PG Essay Return of the Mac Revisited

Just skimming the list of The Setup I count at least eight people who always used Macs. That’s more than twenty percent. Which means that if you interviewed them five years ago you already would definitely have gotten a different result then PG. Five years ago.

Not a kosher comparison.

The numbers in TFA mean absolutely nothing: he's comparing oranges and orangoutangs.

What would be nice is if PG could post the latest stats :)

Where to start.

First off, he's comparing proportions of OS use from two totally different datasets--one is proportions of web visitors to ycombinator.com, and one is systems described in interviews by usesthis.com. You can't meaningfully compare two totally different populations like this, can you?

But even if you could, you wouldn't want to represent the results as some type of off-axis skewed 3D pie chart, because those only distort the data.

So you have dishonest data, represented dishonestly. If you want to make a blog post about this, ask PG for his ycombinator.com visitor stats for this past...whatever period is equivalent to the period he got his numbers from in 2005. And visualize it using honest two-dimensional pie charts. And then you might have something useful to say.

The author documents a drastic change in browser use to view his site from 2005 to 2010. Mac goes from 18.8% to 78.9%.

But I am hesitant to trust his website as a reflection of the entire "Hackers, Creators, and Nerds" Community.

"For your sake I hope Zed Shaw misses this one."

Classic, and accurate. Zed would be justified in his rant here I think.

NetBSD here.