I still use my 21" iMac 2007. It does the job for household computer, usually my mom use it for web browsing and emails, but I can do dev work relatively nice on it, El Captain installed btw.
It will hit 10 years mark in May next year, I shelled out $1.6k at the time for it, 2 years ago upgraded RAM from OCW, and installed SSD, upgraded magic mouse, and it works really nice! I think I used the hell out of it, and it is amazing machine!
While your concerns and gripes about Apple Dev. environment are 100% true, there are some reasons why are they so. And in a few years I think that will change, Swift will change it! Imagine you can compile swift code on Linux now! It's nowhere near usable for serious development work, but I think with Swift, Apple addressed that problem too, so I think in 5 years you won't need exclusively OSX to dev for Apple devices. I'm sure it would be the best way to do it, but who knows we shall see.
> And in a few years I think that will change, Swift will change it!
The compilers for Swift and Objective-C are command-line tools that are (relatively) easy to port to Linux.
But for a real iOS dev environment or CI server you'll need the iPhone Simulator, which is built on a large stack of proprietary frameworks. I don't see Apple porting it to other platforms anytime soon.
The trivial fix would be to allow virtualisation of OS X on commodity hardware.
On the other hand Apple makes virtually no hardware that would be a good fit for a datacenter with many VMs on powerful multiprocessor hardware available in a compact form factor.
It will hit 10 years mark in May next year, I shelled out $1.6k at the time for it, 2 years ago upgraded RAM from OCW, and installed SSD, upgraded magic mouse, and it works really nice! I think I used the hell out of it, and it is amazing machine!
While your concerns and gripes about Apple Dev. environment are 100% true, there are some reasons why are they so. And in a few years I think that will change, Swift will change it! Imagine you can compile swift code on Linux now! It's nowhere near usable for serious development work, but I think with Swift, Apple addressed that problem too, so I think in 5 years you won't need exclusively OSX to dev for Apple devices. I'm sure it would be the best way to do it, but who knows we shall see.