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Developers that attend conferences in USA are very small and biased subset of total developers worldwide. For vast majority of developers attending a conference in USA would cost few to several months worth of salary, so it's no brainer. Not to mention bullish USA border controls that makes people (especially non-white) think twice before traveling. I haven't seen many developers using Macs outside of USA and few Western Europe countries.

The big / national tech conferences - yes. They are expensive. There are many local or regional ones that are much less expensive.

I'm heading to a regional one in August that is registered as a nonprofit and is less than a week's salary to attend (and I work in the public sector in the Midwest so don't think that this is big left cost salary).

That said, even with a strong Microsoft bend to many session technologies, macs still are several times more frequent than non-mac.

Plane tickets, travel, hotel, catering alone can easily add up to few thousand dollars.

For the regional one I go to (That Conference), its about an hour each way. $10 in gas/day or so? Since its close enough for a long commute, I don't have to worry about a hotel (or plane tickets).

Since the conference isn't trying to pull in big bucks (its a break even - 501.C non profit even), attendee costs for 2017 are $425 (food included - and they don't skimp on food). Even if you're going to add on the hotel the conference is located in, its only $175. Toss in a plane ticket and it is probably still less expensive than the national ones for the "get in the door" ticket.

There are lots of regional or local conferences that are not absurd in pricing.

For another example of an upcoming local one: https://stirtrek.com which is a one day $99 one. Its draw is likewise local.

Yea, NoFluff is $1000 to walk in the door for two days. I'm very glad that there are others that are closer in line with not needing to drain the training budget to go to.

FWIW, in this survey I would've answered "Linux Desktop", but at a conference you'd see me on a MacBook. Not everyone uses the thing they bring to a conference as their workstation. :)

Developers that attend conferences in USA are very small and biased subset of total developers worldwide.

It's even a very small and biased subset of the total developers in the United States. The majority (I would say vast majority) do not attend conferences. Sometimes because their workplace won't fund it, but often simply because they find no value in it. I personally gave up going to conferences years ago partly because workplaces treated it almost like they were giving me a vacation that I should feel grateful for, but it certainly didn't feel like a vacation. And afterwards I would try to itemize the value I received...to have nothing (talking to developers of the vendors face to face was, if anything, less productive than simply dropping a note on a discussion board).

So that subset often comes from more moneyed employers, or are the "see and be seen" sort, or they really get value out of it. For the former two sets a Mac is a pretty likely device.

Outside of US, very few people use macs compared to you. Here in euw even in a CS course, engineering class in a top university or hackathon in a big startup incubator I can see like 1 macbook every 30 standard notebooks.

Reason is simple: they are very overpriced for ours salaries (and I am in a first world country, I think their costs are prohibitive in places like India/Cina/etc) and - personal reason - as a webdev I can basically do everything I need in a 250$ old t430 with fedora, so I can't justify to spend like 10 times more just for a shinier piece of hw which is not even easy to upgrade.

As you say that depends on income. Based on location and whom you mix with. And perhaps some culture bias/patterns but that is my just guessing.

Macs have dominated in the areas I have worked in for the past 6 years. I would say in the companies, hands-on meetups and conferences I been to in London and across Scandinavia: 75% use macbooks, then perhaps 15% dell xps with ubuntu and 10% mix of lenovo, MS surface etc.

Though I think this split will change with the recoil of the new touch bar macs.

(Again this is just from my smaller demographic of location and people.)

London is special because there are a lot of Apple stores here (I count 7). That's more than many European countries have.

The calculus of owning a Mac changes drastically if you live near an Apple store. If my Mac has a problem, I can book an appointment at the Apple store, real person will try to fix it, and I can have it back ASAP. The customer service is half the price.

> London is special because there are a lot of Apple stores here (I count 7). That's more than many European countries have.

Probably because London has more people than most European countries.

Whaa ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

Yep, it's almost true. London 8.5M. If you count all 50 "countries" (some are a joke though) it ranks between the 21st and 22nd.

Though in my city (Paris 11M, I think), similarly sized, there's only 2 Apple stores.

If you go by metropolitan area London(13M) and Paris(12M) would be 13th and 14th the country population list.

Ref:[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_...]

The point isn't that though. Very similar cities have a very different number of Apple stores.

Paris and London are 500km apart, a couple hours of train or plane away from each other, both capital cities, both have ~10¨7 people.

