Firstly I thought a windows laptop was what most web devs use and after reading this thread it seems I was wrong. Adobe CC was mentioned. Macbook Pro's suggested. So I am curious to hear what the Pros use for web development unless it's an industry secret. What are the firms and agencies that you interface with mostly using?
It's almost exclusively iMacs and MBP's, even locally. Adobe is the standard worldwide - you seem surprised by this? Who have you worked with that this is news to you?
Also with a mac you're limited
The support lifespan will force you to buy a new one after about 5 years.
We had to replace a fully functional 13" macbook just to get OS and hence Xcode updates( but that's more app dev than web).
Unless a business is on the verge of bankruptcy, I don't see why any computer wouldn't be replaced after 5 years. A 5-year-old Windows laptop looks and performs very different from a 5-year-old Mac laptop.
How is Mac limited? You can boot into Windows and then you effectively have a Windows machine.
Yeah, Bryn appears more focused on the web design niche. We hire agencies for that bit when required.
Web design isn't a niche, firstly. Everything on the web should be designed at some point.
Furthermore, that's the opposite of what I do. Design documentation is supplied to me, and I need to create a site with it. Like every web developer is supposed to.
I'm getting more and more confused as to why you guys are even in this thread. It sounds like you're on the extreme end of niche web development if what I do (which is straight through the middle, mainstream web development) is so utterly foreign to you.
It sounds more like you are describing web designers, not web developers.
As for "slow cheap garbage made with Visual Studio", you know that Visual Studio is an IDE right? You make exactly the same site with VS as you do with TextMate, Sublime Text or whatever else you prefer.
I do agree that it is better to use what the client and the rest of the team uses, if only so that there are fewer problems, and if there are some issues the rest of the team can easily help getting those resolved.
And I speak from experience. I took both my beautiful but crappy MBP and my ugly but fast Dell overseas when working for a US based design company. I had my mac for initial setup and testing, but my windows machine for the actual development. It was a bit troublesome, but preferable to using a Mac exclusively.
Edit:
@00fatima00, Get your R10k windows machine now, but I recommend you don't get onto the Mac bandwagon unless you absolutely have to, either because your employer wants you to, or you are freelance right off the bat and you notice thats what your clients use.
I didn't say "slow cheap garbage made with Visual Studio". The garbage was referencing the site itself. I would hope that it's an uncontroversial observation that most sites are garbage. Due to most web developers being terrible. If Elementor, Divi, Avada, Beaver Builder etc. disappeared overnight, so would 90+% of web developers. The point was that I have no intention of ever appeasing, encouraging, befriending or vindicating people who have poisoned the industry with that nonsense. Someone with a decade or more of such experience is essentially an inexperienced web developer.
Web designers design websites. Web developers develop them. Why is this a muddy distinction? Every time I receive a batch of design files, I need to be able to open them, view them properly, extract assets, read notes with CSS guides, make the inevitable changes to the documents that are requested after the designer is done, create an extra page with a suggested mobile menu, dropdown desktop menus and anything that might benefit from adjustments and send it for approval etc. and then make it appear online exactly as requested.
The first line I submitted in this thread disclosed that I'm not a fan of macOS. I'm also not a fan of iOS as it happens. Spending R50+k on Apple hardware is somewhat soul-crushing if not for the consolation that it would not be possible without some measure of success. I'm acutely aware of what that money would buy on the Windows side of things. But again, there is no piece of gear better for web developers. Except, evidently, for you web dev and app people. The rest of us are joined at the hip with creative folks and firms.
Were not web developers. We do web dev. We do mobile dev. We do datawarehousing, we do ETL, API, systems integration and interaction, we do occasionally connected systems. Not niche, more general. We do skills transfer and mentoring. We present at conferences on cybersecurity, emerging tech like Blockchain, monitoring and evaluation systems and international development. Our clients are global. We do very little work in SA but we do occasionally work for clients here.
But this guy is an aspiring web developer. We were supposed to be talking about web development. You're just a general developer it seems, all this time going at me for not representing web development accurately enough.
Seems like it's you guys who are either not in the field at all or a <1% niche market of it.
