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Comment by ChrisRR | Hacker News Reader

I stopped reading at the second line: "As you may all know, developers are a social tribe that is well known for using MacBooks with stickers on them"

I don't know if this is an American thing or the industry I'm in, but I've never seen a single developer use a Macbook or have stickers on their laptops. Is this is a silicon valley, web developer kind of thing?

Edit: Just to clarify, I'm a low-level C developer in the UK. Most everyone I know uses Windows/Linux and laptops are mostly Dell/HP

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I doubt I've been to a conference that's even vaguely oriented towards developers or even technical folks more broadly in the past 10 years where Macs with project stickers on them aren't the most common laptop, often by far. This is true even at conferences where one might expect Windows to be more common (don't know specifically about Microsoft events but VMWorld, say) or Linux (Open Source Summit and the like).

This is broadly tech industry I'm talking about but not some narrow Silicon Valley or web dev space. I'd never believe Macs were only about 10% market share based on pretty much any of my own anecdotal observations including walking into a random coffee shop.

There's a certain demographic who attends conferences. Yes, they mostly have Macs. No, they don't represent the developer community.

Definitely a US thing. In every french conf I go, PC are a majority. In the french PyCon where I regularly give talks, Linux PC always are.

The diversity is even a problem in workshops because everybody has a different config and you get weirds errors due to this or that combo.

But yeah, you will see stickers. Lots of them.

I can't say I've taken a survey but Macs certainly don't seem conspicuously absent at a venue like FOSDEM (Brussels). Of course, that's an international event even if it's disproportionately European. It's probably fair that the further you get from US tech companies in general and possibly Silicon Valley in particular and the closer you get to developers doing open source in their spare time in non-US countries, the fewer Macs you probably see. If only because of price.

ADDED: And, of course, if you look around inside a company that mostly runs their infrastructure on Windows, most of the developers will be running Windows on Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc. machines.

Depends on the events you visit, I'd say I saw a 40/40 split of ThinkPads and Macs with 20% "other" - but I know it's not really representative, as I've mostly visited smaller events focused on non-enterprise stuff, or DevOps confs, or close to the CCC. In my web dev days in small companies there were more macs though.

I'm in the midwest and pretty much every dev group that is cloud focused based is Mac based. The transitions from onsite to cloud and the switch to mac seem to go hand and hand.

Doing lots of web work with open source software is painful on a corporate (ie very locked down) Windows machine.

Once everybody has the same Macbook model you really need the stickers just so you know whose laptop is whose.

Or stickers so you don't mistake your personal MacBook for your work one (or worse - your spouse's).

Pair this with a long commute and stickers become a key identifying factor and stress reducer.

I'm in the Midwest and none of the groups I've worked with use Mac unless an individual requested it. This seems highly anecdotal. Actually, it seems the Mac users tend to form their own bubbles and shun anyone using PC

Yeah you're basically right on the nose with that assessment.

The author attempted to use WSL like their mac and had a bad time with it, aside from the text rendering and high DPI stuff that isn't quite as polished on Windows.

I am American, not anywhere near SV. I have never seen a Macbook at work either. There was one guy a few years ago who seemed a bit SV-influenced, and he had stickers, though it was a Windows laptop like everyone else.

But yes, oftentimes HN (or an article it links to) uses "developer" to mean "SV web developer".

I love stickers- I think they're cool. What can I say? I'm pretty old, though, so maybe it's brain damage or something.

Pretty much. I started my career in SV at a startup and have a Macbook with about a dozen stickers on it. At all the companies (all startups) I've worked for, they've given me a Macbook pro by default. You'd have to make a strong case to get a PC.

Yeah in the UK it's not particularly common for developers to use a mac from what I've seen.

That might be because generally C#/.Net is the main choice of enterprise which was traditionally all windows.

Linux-loving developers can switch to MacOS and get productive with it instantly... American devs probably default to Macs instead of Linux because some of their non-tech friends also use Macs.

As a European dev I just use a Mac because I love the Linux-ecosystem but I also need/want to run preferred photo/video-editing software on same machine I code on.

Very few Linux-loving-devs have audio-visual-creative hobbies and a need to use "one device to rule them all", hence not that many devs with Macs in Europe, simple :P

>I don't know if this is an American thing or the industry I'm in, but I've never seen a single developer use a Macbook or have stickers on their laptops.

I work on the East coast and in one of my recent jobs, a couple of the younger (under-30) engineers had stickers on their laptops. This was definitely not Silicon Valley or any industry like that, and these were Dell Windows machines, not Macs.

That makes sense. For low-level C, you probably want to develop on whatever your target platform is. I'm sure most Linux kernel devs have a Linux laptop. In fact, Linus Torvalds made an argument along these lines in the context of ARM. (Basically, we need ARM laptops if you expect to get developers developing for ARM servers.)

Not just Silicon Valley–it's a West Coast thing. Go into any hip coffee shop in CA, OR, or WA, and you'll find a sea of MacBooks covered in stickers running brightly colored IDE's (and at least a few running vim).

The stickers are usually souvenirs from tech conferences, employers, cool startups, and hackathons.

But hey, most developers don't sit in coffee shops :) they are sitting in offices, mostly working on proprietary software that is making hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the company.

Very much a thing in the companies I worked for in the Netherlands as well. But it is often a balanced mix of pc/mac and linux/windows/macos instead of a mono culture. Though frontend seems to lean more towards mac.

re: stickers on Macbooks

In an office, or conference, where multiple people have the same work-issued laptop, the easiest way for folks to not mix up their laptops is to slap a sticker or two on it.

same here. I know a couple or few more that actually do the mac and sticker thing and even then it's on their personal devices, not work issued ones.

at best author is just another victim of selection bias, at worse he really believes everything he doesn't experiences doesn't exists.

actually its extremely prevalent amongst developers -- you will see it at conferences worldwide

downvoted? i mean, this is not controversial: go on youtube and type developer conference for whatever industry you're in and any money says the presenter in the top hit has stickers. its that prevalent. its not a judgement, its just very odd to see it denied.

edit: tried it myself. ACCU (C++ conf in bristol). a lot of stickers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMYazsVW1KA

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