Hackers Choosing Macs

The term “hackers” can conjure images of teenager misfits, breaking into your credit card account in order to get into porn sites on the web. But these days when you talk about hackers your talking about those programmers that can make software sing. They take open source code and turn it into main-stream applications.

So what are hackers using for their “weapon of choice”? Well according to Tim O’Reilly from O’Reilly Books, and  Paul Graham, author and programmer, it’s the Mac OSX. Why you may ask? Well according to Paul Graham in his essay “Return of the Mac”.

All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs. My friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple’s low point in the mid 1990s. They’re about as hardcore OS hackers as you can get.
The reason, of course, is OS X. Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know? For most of us, it’s not a switch to Apple, but a return. Hard as this was to believe in the mid 90s, the Mac was in its time the canonical hacker’s computer.

Read the rest of the article at Surf-bits.com