Let's say I went the Mac route -- what's the difference between a
MacBook Pro and MacBook?
I can get a decent price with a MacBook. I'll only be using it for
web
surfing, coding, Photoshop, and basic text editing -- no gaming.
The mac book pro has a bigger screen, dedicated graphics, expresscard
slot, extra firewire 800 port, doesn't use those stupid minidvi-dvi
screen outputs and has faster cpu options
Sounds like it wouldn't make much difference to you. The hard drive is
a lot easier to change on the plain old macbook.
I tend to max out whatever I'm using, so prefer to get something with
as much horsepower as possible. And Photoshop can be a serious
resource hog.
A point not yet mentioned in favor of the Mac is that you can test on
all of the major platforms with one machine, essential if you do much
traveling. I have VMware with Win/XP, W2K, Ubuntu, CentOS and
OpenSolaris running on my MBP for testing purposes, and it works
out great.
Fact is, ruby and rails work best on *nix-based systems. Take your pick: Mac OSX or GNU/Linux.
Ruby & Rails on Windows is a PITA. Slow, many extensions don’t work or need some surgery to work, weak non-standard “shell” (windows’ fault), etc, not to say that all tutorials and books take *nix based system as the default platform (Mac or Linux).
Mac is mostly aesthetics. It is cool, pretty works nicely and is stable (underlying BSD core). But so is Ubuntu (GNU/Linux).
Now, for the people that says that coming pre-installed with ruby and rails is a big advantage, please, stop. It is okay to be lazy, but this is just too silly. If you are using a mainstream distro. such as Ubuntu, setting up a Rails environment is as easy as it is on Mac OSX.
It is okay to have a Mac, but please, be pragmatic and don’t turn yourself into a fanboy.
I work on a Windows machine and it gets the job done. I do encounter
some incompatibility issues occasionally, but most of the time it is
resolvable; except for background-rb unfortunately. It's been a while
since I did a fresh Rails setup, but it definitely took longer than
what everyone is describing for Mac/Nix machines; everything is moving
along nicely now though.
Anyway, before I ever dished out the money for a Mac, I would probably
just reformat with a quick Ubuntu install. Really my machine is just a
tool, a means to an end. As long as it does what I need it to, I don't
see a need to upgrade my system.
Anyway, before I ever dished out the money for a Mac, I would probably
just reformat with a quick Ubuntu install. Really my machine is just a
tool, a means to an end. As long as it does what I need it to, I don't
see a need to upgrade my system.
This really highlights my earlier post. For many people their computer
is "just a tool." There's nothing wrong with at all.
However, for some of us our computers are quite a bit more than that.
For me it's my life, my passion, my career. I spend a lot of time behind
a computer screen, whether it be for work, entertainment, communication,
or whatever.
When I do anything with my computer I don't want to be surprised every
time something actually works as expected. I'd rather be surprised when
something breaks. As for me, my Mac delivers this experience. If that
make me a "fanboy," well so be it (as much as I hate the stupid term)!
Although textmate is a great tool, you can't compare it to an ide like
NetBeans. Netbeans is by far superior, unless you like having to open
multiple windows to do your work, setup databases, and install
plugins. The real necessity for getting a Mac for rails is the fact
that its a unix box and there's a huge variety of utilities available
for rails on mac.
unless you like having to open multiple windows to
do your work, setup databases, and install plugins
As crazy as this may sound to some people, yes, there are those of us
who would rather have multiple windows open.
Same here. I can't stand ides where you have all these little docked
panes rather than a bunch of windows. Apart from anything else
spreading 1 window across 3 screens doesn't really work.
I also have better things to do with my time than waiting for a big
bloated Java IDE to launch.
I use one of these bloated IDE every day at work to do Java. I didn't
realize how much pain I was actually in, until I started developing
Rails applications in TextMate. It's like a dream when I want to edit a
file "mate file.rb" and BAM I'm editing my file. What a concept.
Yes, IDEs provide code completion, refactoring, etc. I used to think
that mattered, until I realized that it was actually Java that made that
stuff so vitally important.
Ruby, IMHO, just makes all that go away. It's not the entering of the
code that I need help with. It's what the Rails framework provides that
make 90% of that boiler plate code go way that's important.
Once that happens, all those heavily touted IDE feature are reduced to
insignificance. All I really care about with Ruby is having a great text
editor that helps me edit text. I'm the programmer, let me worry about
the API.
Tell me about it, there are even gems that don’t work correctly on windows (like gd2). I am stuck with windows because there is no good (read: cheap) online backup software for linux yet. I run andLinux and it runs my rails app almost as fast as my linode does. I have a full ubuntu installation sitting on top of windoze - best of both worlds. I wouldn’t dream of buying a mac because my sub-$1k homebrew computer would be over $4k if I bought the mac version. It might be a little better, but it’s hard to justify the exorbant cost when the difference in productivity for most people is negligable. </$0.02>
