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Comment by yulaow | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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...

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.

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