Robert 28 Feb 06

Make the Macbook Pro cheaper, and sure: I’ll switch.

rick 28 Feb 06

I got a refurbed 12” powerbook for $1k. Not too shabby. This was an upgrade from my $500 mini. Both let me get a lot more railing done than my Dell Laptop.

Mark 28 Feb 06

Will RubyOnRails.org be recommending this over the existing link for OS X setup?

Curious.. I just went through the steps in hivelogic’s on Sunday.

Chris H 28 Feb 06

I’m a designer and I was able to get Rails up and running on my PowerBook via Locomotive
, which is an all-in-one setup including lighttpd with FastCGI…and it lets me use my native OSX MySQL. That, coupled with svnX (a Mac subversion client) lets me do super-simple Rails development (the little bit I know how to do) with very little use of the Terminal. I even use Dreamweaver’s (the shock! the horror!) text editor to edit my .rhtml pages.

But you all probably already knew this, right?

Amihai 28 Feb 06

Yeah the only thing that prevents me from switching is that a new Mac costs double than a new PC. Desktop OR Laptop.

sims 28 Feb 06

Rails (and Textmate) seem to be good news for Apple. Two weeks after one of my clients decided to develop some Rails apps, a few G5s and an XServe showed up in the office, courtesy of management. Three years of asking, and it was the CFO learning to make a blog that made the sale. I can’t help but think there are others too…

Anonymous Coward 28 Feb 06

I can’t wait to get one

Anonymous Coward 28 Feb 06

Yeah the only thing that prevents me from switching is that a new Mac costs double than a new PC

U$1299 for an iMac is the deal/steal of the century. All things considered, that machine can’t be beat.

Jake Smith 28 Feb 06

Amihai, grab a Mac Mini. That’s what I run all of my stuff on and it’s better than any PC you can get for $500. But if you decide to go with a Mini, you might want to what a few months for them to release the Intel based Mini… Can you say dual processor?

FAA 28 Feb 06

To the price complainers: MacBook Pro v. Dell

Your argument is so 2005. Now stop it, and stay silently (dis)content with your PC… Or get a Mac Mini for well under a grand.

Brandon 28 Feb 06

Re. Used Macs - I got my wife a 12” 1Ghz Powerbook with 30 GB and 512 MB for $500 locally. You can find deals if you want.

If it was a 15” I think I would’ve kept it for myself… I’m holding out for a docking solution for the MacBook and then I’m switching.

Samo 28 Feb 06

The new intel iBooks will come soon enouggh, as will the intel Mac Mini, so I really don’t see a big problem here. The iMac isn’t that expensive either, and I doubt you need more than 1 CPU for Rails development, save the 2 found on the Macbook Pro and iMac or the possible 4 that will be in the new PowerMac.

I’ll get a Mac Mini myself this week to install an intranet CMS made in Rails for my customer. It’s an easy and good looking way to have a completely separate Rails server on their network.

Matt Todd 28 Feb 06

Indeed, Macs are great machines. I’ve been using a dual G4 1Ghz for the past two years and just last week found a great deal on a 1.8 Ghz G5 iMac (17in) for only $550! That’s what I call a steal!

If you look closely enough and are comfortable with buying used or refurbished Mac hardware, you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised with the quality and performance of the machine regardless of age.

M.T.

Jackie 28 Feb 06

Amiha: You should update your research a bit . . and spend some time on Apple hardware. Not to slam Dell, they have their fans, but the price/performance/and overall user experience edge has shifted heavily to Apple for me since I switched.

Veracon 28 Feb 06

FAA: But who says you have to buy Dell?

No, I don’t have a Macintosh, no, I’m not particularly attracted to them.

Phil 28 Feb 06

Heh. I like how the Apple article fails to mention that Apple’s install of Ruby is garbage. “Reinstall Ruby, because…. this one’s newer. Honestly. Not because the one we bundle with OS X is seriously broken.”

Nick D 28 Feb 06

The article on Apple’s site just got picked up by Memeorandom.

Shawn Oster 28 Feb 06

Rails runs wonderfully on Windows as well though :)

As great as TextMate seems (I am jealous) it is still just a text editor and really isn’t what makes Ruby or Rails great. That’s just a wee bit OS specific of icing on the cross-platform goodness that is Ruby on Rails.

I just don’t want anyone to get the impression that Rails is somehow better or worse on either OS.

Geoff B 28 Feb 06

I priced laptops a while back, and the mac ibooks seemed pretty competitive to me. The cheapest one is a little under a thousand, which isn’t too bad.

You’ll see ads for new wintel laptops priced much lower, but once you’ve upgraded to a system comparable to the mac, the price difference is pretty negligable.

The main reason I went with the mac was that I wasn’t learning anymore. I figured that if I walked around with a decent version of unix for the next two years, I’d eventually get good at it.

btw, it was a little trickier getting rails working on the mac than it was on a pc - though I did this all about 6 months ago. The blogs helped enormously. I hope the installation instructions above make this easier.

Rebort 28 Feb 06

“But if you decide to go with a Mini, you might want to what a few months for them to release the Intel based Mini�”

Or you could wait until … today! Check the Apple store, Jake. :))

Ryan Heneise 28 Feb 06

That’s cool - they even show TextMate as the editor. :)

Kenny Smith 28 Feb 06

Hey, you guys missed the quote af the end of the article…

Oh, and by “Ruby on Rails” we really mean WebObjects…

It’d odd seeing a company that build a competing product so enthusiastic about a community-grown solution. How is that synergetic with their overal marketing campaign!?

I

Todd Warfel 01 Mar 06

Kenny said…

It�d odd seeing a company that build a competing product so enthusiastic about a community-grown solution. How is that synergetic with their overal marketing campaign!?

Actually, Apple acquired WO from NEXT, they didn’t build it. It was the original web-application server, but Apple hasn’t ever devoted a lot of attention to marketing it. A shame, really, considering the development toolset for WO is far superior to anything else out there and it’s really a killer platform. They just have their eyes on another horizon.

b 01 Mar 06

RoR development is just fine on a PC… RadRails does a great job.

Phil 01 Mar 06

mattl:What do you mean “shouldn’t me long till we have a free software editor that has all features of TextMate.”? Have you not heard of emacs? It’s been around over 20 years for crying out loud. (Not to say gedit isn’t cool, but it’s just nothing new.)

Besides, from what I understand TextMate isn’t about unique features that aren’t found elsewhere, it’s about Cocoa and being integrated. Of course, it helps that Apple’s X11 breaks the Meta key, making emacs difficult to use on Macs. Yes, even eMacs. =D

John K. Lewis 02 Mar 06

My Gateway laptop runs Ubuntu… and Ruby on Rails seems to work just fine. It’s nice that Apple noticed Rails, but you don’t have to pay one penny to get nice performance.