> Apple has always been a bit of a darling of the media for some reason or other.

They were the punching bag during most of the nineties. The company was in bad state (from 1993 to 1997 there were four different CEOs), their offerings too expensive, and with too few applications running on them and no clear strategy for the company. They were a relevant punching bag primarily because they were the only Non-Microsoft computer that people had ever heard of; and a lot of schools had Apple ][e's (a few macs, but many more Apple ][e's). The main place where Macs were managing to maintain some marketshare was in, as you have noticed, media and publishing. For a while, Photoshop was the primary killer app for the macs, and is still (last I checked) the de facto standard for it's domain.

Their image drastically improved when Jobs came back. He launched the "Think Different Campaign", the iMac's with the hockey puck mice (also, he got an injection of $150 million from Microsoft and a commitment from them to build the Internet Explorer for the Mac), and finally delivered a modern operating system (Mac Fans were in denial about how bad the OS was prior to X). Jobs provided a compelling narrative that the media loved telling, of a man banished from the company he founded, and returning to save it from destruction. Also, the perception was that he'd also have to take on Microsoft, so he had the whole "David and Goliath" thing going for him as well. The popularity of this story is effectively why something like "Pirates of Silicon Valley" got made.

I'm not entirely sure why mac laptops have gotten such traction in the dev community; but it's not because media studies is broadening to cover the web.

>I'm not entirely sure why mac laptops have gotten such traction in the dev community

Macs have been since Jobs return as much of a status symbol as a productive device.

Combine that with the fact that OSX is a modern Unix, has BASH, and can run most GNU/Linux targeted software with only a C compiler.

THEN you have actually have competitively powered hardware running under the hood (i7 + 8GB of ram + 5+ hours of battery).

You actually get an all around fairly solid development machine that also acts as a socio-economic status symbol. Jobs did in fact know what he was doing.

>I'm not entirely sure why mac laptops have gotten such traction in the dev community

Makes sense to me - it's a Unix with big-company support. Up until the last couple of years, running Linux on a laptop was a nightmare of compatibility and driver issues, and certainly not something most (i.e. non-big-4) companies would want to take on for a corporate fleet.

People keep saying that Linux is no longer a nightmare, but it often still can be if you have to use an existing, non-custom-built machine that was made for Windows. And if you're going to buy a new machine and have cash to splash, well, the Mac has no hardware issues running OS X.

In all practical terms if the computer is not custom build for Linux or OSX, it is by default custom built for Windows (and a specific version of Windows at that).

I switched to a Mac laptop late in the PowerBook series. Before switching, I developed mostly on Unix (AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX) and appreciated that I could drop into a terminal when necessary and use a solid shell scripting language. Windows' DOS batch language just doesn't do it for me.

Windows' memory management was horrible at the time. I had to reboot a minimum of daily or my laptop ground to a halt. OSX hummed along for months between reboots.

I hate system administration on my own laptop. In the 30 minutes I have to code a personal project daily, I don't want to screw with drivers, updates, hardware, etc. I just want to code the next module in my project. The Linux distros at the time seemed to require more hands-on maintenance.

Over time other factors have become important. The same laptop I use for coding is the one I use to download music, store memorable photos, etc. The apps that come with OSX may not be "best of breed" - maybe they are, I'm not qualified to say - but they are more than good enough for my needs.

Despite great advances in Linux distros and the call to F# and LINQ on Windows, I'm Apple's customer to lose not others' customer to win.

I worry that this you may be neglecting base rate. I hardly even _know_ anyone who doesn't have a Mac laptop, regardless of what they do. I'm not sure the "non-Mac user" is even a coherent natural class anymore.