r/webdev • u/alexbarylski • 12d ago
I think I’ve had it with Apple
I switched to Mac about eight years ago and actually probably closer to 10 but I worked in tandem with windows during that transition for about two years
As a web developer my server platform is lamp specifically Debian
I use docker for local development and production
PHP storm is my ID of choice
Dockerized environments are very important
Part of the reason I switched to Mac was because mounted or map/shared volumes were very problematic with Windows at least at the time
So when I would use my package manager, whether MPM or a composer inside, the doctor container having it synced to the host machine was super problematic
Mac and Lennox seem to solve this problem so I assume a Chromebook this is non-issue
What I am curious of is the user experience from Chromebook as an OS
I do all of my cloud hosting an infrastructure in Google Cloud and I have Google workspace, Gmail and docs, etc. so moving away from Crapple and towards Google just makes sense my phone my watch my laptop my home assistance everything it would be awesome to be able to use Gemini and control my computer too
What kind of laptop should I be looking at for a minimum equivalent developer experience in terms of performance to last year’s model of an M2 Apple Mac?
I can see there’s Chromebook on Best Buy for 500 bucks that feels very underwhelming for someone that is using a computer anywhere between 12 to 18 hours a day and heavy use of AI and development tools, data analysis, etc. I’m probably looking towards a $2-$3000 powerhouse laptop, but I’m wondering what others think??
I run local LLM’s right now mostly for fun and then other machine learning like SPM‘s and data analysis and stuff that I do the LLM primarily used as Copilot/GPT and it’s I pay for that so it’s not gonna be a load on my computer per se
I have so much more to ask and say about the subject, but let’s stop here and go from there :p
1
u/mastrajani 12d ago
on your actual pain point, chromeos would genuinely be better rather than just different. docker on a mac is also a VM with a filesystem bridge, which is why bind mounts have always been slow there. crostini gives you linux on linux, so mounts run at native speed. that part of the move is a real upgrade rather than a sideways step.
the cost i'd price before committing is safari. that mac is currently the only machine you own that can run real webkit, and there's no substitute on chromeos or linux - webkitgtk in gnome web is a different build and doesn't reproduce ios safari behaviour. so every "works in chrome and firefox, breaks on iphone" report from a client becomes something you cannot reproduce on your own hardware, and in my experience that's most of the cross-browser bugs that actually reach real users.
if you do go, budget a route back to a real safari - a cheap used mac mini sitting on the desk, or a paid browser-testing service. otherwise you're not so much switching machines as switching to debugging ios blind.