I'm really not trying to be rude, but if you're a serious developer, 'security person' or otherwise, the cost of entry for apple is not a problem.
I know I'll get abused probably for saying it, but I mean come on. An apple device is what, one days worth of consultancy time? For a security researcher maybe an hour? It's the cost of business.
If you're priced out of getting into that particular game (I was too, once) then do something adjacent and switch once you're earning 10k a year and can afford an apple device, if you really want to work on apple devices..
I don't spend €500 on a locked-down device that I can't do anything with.
But if there's a nice open source emulator for €50 (or in this case, free?!) where I control literally everything, that opens up a world of possibilities.
Also, don't overlook students, countries other than the richest thirty or so, and income discrepancies within those countries in general (especially in the USA where the discrepancy (Gini index from the World Bank) is between that of Kenya and Bolivia). One might want to learn and not yet have that well-paying job, or do it as a side project for fun.
> what, one days worth of consultancy time?
Let's go for the iPhone 11 from OP, checking... that's €519 from the cheapest store in NL (huh that 500 euros above was a good guess). That's 2½–3½ weeks of work for this security consultant. (That's a long time to go without food and rent! :P) If you can pay me that many times better that I could afford this after one day of working, without having to relocate to some faraway country, then contact info is in my profile!
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I do agree with your point in general I suppose. Yes, in many countries serious iOS developers and security firms that have more than one customer request for an iOS app review per year will easily be able to afford the necessary devices, and if needed wait long enough for a jailbreak to exist. But if I want to make an app for fun, and to even get started I need to invest hundreds of euros? In a platform I'll never use? Well, that's why the few small apps that I built are all Android-only.
> I'm really not trying to be rude, but if you're a serious developer, 'security person' or otherwise, the cost of entry for apple is not a problem.
If the cost is so meaningless to you, you’re always invited to donate to the Patreon/ko-fi/GitHub Sponsors links of the projects that can’t afford an iPhone :)
I'm not an apple fanboy. I do have a M1, but I once spent 4 months porting KDE to solaris 10 x86 to run on a hp probook (and even got paid to do it)... I routinely try to exit the apple ecosystem but it always costs me pain and time, which hasn't been worth it for a number of years now. looks at drawer of ubuntu dell XPS's, ThinkPads running openbsd, etc etc.
I've fucking TRIED... :(
It's been linux and bsd machines as clients for work for almost 20 years.. And yet I keep having to go back to OSX for reliability.
At some point you have to just accept certain things are the cost of business..
Reliability? I run a Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13, and Ubuntu on a custom i9 desktop with no reliability issues at all. In fact I spend less time fixing things than I used to with my Macs (which I used exclusively for 13 years). What reliability issues are you talking about?
Then it's not for you. No shame in admitting that. For other people, though, Macbooks simply also don't make sense. Wanna run that 32-bit plugin you use in Photoshop? You're out of luck. How about some advanced Docker development? Hope you don't plan on doing it locally. Hunted by your government for whistleblowing? Probably shouldn't use a laptop that can automate the process of ratting you out.
If you're a webdev or hipster programmer chasing the most lucrative Web3 gigs, sure, buying a Macbook is probably the kind of status symbol your peers will respect you for. At the end of the day though, they're all just tools with different uses. If you can use an ARM laptop for day-to-day work, then don't let anyone stop you from doing it.
What people dislike is your "every serious developer owns a Macbook" claim. It's the sort of thing you hear from West-coast Google engineers who look around their office of L3 Javascript employees for a sample size before posting a comment. It honestly doesn't reflect the myriad of programmers you'll encounter in the world; some of the most productive 10x developers and "security people" I've met are using systems that even I would consider asinine, like NixOS, QUBES, Whonix or OpenBSD. I don't knock them, though. We judge hackers based on their skill, not their salary range, clout, and least of all by the laptop they have in their backpack.
> If you're a webdev or hipster programmer chasing the most lucrative Web3 gigs, sure, buying a Macbook is probably the kind of status symbol your peers will respect you for. At the end of the day though, they're all just tools with different uses. If you can use an ARM laptop for day-to-day work, then don't let anyone stop you from doing it.
That’s a bit reductive. Macs are solid native mobile dev machines as well, with a good number of even Android-only devs using them. Lots of dev houses in the US use them for backend work (including Docker, despite the performance penalty), and the FreeBSD devs have been known to use them too.
I'm not here to take the piss out of your laptop of choice, but I'm also not here to write an exhaustive list of the uses for your Mac. The point that I'm working towards is that it's always a game of give and take. There's some people who a Macbook would be the perfect device for, who I will readily admit cannot use Linux or alt-systems to be as productive as they are now. Conversely though, there are a number of things that MacOS is laughably bad at, likewise there are a number of people who quite literally cannot use it as a daily driver.
The whole "this machine is more stable" and "my anecdotal opinion is x/y/z" nonsense is a non-starter for productive conversation comparing the systems. The upthread comment was warranted to call them out on Apple fanboyism; their statement was nonsense and exclusively backed by their personal experience. I've talked to enough "serious developers" to know that there are no perfect operating systems, and pretending like any one of them is king is just hubris incarnate.
You're saying you're not taking the piss out of the choice, and then also saying only [implied lesser] web and web3 developers buy them as status symbols for the sake of peer respect, which sounds a lot like taking the piss out of a choice.
I live in one of these countries. There are lots of people who earn a lot less than 12k/yr but buy brand new iPhones. Why? Because their resale value is awesome. They lose very little value over the years, because a lot of people want to own one, so even used ones retain value. Even if it's something old like an iphone 6 or something like that.
If you buy an android phone, chances are you're going to sell it for a lot less than you got it for unless you're talking about a flagship that's not too old.
I know I'll get abused probably for saying it, but I mean come on. An apple device is what, one days worth of consultancy time? For a security researcher maybe an hour? It's the cost of business.
If you're priced out of getting into that particular game (I was too, once) then do something adjacent and switch once you're earning 10k a year and can afford an apple device, if you really want to work on apple devices..