> "countries" (some are a joke though)

Which? Vatican City is fairly extraordinary, granted, but I think 'a joke' is unfair...

Apple pretty much dominates the startup scene in the NL as far as I can tell.

I would say the startup scene represents a very small portion of professional programmers.

10% according to the survey

of 64,000 developers.

The situation is entirely the other way round here in Singapore (for the younger generation).

I used to run Linux on a laptop, but eventually I gave up and switched to Macbook so that I don't have to deal with drivers and low-level config issues on a daily basis.

In my university, 60%-70% of CS students use a Macbook. They are not working or attending conferences yet, so the change is going to take some time.

Singapore is the 3rd state for GDP per capita, I bet buying a macbook is not seen as "oh I have to invest on it almost two month of my pay" in that area

Just for comparison, with what I should spend for a macbook here I would pay 3 years of a Bachelor Degree + half a year of a Master Degree (obviously I am referring to just university tuition costs, not rent or other general expenses) in a top 3 university of my country with international recognition.

"deal with drivers and low-level config issues on a daily basis"

What in gods name are you talking about? Are you using a distro from 1995?

I ran Ubuntu 12.04 on a Lenovo laptop for a year or so.

The graphics and wifi drivers broke down every now and then and sometimes it broke the OS completely so I had to reinstall the OS.

Need to fix multiple config issues and compatibility issues when I wanted to install some Linux-alternatives for Windows applications.

Plus I need to do video editing and Android apps so I still have to constantly switch back to Windows with dual-boot.

Mac just seems to be a perfect balance, giving you all the standard terminal stuff plus everything just runs out of the box.

I ran a debian-based distro on a Lenovo thinkpad in graduate school from 2008 to about 2011. I had basically the same experience. Everything worked 95% of the time, but that other 5% felt entirely random and pretty dehabilitating.

Now I use a mix of Win, OS X, and Ubuntu depending on what I am trying to accomplish. I make heavy use of Linux servers, but have no inclination of using one as a primary end-user desktop environment again.

You should try. The changes happened in the last 5 years are extremly big. I mean, all my notebooks (some DELL and a lenovo t430) work better with any linux distro compared to win10, and I even get +30/40% hours of battery on them

same experience here.

When people complain about Linux my first question is if they had given it a serious try in the last 2 years.

Which distro's have you used on those notebooks? I'll likely be switching back to Linux laptop from Mac, and I'm trying to figure out which distro I want to use.

I love linux, and use it as my daily machine for work and home. But whenever I mention to others in the community that we really need to clean up this crap, and make our systems reliable instead of flashy, they treat me like I'm insane. It's amazing to me that we still have sound, wifi, and display issues that need to be solved with shitty hacks in 2017.

Dude, every time I bring up my difficulty installing Ubuntu on a relatively new Macbook Pro (Retina 13-inc early 2015) people respond like this. And yet [1] I was never able to solve this issue with video drivers (or something, I never figured it out) causing incessant crashing. I mean, look at the stack overflow post, I tried so hard to get it working. This is consistent with every ubuntu install I've ever done - there's always some shit that just makes me wonder whether it's worth it.

[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/838855/crashing-freezing-hang...

> whenever I look around at a non-Apple dev conference

I think you're seeing selection bias here. The devs that attend conferences are a very, very small sliver of the total population, and the price of attending a conference (not only the ticket, but travel and PTO necessary to attend) also overlaps heavily with the more "well-off" devs, which probably have a higher percentage of Mac usage.

FWIW: I've had a personal Macbook (for two years in college) and a work Macbook (when necessary), and in both cases I only ran linux on them.

> It's just that whenever I look around at a non-Apple dev conference

Most devs don't attend dev conferences.

StackOverflow is more tilted towards "dark matter developers"[1] than many other places - the unseen, the unheralded, those that are toiling away at LOB apps inside of companies. Often they're using PHP or Java or C#, or god help them, Visual Basic, still. Those are not necessarily the kind of people that are going to be seen at dev conferences, but there is a huge number of them, and they use StackOverflow hard.

[1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen...

Heh. Two of my clients are still using VB Apps I wrote for them in VB6. I'm not ashamed. They work, and they've worked well for 12+ years, with only the most minor of updates. Not every business follows the 'innovate fast and break things' mold. Thankfully.

Exactly, we should be proud of creating Software that works and works great. Not the languages we develop in. The one main lesson if there is I learnt from 13 years of development is, keep the dev stack boring!

