macOS as Unix is not dead – the compatibility with developer and unix infrastructure it has is an important reason why the company I work for uses MacBooks (at least I believe so).
macOS as Unix is not dead – the compatibility with developer and unix infrastructure it has is an important reason why the company I work for uses MacBooks (at least I believe so).
Does your company care about compatibility with UNIX® infrastructure or that it's compatible with Linux/BSD infrastructure?
People care that macOS has a lot of compatibility with Linux/BSD, but most don't care that it's UNIX® - just as people don't care that Linux/BSD aren't UNIX® compatible. Yes, Linux/BSD are very similar to UNIX® and mostly compatible, but they don't conform to the specification.
You (probably) don't care about the UNIX® specification. You care that your MacBook has good compatibility with Linux/BSD infrastructure. Many people assume that Linux/BSD are UNIX® and just don't pay for certification. They aren't UNIX® compatible. They are extremely similar, but they don't follow the spec 100%.
Sorry for putting the ® everywhere, but people often use UNIX when they mean nix-like operating systems and when we're talking about whether people care about macOS as a UNIX® or not, it matters whether were saying "people want macOS to be UNIX®" vs "people want macOS to have good compatibility with nix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD like it does today." People usually care a lot about the latter and not about the former.
The relevance of Open Group and the UNIX brand has been a walking corpse for decades.
I would guess that your company isn’t actually interested in the UNIX compatibility specifically, more that they’re interested in laptops that can run a similar toolset.
They probably also buy MacBooks since they’re reliable, performant, high-endurance (battery life) general purpose business laptops that employees like using and see good productivity with.
I think he means macOS as official, certified Unix is dead.
macOS as a more Linuxy-friendly place to work on Linuxy-type software, sure. Definitely true compared to Windows. But no one cares if macOS is blessed as Official UNIX.
How many people are writing software that they need to be able to run on Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX in 2026?
We've found it to be a much worse experience than windows for dev stuff. It's a different OS and architecture to the target env (Linux). Aligning with that makes life considerably easier.
If you're using a language compiled to bytecode or interpreted, then the OS and arch don't matter a whole lot (so long as you don't have to deal with Window's weird filename conventions or other oddnesses). If you're using compiled-to-bytecode languages, there's a huge advantage in forcing your code to be cross-arch safe from day one, lest ye accidentally end up with something that can only build on the exact CPU in your devs' laptops or can only run on the flavor of WSL you're using that year.
Writing on Mx Mac and deploying on Intel Debian is a little harder in the beginning, but spares you oh, so many footguns down the road. Eventually you might want to deploy to a different OS or arch for cost or convenience reasons. That's a really bad time to find out that your project can't be made to work there without heroics.
Why not develop on the same env? I mean if I were you my macbook would just be an ssh client to the x86-64 dev box that emulates the target env. So many advantages to offshoring the compute to some server (my preference is your own hardware ofc but theres flexibility in cloud). For one, the laptop is not getting hot just being a dummy ssh client. I can spill a coffee on it during a build and nothing happens, build goes on and I am just out a thin client I can replace immediately with anything with ssh installed, my cellphone included if I am so desperate.
Linux doesn't have an "architecture".
You know what I mean. ARM vs x86-64 -and- macOS API vs Linux API.
And yes, they are different even at the user end on the shell.
All of our production Linux systems are running on Graviton these days, i.e. they’re arm64.
Your production is not going to be the same as everyone else's. It's also not going to be the ideal for everyone else's, or even possible for everyone else's.
The differences between ARM and x86 are probably less relevant for the majority of server-side development than API and admin interface differences.
In practice, anyone seriously developing Linux software on either macOS or Windows is using VMs or containers running the actual Linux kernel, at least for testing, and the difference is that Microsoft has put far more effort into integrating specific support for these things into the OS.