Yes, let's alienate the group of people who build 3rd party software and want a reasonably priced headless mac, and user upgradeable memory/HDD. Idiots.
$100+ billion in cash or marketable securities and total spite for the dev/performance market. Just blind arrogance at this point - 'we don't need to offer this option anymore'
Apple has never been shy that "developer" Macs are the MacPros. The fact that you can get a reasonable developer experience on a Mac Mini or an iMac the last few years has been coincidental.
Let me put it this way. If I do a pkgsrc bulk build, what do I build it on?
Previously there was the XServe platform that I could have in a rack along my other infrastructure. They ditched that. The old MacPro's you could install in a rack, though they were massively overpriced for what it was a purely CPU-bound job. Now the new MacPro's are not rackable any more.
Mac Mini's were never great, but they were cheap enough you could buy a few and small enough that you could put somewhere, although it sucked.
Again, you're missing the point. Mac's are built for workstation style development. The distributed, shared infrastructure that's en vogue today isn't a factor if you're building iOS & OSX apps. And, if you dedicate the time and infrastructure, you can build those up to stronger processes with Xcode and it's distcc.
And where does the software that powers the workstations come from? Out of thin air? Where do you compile it? I am not talking about iOS and OS X bundles, I am talking about fundamental Unix system software (which pkgsrc provides). And what if you do continuous integration? Where do you run that?
Lately I've been playing with a setup that builds a cross-clang on FreeBSD to cross-compile OS X software using the libraries inside the XCode sdks. The setup itself is working reasonably well, but most autoconf scripts don't work well with cross-compilers, so it's not workable for pkgsrc right now (though it is workable for my own C software). Unfortunately, this would not help with integration testing...
but at a huge premium to a bog standard standard wintel system which is now 8+8 core at the top end and 6+6 entry level - for those that really want to push its will be the dual xenon E5 V3 using a pair of those 18 core monsters
Yes, let's alienate the group of people who build 3rd party software and want a reasonably priced headless mac, and user upgradeable memory/HDD. Idiots.
$100+ billion in cash or marketable securities and total spite for the dev/performance market. Just blind arrogance at this point - 'we don't need to offer this option anymore'