Faster, better tools for happier teams – why Mac is the best choice for DevOps

Apple Mac is the device of choice for DevOps professionals, enabling them to work faster and have more fun at work.

That’s according to tech experts at iStore Business, who say South Africa’s growing developer community sees the Mac as the development tool of choice.

Developers are in high demand as local and international organizations look to innovate and implement more digital initiatives.

Sudesh Pillay, Executive Director of iStore Business, says: “Multinational companies see value in South Africa’s developer skill base and are hiring South African developers for their full development capabilities.” According to research from OfferZen, the number of South African developers working remotely for multinational companies has more than doubled in the last 12 months. Pillay says international companies tend to issue Mac devices to their remote South African employees due to the ease of management and superior design of the devices.

For developers themselves, the Mac becomes a non-negotiable productivity tool.

“We’ve heard of highly skilled developers saying they won’t accept job offers unless they involve a Mac,” he says. “At a large local cloud development company, eight out of ten new employees choose a Mac.

“As competition for our resources increases locally and internationally, Macs and iPhones are now being made available as add-ons to attract and retain key skills,” says Pillay.

Lance Van Der Molen, senior solutions architect at iStore Business, says: “Most of what people work for is based on Linux. Few realize that Mac is a Unix-certified operating system that is very similar to Linux. This is one of the reasons the developer community has embraced it – the operating systems are very similar and many tools, such as server platforms, run on both. So moving from development on a Mac to production on Linux servers – where 80% of the Internet and most enterprise platforms run – is easy. This is a natural progression for developers.”

Matthew Collison, senior technical manager at iStore Business, says the Mac is also the preferred device because developers tend to focus their efforts on the more lucrative Apple environment. “Apple has always encouraged the development of this platform. “The robustness of the developer channel and Apple’s heavy emphasis on security mean that developers typically build apps for iOS first, and then for Android and other platforms,” ​​he says. Naturally, Mac is their device of choice for this.

“Also, Apple supports virtualization capabilities well,” Collison says.

Describing Apple Silicon’s ability to natively support virtualization as a “game revolution” over the past four years, they note that it is possible to run a virtual machine on a Mac without a virtualization software environment.

Van Der Molen says: “There has been a major shift towards the Mac platform, partly due to the stability of the platform. Since Apple develops the hardware, software, and chips, developers don’t have to worry about issues such as their systems slowing down when updating. In a Mac environment, everything just works – faster.”

He adds that there is also widespread speculation that an announcement will be made at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June regarding artificial intelligence features for developers using Apple’s Neural Engine, or neural processing unit.

However, the ecosystem and software are only part of the value proposition. The performance, build, and reliability of Mac devices also play a key role in whether they are the devices of choice for developers.

Van Der Molen says: “Developers are very specific and a bit pedantic when it comes to the devices they work on. Developers are rewarded for performance, so reliability, battery life, and performance are important. The build quality of Mac devices is great, so they don’t break or cause problems. From a usage and CPU utilization standpoint, developer devices are put under a lot of stress, but Apple Silicon and the device design help keep temperatures fairly low and performance stable so developers can benchmark the performance of their code.”

Mac also offers longer battery life, and its best-in-class keyboard and trackpad make it comfortable for people who code and write regularly, he says.

Van Der Molen adds: “Another big plus is the interoperability of Apple devices. You can easily switch between devices or use iPad as an additional screen – allowing you to organize your workflow the way you like.

If you would like to learn more about iStore’s business, products and solutions, please complete the form below and they will contact you to recommend the best options for your business needs.

Contact us now.

iStore Business is South Africa’s leading Apple Business reseller, serving over 60% of South Africa‘100 best companies. We unlock technical complexity and make it easier to integrate Apple products with Enterprise.

Best for users | Best for productivity | Best for the end result