You can run the 'big two' - Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. The biggest advantages, however, to using a Mac for development are I personally use Eclipse, JBoss and Tomcat, ANT and Maven, and MySQL - with various plugins and third party libraries, and have had no issues. You can download and install everything else you need on top of that. Apple builds and distributes a MacOS-specific full JRE and JDK stack.
It has subversion support built in, and Apache installed by default. It has bash and all the command line Unix tools. I am a Java developer, developing web applications for e-commerce and publishing, and have been exclusively using a Mac for many years.īeing Unix-based (a form of Free BSD, to be precise), MacOS has everything you would already be familiar with for Java development on other Unix-like platforms.
