In high school, I thought that the CodeWarrior IDE (which was, as far as I knew, the dominant development environment) was absolutely terrible. I'm not sure how good my judgment at that time was.
That said, with OS X they really became a lot more developer friendly just because they adopted a UNIX base. At this point, I'd say they're the default platform for ruby/web development. Look at all the rails job postings for small startups promising 30" Mac Pros, etc.
Yeah, I have terrible experiences with codewarrior as well. I had one programming class in the late 90s that required macs and boy did that make me hate macs with a passion.
But I dont think it was purely a codewarrior issue. The overall apple OS at that time was simply terrible and 10 years behind windows (i wont even count how far behind unix they were) -- they still could not get multitasking to work right. Which meant that any pointer error causes your computer to hang. And when you are coding for a data structures class in C all of your errors are pointer errors.
So I am sure a lot of developers abandoned the mac platform around those times, but maybe many of them are coming back now.
That said, with OS X they really became a lot more developer friendly just because they adopted a UNIX base. At this point, I'd say they're the default platform for ruby/web development. Look at all the rails job postings for small startups promising 30" Mac Pros, etc.