Why developers prefer Macs

When Terry Weaver wants to create .Net applications, he fires up Visual Studio and types away like any other .Net programmer. The setup gets a bit weird when he wants to test how the .Net application might appear to a Mac user visiting the Web site. Instead of starting up another machine, asking a colleague with a Mac, or simply ignoring those crazy followers of Steve Jobs, Weaver just pops over to the browser in another window. That's easy because Visual Studio is running on Windows inside a Parallels virtual machine, which, in turn, runs on his Mac. He has a PC, a Mac, and a Unix development box all in one.

"I set up the networking so that I can type the IP address of my dev Web server to test my ASP.Net pages to see how they look and behave on Mac systems," said Weaver. "I think that's a good thing since I don't believe many developers of .Net take the time to test their applications on browsers in other operating systems."

[ InfoWorldTest Center review: Why the MacBook Pro is still the best laptop you can buy. | See InfoWorld's special report on how to make the Mac fit as a business desktop. ]

Stories like Weaver's are increasingly more common as the Mac's popularity among programmers continues rising. Apple's decision to move to Intel chips and embrace virtualization of other operating systems turned the platform into a very flexible tool for programmers. Macs let coders work with most of the software standards that live in boxes that range from the smallest smartphone to the biggest cluster of computers.

This newfound success has been evolving for some time. One team manager interviewed for this article said that his programmers started switching from Dells and ThinkPads at least three years ago. Now 80 percent of his group uses Apple laptops.

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