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I find this baffling. I'm in Sweden and I do see a Mac every now and then, especially among artists and designers. But most people I know use nothing but Window

I find this baffling. I'm in Sweden and I do see a Mac every now and then, especially among artists and designers. But most people I know use nothing but Windows and every place I've ever worked used Windows. The only place I've seen a lot of non-Windows machines is the university. They had a fairly even split between Windows and Linux.

cgh 5y ago
As the parent mentioned, Macs are extremely popular in the SV development scene. Even large, stodgy 70,000 person companies like Cisco consider them the standard.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  IBM, in a historic twist of fate, rolled out Macs to their entire fleet unless you opted out. They also said that using Mac, contrary to what you'd expect from the purchase price, saved them buckets of money.
  - dijit 5y ago
    I don't know why you wouldn't expect that. People (consumers) see the Mac prices and balk because they're comparing to the Acer Aspire they can buy at BestBuy on discount for $300. Businesses see the Mac prices (and, barring upgrades): they see that they're cost competitive with the contemporaries. Dell XPS, HP Elitebook, Lenovo Thinkpad Txx (or Carbon X1) are all in spitting distance and in some cases even more expensive than Macbooks. That's before you even talk support contracts or yearly licenses (the OEM license on the unit is rarely the one you'll use, usually you have a volume license and a KMS server which also costs a lot of money).
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      Exactly. From a business' perspective (and according to IBM's own study so this isn't conjecture), Macs are significantly cheaper in the long term, and only slightly more expensive in the short term if even. Also, when it comes to management for a small or even medium sized business, look at Apple's approach to management: https://www.fleetsmith.com https://www.fleetsmith.com . Dead simple pricing, dead simple UI, and they provision your devices out of the box without any manual setup. You can just buy 50 MacBooks, Apple will automatically ship them set up to your employees for no charge, and you'll pay a several bucks a month per device for management. Now compare that to how you manage a Windows deployment. By comparison, it's unintelligible. You need to upgrade every device to Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise as part of a contract to join a domain, set up a domain server with Active Directory to have a user store, add connects to connect the Directory to the Domain which may or may not require a Windows Server, which may or may not require the arbitrary Windows Server CALs, and then you have to manually set up and wipe each device out of the box unless you managed to get a special deal with the OEM...
      - crooked-v 5y ago
        > and only slightly more expensive in the short term if even As I found with Lenovo and their bizarre continued use of 1080p as a baseline everywhere in CURRENT_YEAR, if you specifically go looking for laptops with even just 1440p displays the prices quickly inflate towards Apple levels.
      - MangoCoffee 5y ago
        maybe large enterprises see Macs are cheaper but all i see is Windows pc in small to mid size companies.
        dijit 5y ago
        You’ll see it in large companies too; there is heavy inertia and quite a bit of lock-in on the windows ecosystem.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > because they're comparing to the Acer Aspire they can buy at BestBuy on discount for $300. ...it even has a bigger screen and hard drive!
  - alerighi 5y ago
    I don't see how having to replace an entire computer for an hardware fault like a broken SSD can make you save a lot of money. Maybe in the old days where macs were still professional machines. Nowadays macs are the nightmare of every IT department, the smallest that on a PC takes a couple of minutes, like changing an hard drive or a RAM module, it's a major surgery on a mac, where it's still possible and where you don't get all the things soldered on the main board. You have an OS problem on a mac? Good luck wasting hours reinstalling the operating system manually and then installing all the software. On Windows? You have your custom install ISO with all the drivers and software you need and you install it automatically. Or just have a stack of cloned disks, and in case of a problem just swap the hard drive, in most enterprise computers that have everything tool less is basically the fastest way. Also Windows machines are usually favorites by the IT departments because they work well with all the Active Directory stuff, meaning that you can manage everything centralized. Yes, you can even on a mac join an Active Directory domain, but you can do less things than with a Windows machine. And surely you have to develop a lot of custom tooling to administer network made by macs, while on Windows you can do that with standard tooling.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    Was that during the PowerPC era? Would have been natural for IBM to want their own chip powering their employee's machines.
spideymans 5y ago
It's definitely a US-centric view, where 30% of internet-connected personal computers are running macOS.
criddell 5y ago
If you consider iPhone to be part of the computing landscape, does that change anything?
- cbsmith 5y ago
  iPhone has 54.56% marketshare in Sweden: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/sweden https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/sweden
- Agentlien 5y ago
  As mentioned by the sibling comment, there are a lot of iPhones here. Not enough that I would say Apple "reigns supreme" over the smartphone market and certainly not of computing as a whole. But including smartphones absolutely does make the claim less dubious.

