones even.
I learned to hate the Mac forced upon me for the time I used it, thank you very much. Fuck everything about those boots from the fruit store. Especially in a multi-architecture team, fuck macs.
Like the other person said, “what ui”? Sounds like you didn’t even try it, like opening up GNOME and saying “this sucks” and then immediately turning the computer off.
What UI? Get a tiling window manager for all your terminal windows and then have your IDE or editor in one full screen workspace and the application being tested in another, browser for reading documentation and Lemmy in the 3rd one. You don’t even need to see the MacOS UI when working.
I was told the same at multiple jobs and just asked kindly that they spend the money on a linux compatible laptop. I had arguments to back my statement up too. It worked out.
YMMV
Good luck (if you want to go down this path and haven’t become a farmer yet).
If I resort to using a Mac I want someone to put me out of my misery.
Well m-series macs are decent spec and reliability wise, but repairability is a shitshow. I’d buy one if I could afford it (but I suspect the keyboard is terrible). Edit: Linux in a few years is possible.
That’s why the company buys it! I wouldn’t buy one personally either (I had a personal M1 Air but Pro is too much for me). The keyboard got improved a lot in 2019 or so, it was the 2016-2018 one that sucked ass.
Honestly, between the MBP and a similarly priced Dell as a company laptop, i choose the MBP.
The battery is better, the screen is better, performance is better, etc
Dell doesn’t know how to make a laptop & windows sucks ass. Macos is so locked down by default that all the restrictions on a company laptop don’t change the user experience all that much.
In an ideal world, id love a debian thinkpad or framework. But we don’t live in an ideal world, so had to choose between the two worst possible options
I was able to buy my M1 MBP from my company for cheap and the laptop is amazing. Its like 4 years old now but it doesnt feel like its aged a day. Easy 6 hour battery life while doing heavy tasks and it performs like a beast. It’s faster than my desktop at many tasks such as compilation.
M CPUs make me a believer in ARM and other non-x86 chips, but preferably RISC-V in the long term.
Then make your world ideal. Pester your boss or the IT guys with articles showing how Linux is better than Windows at security or dev work. Show them how Linux isn’t prone to the same security concerns. Show them articles or examples about how you could do your work with a Linux install.
Maybe this works for a small-medium business, but for large enterprises (i work for a massive tech company) it doesn’t work like that.
Corporate devices are bought through enterprise service agreements, which have to go through the lawyers as well as the procurement team. Although you could get a contract from Lenovo for the actual devices, a Linux distro would have no service agreement, so that would kill it right there (+ legal would probably flag the risk of malicious code being injected into the OS, i.e. xz). Ignoring thag, devices that are onboarded need to be able to fit into existing device management solutions (ABM/MDM, EDR, DLP, AD, etc etc).
And before any of that, there would be some survey that goes out to determine how many employees would realistically make the switch. For Linux, that number would likely be so low that the business teams would decide it isn’t worth a discussion because of low business impact & user desire (not to mention that now the IT teams also need to be skilled up to support it).
I couldn’t even get a FOSS browser extension approved to be installed on my device, much less spur a movement for adding a whole new set of devices to the corporate inventory.
(Editing to add, i did talk to the IT guy and he said he wished he could give me one because he wants one too lol)
Ever heard of Red Hat?
redhat provides enterprise support for Linux.
my very large tech company heavily uses Linux (and I personally have both a Linux laptop AND desktop).
it’s not the easy path, but when it happens it is so nice
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
As much as I would love to go over to a purely Linux system there just isn’t the support. I would not relish the prospect of trying to administer 5,000 laptops, and 300 desktops without the benefit of active directory user groups. Even with all of the messing about that Microsoft has done with Entra, it is still a far better mass device management platform than anything available on Linux and Apple haven’t even tried.
I guess you’re right, because I’ve never worked as an IT admin, or had the policy at multiple companies I’ve worked at changed to allow Linux devices for devs.
Mac user here.
Rght? "I want something shiny to write my code on because it makes me look cool and costs a lot " is not ether sign of seniority.
I cba to find it but there was a tweet of someone saying that buying devs M1 Pro MBPs pays off in half a year from the shrink in compilation times. Some guy got snarky in the replies implying it can’t be a very big project (in terms of the users and whatever) that OP’s team was working on and it turned out to be the Reddit Android app.
Sure, if you compare it to a thinkpad for 1k. M1 Macbook pros cost how much when they were released? 2.5k? 3k? Of you’re going to get reduced compilation times. But what exactly is it “paying of”? How is the calculation from time to money done?
“I can store so much stuff in my RAM, it’ll pay back in 6 months”. Such a random metric.
A well specced Thinkpad is more like 2-3k. Calculation from time to money is done assuming a 40 hour work week and the average salary of a software engineer in that team. The comparison was to an Intel core i9 MBP IIRC. And the comparison wasn’t two laptops, it was replacing the year or 2 old ones for the new model, not accounting for resale value on the old ones even.
I mean… the official Reddit app was so bad that they had to charge for API access in order to get real market share.
I can only imagine that you’ve never touched a mac much less used one for development.
I learned to hate the Mac forced upon me for the time I used it, thank you very much. Fuck everything about those boots from the fruit store. Especially in a multi-architecture team, fuck macs.
I did. The UI sucks.
Like the other person said, “what ui”? Sounds like you didn’t even try it, like opening up GNOME and saying “this sucks” and then immediately turning the computer off.
What UI? Get a tiling window manager for all your terminal windows and then have your IDE or editor in one full screen workspace and the application being tested in another, browser for reading documentation and Lemmy in the 3rd one. You don’t even need to see the MacOS UI when working.
I had two options at work.
Mac or Windows 11.
I was told the same at multiple jobs and just asked kindly that they spend the money on a linux compatible laptop. I had arguments to back my statement up too. It worked out.
YMMV
Good luck (if you want to go down this path and haven’t become a farmer yet).
oh I asked. this is a big company with 6-8k employees.
the answer was always, “no”.
looking for my plot, though I might just become a fur trapper instead of a farmer.
That explains it, yeah. Companies of that size often aren’t open for change unless it is top down.
Good luck with the fur trapping. Not sure if there’ll be less bugs though ;)