the short answer is because they're smart :-).
You have to remember that OS X is Unix with the best GUI. The Unix platform is far more mature than the Window core therefore more stable. Also, Unix was originate by programmers for programmers
Hope that help. Also, if you'd ever spend some quality time use OS X you'd never go back to Windows & I used Windows since 3.0 until about 6 months ago. I'll never run another Windows PC
Another reason the Mac has continued to be so popular is that has included Ruby, Rails & SQLite out of the box for the past few years. This means you can have a working Rails environment on every new machine. You can even do native development (full GUI desktop applications) on the Mac in Ruby.
At a lower level, the typical language for Mac development, Objective-C, has many structural similarities to Ruby (you can do the equivalent of mixing in modules to any class at runtime) so there are general philosophies that are in sync.
Finally, if you look at Rails alone... it's premised on the idea of keeping everything very simple to do & convention over configuration..... which is very similar to the Mac philosophy of ease of use.
Niels
And! you'd probably find that a good portion of the non-Mac laptops at those conferences were running an o/s other than Windows.
It's similar to the reason that Graphic Designers are more likely to have Macs. The platform has a better environment, better tools for the actual work that matters.
-Rob
Rob Biedenharn http://agileconsultingllc.com Rob@AgileConsultingLLC.com
So sad that Mac not in countries like Argentina, only have expensive resellers, we must pay price of 150% or more compared with the U.S…
Then you could use Ubuntu or one of the other similar distributions. That is good for RoR and cheaper, with excellent community support.
Colin
I talked Mac in Argentina (reseller, not direct Mac Store) is expensive to buy the equipment. Whoever knows the benefits of using Mac hardware knows it is not the same team using a different brand with OSX.
The price of Macbook Pro 2.66 in Argentina is $ S 3300 and in U.S. u $ s 1999. And the reason is not taxes, is by middlemen.
Spanish mac reseller:
http://www.macstore.com.ar/producto.php?id=1615&idCategoria=1&idSubcategoria=2
(1 u$S = $3.82 argentine pesos)
Mac U.S. web:
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro
I talked Mac in Argentina (reseller, not direct Mac Store) is expensive to buy the equipment. Whoever knows the benefits of using Mac hardware knows it is not the same team using a different brand with OSX.
The price of Macbook Pro 2.66 in Argentina is $ S 3300 and in U.S. u $ s 1999. And the reason is not taxes, is by middlemen.
Spanish mac reseller:
http://www.macstore.com.ar/producto.php?id=1615&idCategoria=1&idSubcategoria=2
(1 u$S = $3.82 argentine pesos)
Mac U.S. web:
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macbook_pro
Agustin Viñaowww.agustinvinao.com.ar agustinvinao (Skype)
Hi, you might want to pay a visit to the states if you know someone’s that’s traveling your
way, you might be able to make arrangements that way. Here are a list of states that do
not have sales tax:
Alaska
Delaware
Montana
New Hampshire
Oregon
Good luck,
-Conrad
I bought a Macbook Pro from Argentina by u$2200 through megadistributors.com Just only u$300 more than US. And they delivered it at your door home.
And why Mac for Rail development ? Did you use combination Mac + Texmate ? It's awesome.
DHH and his team were developed Rails using that combination.
Cheers. Aldo Nievas www.satio.com.ar aldo.nievas (skype)
Colin,
If you were running on Ububtu, what editor would you use? -RVince
I would use emacs
I am, I use jEdit, which I can also use when I have to be in Windows, but there are choices on Ubuntu to suit all tastes.
Colin
RVince wrote:
Colin, If you were running on Ububtu, what editor would you use? -RVince2009/12/4 Agustin Nicolas Viñao Laseras :So sad that Mac not in countries like Argentina, only have expensive resellers, we must pay price of 150% or more compared with the U.S.. _______________________Then you could use Ubuntu or one of the other similar distributions. That is good for RoR and cheaper, with excellent community support. Colin
I use vi (vim or gvim) usually with occasional forays into emacs. I have used vi for 25 years or more and find it meets most coding needs.
+1 for vim with the right plugins. It is fully featured, light, portable, flexible and productive (after a learning curve). Learining VIM might ease your requirements for coding drastically. E.g. with a small tarball (~300K) you can have a code editor with Syntax Highlite, Code Navigation (Similar to Ctrl+Click in Eclipse), Autocompletion, Code Snippets, Filesystem Tree operations, VCS integration and more. (Of course, you'll get tabs, horizontal/vertical split multi buffer edition, command line interaction, block text selection, regexp based search and replace, and many more nice features from vim itself)
Of course it has a learning curve, but it definately worth it.
+1 for vim with the right plugins. It is fully featured, light, portable, flexible and productive (after a learning curve). Learining
http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/curves.jpg 
If you go the vim route, look into the vim-ruby gem as well. Good stuff.
Vim is probably the best choice, but I just want to put a plug out there for Gmate (http://github.com/lexrupy/gmate). It's by no means perfect, but it's impressive what a few Gedit plugins can achieve.
Gedit also has a set of plugins that make it very useful for Ruby on Rails.
See: Make gedit behave (almost) like textmate:
textmate like gedit in a few steps:
-sean
