I have noticed a lot of developer these day developing on Macs. I have never use one for an extended period of time or to develop. I was thinking of investing in one for programming purposes but don't have sufficient knowledge in pros/cons of developing on Mac OS X or Windows. I was hoping you all could help provide guidance as to which platform is better suited for development?
Thanks in advance :)
**No Flame Wars Please, hoping we can keep this civilized. :)
It depends on what platform you're developing for and what your personal preferences are.
Personally, I prefer a Mac as it allows me to develop for Mac, iPhone, Mono, Python, Ruby and if I want to switch out and do "Corporate" .NET development, all I need to do is fire up Sun VirtualBox and I can have whatever Windows boxes I need running.
Linux would be a close second to the Mac only because you lose the ability to develop iPhone and Mac applications on Linux.
That's depend on your audience.
For mainstream purposes go with Windows.
It depends on what you want to develop and who it is for, if you want a Mac application develop on the Mac, if you want a Windows application then use windows.
If you want both then see "Java"
As others said before: It depends on what you want to do. I'm a full time .Net developer on Windows and I really really like the .Net platform for software development. Visual Studio is in my opinion the best IDE I have ever used. So from my point of view Windows is a great development platform.
In my spare time, I'm a 100% Mac user. Using a Mac you get the Unix-feeling, but without the hassle to manage a Linux system and with a much nicer GUI. So if you want to develop stuff, which is not bound to Windows (Django/Python, Rails/Ruby, ...), OS X is a nice environment to do so.
Or as a very subjective summary: Windows is the best platform to gain money and a Mac is cool! ;-)