cgh 5y ago

As the parent mentioned, Macs are extremely popular in the SV development scene. Even large, stodgy 70,000 person companies like Cisco consider them the standard.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
IBM, in a historic twist of fate, rolled out Macs to their entire fleet unless you opted out. They also said that using Mac, contrary to what you'd expect from the purchase price, saved them buckets of money.
- dijit 5y ago
  I don't know why you wouldn't expect that. People (consumers) see the Mac prices and balk because they're comparing to the Acer Aspire they can buy at BestBuy on discount for $300. Businesses see the Mac prices (and, barring upgrades): they see that they're cost competitive with the contemporaries. Dell XPS, HP Elitebook, Lenovo Thinkpad Txx (or Carbon X1) are all in spitting distance and in some cases even more expensive than Macbooks. That's before you even talk support contracts or yearly licenses (the OEM license on the unit is rarely the one you'll use, usually you have a volume license and a KMS server which also costs a lot of money).
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Exactly. From a business' perspective (and according to IBM's own study so this isn't conjecture), Macs are significantly cheaper in the long term, and only slightly more expensive in the short term if even. Also, when it comes to management for a small or even medium sized business, look at Apple's approach to management: https://www.fleetsmith.com https://www.fleetsmith.com . Dead simple pricing, dead simple UI, and they provision your devices out of the box without any manual setup. You can just buy 50 MacBooks, Apple will automatically ship them set up to your employees for no charge, and you'll pay a several bucks a month per device for management. Now compare that to how you manage a Windows deployment. By comparison, it's unintelligible. You need to upgrade every device to Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise as part of a contract to join a domain, set up a domain server with Active Directory to have a user store, add connects to connect the Directory to the Domain which may or may not require a Windows Server, which may or may not require the arbitrary Windows Server CALs, and then you have to manually set up and wipe each device out of the box unless you managed to get a special deal with the OEM...
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      > and only slightly more expensive in the short term if even As I found with Lenovo and their bizarre continued use of 1080p as a baseline everywhere in CURRENT_YEAR, if you specifically go looking for laptops with even just 1440p displays the prices quickly inflate towards Apple levels.
    - MangoCoffee 5y ago
      maybe large enterprises see Macs are cheaper but all i see is Windows pc in small to mid size companies.
      - dijit 5y ago
        You’ll see it in large companies too; there is heavy inertia and quite a bit of lock-in on the windows ecosystem.
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > because they're comparing to the Acer Aspire they can buy at BestBuy on discount for $300. ...it even has a bigger screen and hard drive!
- alerighi 5y ago
  I don't see how having to replace an entire computer for an hardware fault like a broken SSD can make you save a lot of money. Maybe in the old days where macs were still professional machines. Nowadays macs are the nightmare of every IT department, the smallest that on a PC takes a couple of minutes, like changing an hard drive or a RAM module, it's a major surgery on a mac, where it's still possible and where you don't get all the things soldered on the main board. You have an OS problem on a mac? Good luck wasting hours reinstalling the operating system manually and then installing all the software. On Windows? You have your custom install ISO with all the drivers and software you need and you install it automatically. Or just have a stack of cloned disks, and in case of a problem just swap the hard drive, in most enterprise computers that have everything tool less is basically the fastest way. Also Windows machines are usually favorites by the IT departments because they work well with all the Active Directory stuff, meaning that you can manage everything centralized. Yes, you can even on a mac join an Active Directory domain, but you can do less things than with a Windows machine. And surely you have to develop a lot of custom tooling to administer network made by macs, while on Windows you can do that with standard tooling.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Was that during the PowerPC era? Would have been natural for IBM to want their own chip powering their employee's machines.

spideymans 5y ago

It's definitely a US-centric view, where 30% of internet-connected personal computers are running macOS.

criddell 5y ago

If you consider iPhone to be part of the computing landscape, does that change anything?

cbsmith 5y ago
iPhone has 54.56% marketshare in Sweden: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/sweden https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/sweden
Agentlien 5y ago
As mentioned by the sibling comment, there are a lot of iPhones here. Not enough that I would say Apple "reigns supreme" over the smartphone market and certainly not of computing as a whole. But including smartphones absolutely does make the claim less dubious.