Absolutely, they were just making far and away the best laptops for web dev at the time. And that yielded a lot of really useful, really polished software for web devs, creating a sort of virtuous cycle. I don’t think one needs to look much further than that for some conspiracy of HN astroturfers, a lot of people just find it the best. Lots of companies spend a ton on marketing, maybe they don’t do it as well as Apple, but geeks are going to shift away if it sucks.
And Apple has made a lot of missteps since then, so maybe their dominance will waver. I’ve been looking at going pure NixOS, personally, been hearing decent reviews of Frameworks. Still don’t think the complete package is quite enough to unseat Mac laptop ssh’d to linux workstation for me, but it’s getting closer.
