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Comment by davidmurdoch | Hacker News Reader

Who is "us" in this case? Majority of devs that took the stack overflow survey use Windows:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#1-computer-...

That's the broad developer community. 90%+ of the engineers at Big Tech and the technorati startups are on MacOS with 5% on Linux and the other 5% on Windows.

Source?

Working there?

Working in three countries, working in big tech and startups, talking to people.

> 90%+ of the engineers at Big Tech and the technorati startups

The US 1s? Is that why we have Deepseek and then other non-US open source LLMs catching up rapidly?

World view please. The developer community is not US only.

You’ll see a lot of MacBooks in Beijing’s zhongguangcun where all the tech companies are, but they also have a lot of students there as well, so who knows. You need to go out to the suburbs where Lenovo has offices to stop seeing them. I know Apple is common in Western Europe having lived there for two years (but that was 20 years ago, I lived in China for 9 years after that).

It wouldn’t surprise me if the deepseek people were primarily using Mac’s. Maybe Alibaba might be using PCs? I’m not sure.

I would also expect that the Deepseek devs are using MacBook. If not they may be using Linux - Windows is possible of course but not likely imho. I have no knowledge about that area though so would be interesting to here any primary sources or anecdotes.

Deepseek is in Hangzhou, so I guess they are. GDP/capita in Zhejiang is pretty high, even more so for HZ. If you ever visit, it feels like a pretty nice place (especially if you can get a villa around xihu). I also visited ZJU once, and it was pretty Macbooky, but I don't have as much experience there as Beijing's Zhongguancun.

I live in Germany not the US. I mentioned in another comment but aside from the fact that Deepseek mainly targets Linux I expect that the Deepseek devs are using Mac or Linux.

I think it's reasonable to say that the people responding to surveys on Stack Overflow aren't the same people who work on pushing the state of the art in local LLM deployment. (which doesn't prove that that crowd is Apple-centric, of course)

Perhaps. Though Windows has been the majority share even when stack overflow was at it's peak, and before.

It's not the whole answer, but SO came from the .NET world and focused on it first so it had a disproportionately MS heavy audience for some time. GitHub had the same issue the other way around. Ruby was one of GitHub's top five languages for its first decade for similar reasons.

Majority of devs are in the global south I presume

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