> why not just use your Linux flavor of choice and cut to the chase
Because desktop Linux is simply not sufficient for me as a daily driver. It is unpleasant to me, it's highly frictional and there are a thousand shitty cuts everywhere that you have to endure for the legitimately good development environments you can get there. I am a software developer but I'm a person first and as a person Linux-on-the-desktop doesn't work for me. Quality matters to me, and OS X's user experience is qualitatively better for my use case.
If OS X didn't exist, I'd still be using Windows and SSHing everywhere. But OS X is a happy combination of the tools I want to use (including ones that don't exist on Linux--I use TextMate 2, for example, because I'm not a big fan of Sublime Text) and a desktop environment that doesn't make me endure it rather than enjoy it.
(And as for expense: if you've got a job as a software developer in the developed world, you can afford Mac gear. If you can't, that sucks, but frankly I'm gonna still use the best tools for my job.)
Because desktop Linux is simply not sufficient for me as a daily driver. It is unpleasant to me, it's highly frictional and there are a thousand shitty cuts everywhere that you have to endure for the legitimately good development environments you can get there. I am a software developer but I'm a person first and as a person Linux-on-the-desktop doesn't work for me. Quality matters to me, and OS X's user experience is qualitatively better for my use case.
If OS X didn't exist, I'd still be using Windows and SSHing everywhere. But OS X is a happy combination of the tools I want to use (including ones that don't exist on Linux--I use TextMate 2, for example, because I'm not a big fan of Sublime Text) and a desktop environment that doesn't make me endure it rather than enjoy it.
(And as for expense: if you've got a job as a software developer in the developed world, you can afford Mac gear. If you can't, that sucks, but frankly I'm gonna still use the best tools for my job.)