Whenever a kid comes around with the cool idea lets rewrite this in X, they need to explain me the business value of the proposal, like in, how will that change the monetary outcome of a project.

Isn't the implicit argument for any refactor/rewrite essentially increased velocity?

"This change will allow us to do X in Y days when normally it would take some multiple of Y."

It sounds like what you want is a more salient list of pain points in the current development environment and exactly how the proposed new thing would address them. Additionally, you'd want to hear the new set of pain points that the new thing will impose (cue the quote about some devs knowing the value of everything and the cost of nothing).

You may also, for their benefit, direct the next kid with the cool idea towards a link that's commonly thrown around here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

I'm going to pull the more direct section "What this means on Wikipedia":

> If you're considering nominating something for deletion, or changing a policy, because it doesn't appear to have any use or purpose, research its history first.

> You may find out why it was created, and perhaps understand that it still serves a purpose.

> Or if you do feel the issue it addressed is no longer valid, frame your argument for deletion in a way that acknowledges that.

It's the implicit rationalization. New software engineers in particular suffer from "Ohh Shiny" when choosing their toolset more than just about any other group I've worked with. To the detriment of the profession, IMO.

(Nice link. I was unaware of the name for that heuristic.)

Have you considered maybe you are living inside a bubble?

After all, you consider C# an uncool language.

> After all, you consider C# an uncool language.

That couldn't be further from the truth... I love slinging C#, it's far and away my favorite. It doesn't have that HN hot-shit cachet that Go or Rust or Scala or Lisp-likes or ML-variants have, however.

> StackOverflow is more tilted towards "dark matter developers"[1] than many other places - the unseen, the unheralded, those that are toiling away at LOB apps inside of companies. Often they're using PHP or Java or C#, or god help them, Visual Basic, still. Those are not necessarily the kind of people that are going to be seen at dev conferences, but there is a huge number of them

I think that is a really important thing to bear in mind when reading Hacker News, or pretty much any online venue. People who contribute or even post comments are not the majority. SO rates me in the top 20% of Ruby developers, because I answered a few questions on the site.

I'm in the camp of "I do all my serious work on a PC, but I take a MacBook to conferences because it's light and has good battery life".

Yes, you are missing something big: the majority (by far) of development work is done on Windows or some Linux platform these days and has been for a long while. In fact, outside the Bay Area I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of developers I ever saw using a Mac. The valley and certain developer "scenes" have a huge overrepresentation of Mac users.

There was a while a few years back where a MBP running Windows 7 was one of the better* laptop choices out there.

The last two teams I've worked with have all had Macs, even though at least half the team were writing .NET in Windows.

Then there's my main personal laptop which couldn't get the latest Mac OS so I just wiped it and installed Linux. I wouldn't do that to my daily work machine though, too many little things just don't work quite correctly, but all in all it installed pretty easily and runs less sluggish than OS X did.

* Better as in good hardware, consumer appeal, and a relatively performant and stable machine for getting work done. Not necessarily best value or gaming, etc.

Macs are good travel laptops.

My windows and linux installs never reliably go to sleep on their respective laptops when I close them -- and I cannot be bothered to figure out whether it's a hardware problem, or a software problem... I'll just bring the mac which does sleep reliably.

It also has pretty good battery life compared to my other machines.

I always get the impression that SO is populated mainly by Enterprise devs using Windows.

Edit for spelling.

The founders were very much Windows guys. Their podcast which essentially developed SO in public was very Windows-focussed. Although it's not the case for me personally, I suspect their audience skewed to Windows, these were the early users of the site, and they helped drive its direction.

Although SO now has a much wider audience, the more engaged, longer-term members are more likely to fill out this survey.

Plenty of people might use a Linux Desktop as their primary development machine, but have a Mac laptop when they travel.

Also, how many of those people with Macs had a Linux distro installed on them?

Maybe the conferences you are going are the tech startups conferences. The majority of developers are working in big banks and big consulting companies. They use PCs, java or .NET, Visual Studio.

Nice to see Linux Desktop so high. Are we entering the era of Linux Desktop ?

Perhaps if you're a dev.

This is surely the year of Linux on desktop :)

more seriously, once you get the hang of it Ubuntu machine is just ridiculously more productive than win and osx.

I'm surprised that not more devs are using it.

Tl;dr India.