What are the pros and cons of using a Mac for web development?

Question

I have been using Fedora Linux for quite some time now for web development (and for other dev stuff as well). But just recently, someone told me that since I'm doing web development, I might as well use a Mac. I feel like Macs are overrated. Why should I (or should I not) use a Mac?

Answer 1

I have been doing web development on Linux for years. Despite owning a Mac, I have never once needed to use it for web development.

VIM, Apache, MySQL, Inkscape, Gimp, GEdit, Firefox+addons

That is all I need.

I will test in IE and Safari and others, but that is testing, not development.

unless you can think of a reason, why should you?

Answer 2

It really doesn't matter when coming to the Web. Adobe's products are considered some of the best in the industry - such as Flash and Photoshop. You can easily get these on Windows too.

Answer 3

I can think of one good reason, there's an OSX software called CSSEdit which could be the best CSS editor I ever used. It supports something similar to #region found in VS and also have a good hierarchy view on rules and classes.

Answer 4

It's my impression that a lot of Ruby on Rails and other relatively new and cool languages have good support on the Mac. I often read about Silicon Valley hipsters (there's that word again) being Mac-centric.

Also, obviously, if you ever intend to get into iPhone development, you'd be all set.

Answer 5

I'm a PHP programmer, and having developed on a Mac for 2 years, I've come to the conclusion I would rather be using anything else.

Since the original question was in regards to using a Mac instead of Linux for web development, that's how I've rephrased my pros & cons.

Pros of Mac over Linux:

• Fully supported by commercial grade products (Adobe, for example).

Cons of Mac over Linux:

• Larger than normal buy-in cost for a complete system.
• Closed system - no hardware upgrades except maybe HDD & RAM.

Edit: In regards to the comments I've received, I've re-evaluated my response to be more in line with the original question.

Answer 6

It's certainly handy to have a Mac around, if nothing else to check for Safari compatibility, but most of the better tools I've encountered are pretty much platform independent (outside of the .Net world anyway, and even they have Mono).

All of the following are available on all the major platforms

• Firefox/firebug for browser debugging (on Mac, Windows and Linux)
• Eclipse or Netbeans for IDE (ditto)
• Tomcat
• Xampp is available on all major platforms in slightly different flavours and gives you most of the tools you'd need for a whole class of development.

The only reason I can see to tie yourself to a particular platform If you have a particular niche you need to target and the application only runs on that one platform. But as this is web development you're talking about you may well find yourself excluding most of the world.

Answer 7

I personally don't think there are any cons (unlike when I have to develop on windows box GRRRRRR!). The pros are as follows

Test in any browser on on any platform Apache built in (But I recommend MAMP) Great native developer tools (Coda BBEdit et al)

Answer 8

After juggling with various environments. I finally have the following configuration.

1. Use Windows for Visual Studio Team System development.
2. Use WinSCP, Notepad++ on Windows to connect to a Linux machine via sFTP and develop PHP
3. Use terminal on MAC for mysql development. Sometimes I use putty on Windows as well.
4. Use MAC for Flash CS4 and Flex development.

Overall, in my context, I found Windows to be much stronger platform than MAC for web development.

Answer 9

I think that web development is one of the things Linux is very good at, because you can easily setup all the standard server side components. On a mac you can do that too but MacPorts and Fink just don't are the same quality and so updated as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.

One point for the Mac may be the availability of good commercial development products.

Answer 10

For web development it really doesn't matter what kind of operating system you are using. Even though I am using a Mac, web developers using Windows may have the advantage of running Internet Explorer native while the rest has to use virtual machines for that. But again, it doesn't really matter then.

The only pro-point I can think of is that 90% of the design folks are using Macs, so you would be able to keep up with the coolness-factor many of them are trying to pull-off.

Answer 11

Ok, here is my 2 cents.

I am a PC guy, have been for years.

I purchased a MAC about 3 years ago, and installed the Macromedia Tools (Dreamwaver, etc).

Despite my best attempts, I just could not be productive -- I was just so used to the way things worked in Windows, the MAC OS (while very nice) felt counter-productive to me.

So, I am back to the PC (have been for years).

My point is, whatever OS you are USED to is the one you will be the most productive on, with the only exception being if there is a particular APP that is only available on another OS.

So, I would stick with what you know (apparently, LINUX), or be prepared to lose some productivity for a while.

Answer 12

Well if I remember correctly, you can't really do flash developmenton Linux. Plus, as much as people praise the merits of GIMP, I don't think it's quite on par with Photoshop / Illustrator in term of ease of use (heck there is a part in the FAQ that explain you how to draw a circle).

I tend to prefer Windows for whatever developpement though as I really like Visual Studio.

Answer 13

A major con is the lack of Internet explorer. That being said, I have Internet Explorer 6 installed Via Wine, so I can use it like any other Mac program (in X11).

It also probably takes more work to get ASP setup on a mac, like installing mono, but even that is easy enough.

There is a lot of great web software that I LOVE on the mac, such as Coda, Transmit, CSSEdit and TextMate.

Answer 14

Really, the issue is that Apple sells hardware and a user experience. With the Mac you would be able to bring the computer to any local apple store for rapid repair and tech support. They wrap the open-source BSD like Darwin OS with a convenient GUI that they control to present a unified experience. So it's just as powerful as you are used to an OS being but has amazing convenience for both software and hardware.

As others mentioned you can run IE with wine, so there's nothing you can't do on it for web development, plus there are great mac only webdev apps (read the other posts).

e.g. I develop on my mac using the full power of *nix (the differences are negligible, like if you need to use RC for anything and don't want to mess with OSX's launched). If anything goes wrong with the hardware I go to the local mall, they fix it asap, and I'm back to programming.

