Some interesting stats in the article:<p>iOS = 75% of company revenue<p>Mac OS = 14% of company revenue<p><i>Unlike the early days of Apple when the company embraced and found refuge in the hacker mentality, Apple has emerged as a consumer company thanks to the wide reach and accessibility of its iOS products.</i><p>The thesis is that Mac OS and being hacker friendly are becoming increasingly less relevant to Apple, and consumers are now the focus. That's broadly true, however as a long-time user I'd say the focus on consumers (not developers/hackers) has been there since at least the late 90s, and possibly the 80s (with a gap in the middle where they floundered).<p>Re Mac OS, I fully expect them to migrate desktops to iOS completely at some point and just have a few interface tweaks for the mouse/window paradigm. The move of AppleTV to iOS foreshadows this, and the numbers above make it almost inevitable, given the cost of maintaining two ecosystems, and the fact they now have an operations guy in charge. It'll be interesting to see just how far they take developer restrictions and sandboxing on the desktop, and whether that affects their market share at all. I suspect as they are a consumer company that it won't matter to them if they lose the hackers/developers to some extent, and they will continue to attract enough developers to survive at least in the short term, while pulling them ever closer into the Apple orbit. There is a great and growing tension there though between the interests of developers (who ideally would like a cross platform solution and the flexibility to use any tools) and Apple (who want lock-in to their ecosystem).<p>The broader problem of developing for an ecosystem like this is that it is in the control of one vendor, and you must play by their rules - the Amazon, Google, Microsoft and even Twitter platforms come with similar problems - either you adopt their chosen technology this year, and accept the restrictions they wish to impose, or you're suddenly frozen out and may fail as a result. It's a lesson for anyone building a business on someone else's ecosystem - it's hard to avoid, but does come with dangers.<p>I'll be interested to see if the open web has a second renaissance as people recognise the deep difficulties of controlled ecosystems - its one great advantage is that it sidesteps the question of control by one platform owner, which sets it apart from all the binary or closed web platforms currently being touted as the future.
If his site was still up, I would read it and then write the comment. But instead, I will make some sweeping assumptions about what it says based on the title.<p>We were never their target market. It is a happy accident that what works for their consumers can also work great for developers. There were always pain points adopting the Mac as your development platform. For example, when it first came out, the JVM available for it was woefully old and out of date. Generally you had to wait 6 months to a year to get the last GA version. Now that the latest is built nightly by Oracle, this is a huge improvement. On Mountain Lion, almost every command line utility (that isn't GPL v3) has been updated like git, ruby, svn, python, etc. At the end of the day, this developer loves that it is still a unix command line with a pretty face. More than I can say for any version of Windows or Linux.
It's not <i>just</i> developers. It's PRO users of any kind. Graphic designers and video professionals haven't been catered to as well. Heck, we're still waiting for a new Mac workhorse that's not an iMac or laptop. Video editors have been duped by the new iOS like Final Cut Pro that was not backwards compatible.
> We are no longer Apple’s target market<p>And even that would be ok; the problem is when developers are actively despised by Apple, or treated like digital peons.<p>But since I'm stuck with Android leaking file descriptors right now, even the peon option seems attractive...
Developers are a relatively small percentage, and in some ways not an overly profitable one as whilst we want the best we're also prone to pushing machines as hard as possible, as long as possible.<p>I've been developing on OS X for something like 8 years now, ranging from C++ dev work up to RoR and some other bits. I've never had any real issues with it as a development platform, never felt like the OS was getting in my way or anything similar. I also heavily use Linux in my day-to-day and that's <i>definitely</i> more developer focussed but it can also be way less productive at times. ML is a solid consumer focussed OS but it's still a very nice development platform as well, but thats my opinion.
I have no empirical evidence that Apple's turnaround was based on developer advocacy, but my friends and family that can afford Macs use Macs due to my recommendations in the mid 2000s.<p>One thing I've noticed about fellow British developers is many of us don't actually have Macs at home because we simply can't afford them. You'll see us with work-purchased Apple laptops at events, but back home we have our trusty PCs, serving triple duty as games machines and entertainment devices. They might use Linux, Windows, or dual boot; but you won't find many of us dropping £1000+ for a personal Apple laptop.<p>So now those friends and family with ageing Macs are buying tablets, because they do 90% of what they need to do at less than half the price. Meanwhile, Chromebooks have a certain appeal, and I think Google should look adapting them to suit developers (outside of switching on Developer Mode and installing another Linux distribution.)
I think there is hope for this whole mobile and tablet future if, and only if, it will be possible to plug your phone/tablet into something that has a keyboard, mouse and two large monitors on your desk to work on that (and then take it elsewhere and do the same there). On top of that, optionally the device needs allow you to install and run any software you want without restrictions, and basically have unix shells and desktop UI when plugged in the stuff mentioned above. Of course, also, the CPUs and RAM need to be on-par with current desktops, but it's kind of realistic that this can happen, and the actual desktop box could be reserved for things that require some extra computing power.
Well, the Mac was the "Computer for the rest of us", so I am not sure how this is news: developers were never the target market.<p>IIRC, the original Mac also needed a Lisa for development with the MPW (<a href="http://www.faqs.org/faqs/macintosh/programming-faq/#b" rel="nofollow">http://www.faqs.org/faqs/macintosh/programming-faq/#b</a>).<p>So things have actually improved tremendously since then, with free and improving dev tools, open-source Unix underpinnings etc. The end of the world will be postponed...
TLDR summary:
"I recently upgraded from a mid-2008 17″ MacBook Pro to a mid-2012 13″ MacBook Air"<p>"I finally had statistical evidence to backup the feelings shared in the development community that Apple doesn’t prioritize OS X anymore"<p>iOS happened. Technology progresses. You adapt. iOS also gives you another platform to target and make apps for.
Being persuaded in another discussion on HN, that chromebooks should not aim to be for developers, now I read the complaints that Apple does not target developers neither. I am curious, how is the situation with Win 8? What is the future machines for developers?
FYI adding a trailing forward slash to the url fixes the database error:
<a href="http://johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-target-market/" rel="nofollow">http://johnkary.net/developers-we-are-no-longer-apples-targe...</a>