I thought the same thing. The only place I've ever seen "developers" use Mac products is when they must for technical reasons (e.g. targeting Mac OS specifically), or in the Valley where it's trendy.
It's not even that suitable for the fashionable toy webapp development that seems to reign here in the Bay. I've seen the homebrew or ports hoops the 'webdev' crew at the company I work for have to jump through just to get a basic development environment running. It's silly. I fire up my linux-guest VM or else use my company-provided MacBook as little more than a terminal to remotely access our development servers to write my code (which isn't web or mobile application code).
Outside of the Bay, webdev shops, or targeting Apple OSes specifically, if I seriously suggested using Apple products for development I'd expect to be laughed out of the room. And rightfully so, in my opinion.
They're fine computers for the consumer market, better than linux or any other alternative for that purpose (in my opinion) but as development platforms they're...wanting.
It's not even that suitable for the fashionable toy webapp development that seems to reign here in the Bay. I've seen the homebrew or ports hoops the 'webdev' crew at the company I work for have to jump through just to get a basic development environment running. It's silly. I fire up my linux-guest VM or else use my company-provided MacBook as little more than a terminal to remotely access our development servers to write my code (which isn't web or mobile application code).
Outside of the Bay, webdev shops, or targeting Apple OSes specifically, if I seriously suggested using Apple products for development I'd expect to be laughed out of the room. And rightfully so, in my opinion.
They're fine computers for the consumer market, better than linux or any other alternative for that purpose (in my opinion) but as development platforms they're...wanting.