Do you really want to buy your Dell and mess with installing whatever OS then when it breaks talking with some guy in India before they'll let you ship it to Kazmandu for fixes?

Why not give it a try?

Answer 15

I've been using Mac for web development for the past year and have recently moved over to Ubuntu Linux and am having a much better time.

Here's why:

• Integrated package management: while macs have macports, this isn't integrated across the whole OS. With ubuntu I can type in a couple of commands (or use a GUI if I were so inclined) and have LAMP up and running in about 3 minutes flat. This is without the user of any shrink-wrapped 'LAMP Installations' like XAMMP or MAMP or EasyPHP, just the raw software itself. This becomes a lot more important when you start using tools like pear, phpunit, rubygems etc which are much less hassle to configure and get working on ubuntu than they were on the Mac.

• Nice Terminal: Relevant only to Unix based developers I guess, but it has a nice multi-tabbed terminal (iterm on mac has this, but it became face-achingly slow for some reason) that expands to a complete fullscreen.

UPDATE: I'm still on Tiger. Leopard, admittedly has a pretty good terminal.

• Easy Virtualization: Again, Mac may have options for this but I probably gave up trying to install them. I'm currently using wine and virtualbox for virtualizing windows and testing IE for web dev projects.

• Nice Open Source Alternatives To Graphics Software: I don't like stealing software, and I can't afford photoshop etc. GIMP and Inkscape are good enough for me. Again these are available on the Mac, but the X windowing system that GIMP uses doesn't work so well on OSX. Flawless in ubuntu however.

Overall I'm just way more productive on a linux machine. This could be because I like things at the terminal rather than with GUI's, but the big win for me is definitely the ease of installing new programmer-relevant software with apt-get.

Answer 16

I really enjoy using my MacBook Pro for all kinds of development, not just web development, but not for any of the reasons anyone has mentioned. Sure it has nice Unix underpinnings, and is very pretty to look at. The main reason I use the Mac and OS X for development is how well and consistently it works. The keyboard shortcuts are consistent across all applications, and the keyboard is laid out in a way that makes it very natural to use the operating system's commands. For me, it's much easier and faster to use the Mac Keyboard in conjunction with OS X for development, even on a laptop, than it is to use a mouse/keyboard on a desktop. I also don't have to worry about drivers or programs working, like I do with Linux (e.g. Adobe Flex).

Answer 17

While developing any commercial web based application it is important to give "Look n Feel" and "Usability" its due importance. DUring development phase the application looks and works excellent on MAC but when run on Windows, it starts to show problems.

Considering the large number of target audience who use Windows or Linux, I feel that development of Web Applications is better done on Windows or Linux.

Answer 18

Pros: TextMate & CSSedit

Cons:

Answer 19

Hi, CSSEdit + Adobe Dreamweaver + TextMate + Transmit FTP + Firefox with FireBug and FirePHP and you good to go on MAC ;)

I moved to MAC 2 years ago, no regrets.

Answer 20

here is what I see that are good on Mac's for web dev

• CSSEdit (only for Mac) - this package makes CSS editing so much easier. The X-ray function is a must have. Firebug has somewhat similar capability and free, but it's just not as well implemented as CSSEdit, and I searched for Windows equivalent and found none.

• Probably better support with Adobe software than Linux :p

• Coda or Espresso (only for Mac) are two other web developing suit I personally think are much better then Dreamweaver.

• System is fairly hassle free. Less time dealing with system. More time for coding, or whatever it is that you want to do.

• Exposé windows management is a great time saver too

• Time machine back up is another gem. Easy to setup, and saved my butt quite a few times.

• Colors system on Macs are better than Windows as far as I know

• Parallels Desktop or VMWare are fast enough to debug IE, so no reboot or a separate computer necessary. (Sorry, not sure what the Fedora situation is though)

• OS interface is much better than windows (again, no Fedora experience here). It takes about 2 weeks to get used to (from several friends experience). After that, there is usually no turning back.

There are cons of course, but right now I can only think of one:

• Notebook's screen sucks… all TN panels. They are maybe good enough for average users, but for any color critical work, it's just no up to the snuff, so if you get a notebook, you wanna get a decent external monitor.

Answer 21

The Mac doesn't really have an edge over Linux for Web Development. If your comfortable and productive on Linux don't bother switching.

However, If the thought of having Unix with a pretty face and well thought out GUI appeals to you then the Mac is an excellent choice. I have one for development at work and use Linux at home for personal projects. For development work there isn't much difference. The difference is in all the non-development stuff.

For instance I absolutely love Quicksilver on the Mac. It's a wonderful interface to most of what I do. I almost never use it when doing code though. It comes in handy when I launch music or open a web page or play a video or any one of a hundred other things I do on that machine. The polish is nice but when it comes time to get serious I just pull up a shell and get just as productive as I am on Linux.

Answer 22

I cannot speak for myself, as I don't own a Mac (or have consistently worked on one), but I work in an environment full of Macs. And I can tell you, most of them are mac users that happen to be web developers as well. They are productive because they take advantage of whatever the features a Mac offers them, and can control their environment. This applies to all operating systems, but the switch involves a learning curve that you must be willing to accept.

You should also consider compatibility, when working on a team. We usually don't have any problems setting up the application environment or working consistently with the code between different OS. But if you need to do image edition stuff, work with very Mac specific tools or need specific software (IE comes to mind), you may be tied to the OS.

The short answer: it depends on how much effort do you require for adapting. The user experience in Mac seems to be the killer feature over deciding. Other than that, they are pretty much the same in term of productiveness, except maybe for the software some people has pointed out already.