Counterpoint: I've never seen someone in the Bay Area developing on a Windows machine, in any company I've worked at. In my experience, locally, it's more like 95% Mac, 5% Linux, and 0% Windows.

Now, I know that neither of our anecdotes represent the state of the world in general, but the notion that "Macs are for non-techies" is laughable on the face of it.

I don't think this is true at all. Despite not developing Mac applications, we've (Twilio) been a Mac shop since day one, 14 years ago. This was driven by our three founders, who, at the time, were all engineers. These days our IT department offers Windows machines for employees who need it for some reason, but uptake is likely in the single-digit percentages.

And I know a lot of people who do technical work at various companies whose primary work machine is a MacBook Pro.

This might be a Silicon Valley startup thing. I would expect the Stack Overflow survey is skewed pretty hard toward Windows due to big corporate enterprises that aren't tech companies. It seems to me that most "tech companies" prefer Macs.

> Take for example using netcat. The version available to Mac is 17 years old and lacking some useful flags

I run Linux, so I don't have firsthand experience with much of this, but everyone I know who uses macOS for development has something like Homebrew installed, so they can get up-to-date versions of the various tools that are outdated in the default macOS install.

I don't disagree that the built-in tools on Mac leave a lot to be desired, but you can also just brew install things and clearly Docker has gone to a lot of effort to make this all work on Mac, so the demand is there.

I switched to Linux for the current company, and was expecting fewer Docker oddities and better battery life, but I seem to actually have way more issues now, which - without sinking a week or more into investigating transient issues - I attribute to it not being isolated in a VM.

I often have to reboot my machine just to get basic DNS resolution working from inside a container

You needn't rely on your memory, the survey is still available [0]. FWIW, it doesn't seem to contain a question about the OS where development takes place, only about the targets[1]. The top answers were:

Linux 48.3%

Windows Desktop or Server 35.4%

Android 29.0%

AWS 24.1%

Mac OS 17.9%

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/

[1] "Linux and Windows Desktop or Server are the most common choices that our respondents say they have done development work for this year." (emphasis mine)