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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-operati

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

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
pdpi 7mo ago
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)
- davidmurdoch 7mo ago
  Perhaps. Though Windows has been the majority share even when stack overflow was at it's peak, and before.
  - petercooper 7mo ago
    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.
AdamN 7mo ago
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.
- davidmurdoch 7mo ago
  Source?
  - saagarjha 7mo ago
    Working there?
  - AdamN 7mo ago
    Working in three countries, working in big tech and startups, talking to people.
- re-thc 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
    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.
    - AdamN 7mo ago
      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.
      - seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
        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.
  - AdamN 7mo ago
    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.
JCharante 7mo ago
Majority of devs are in the global south I presume

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

pdpi 7mo ago

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)

davidmurdoch 7mo ago
Perhaps. Though Windows has been the majority share even when stack overflow was at it's peak, and before.
- petercooper 7mo ago
  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.

AdamN 7mo ago

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.

davidmurdoch 7mo ago
Source?
- saagarjha 7mo ago
  Working there?
- AdamN 7mo ago
  Working in three countries, working in big tech and startups, talking to people.
re-thc 7mo ago
> 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.
- seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
  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.
  - AdamN 7mo ago
    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.
    - seanmcdirmid 7mo ago
      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.
- AdamN 7mo ago
  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.

JCharante 7mo ago

Majority of devs are in the global south I presume