It's even a very small and biased subset of the total developers in the United States. The majority (I would say vast majority) do not attend conferences. Sometimes because their workplace won't fund it, but often simply because they find no value in it. I personally gave up going to conferences years ago partly because workplaces treated it almost like they were giving me a vacation that I should feel grateful for, but it certainly didn't feel like a vacation. And afterwards I would try to itemize the value I received...to have nothing (talking to developers of the vendors face to face was, if anything, less productive than simply dropping a note on a discussion board).

So that subset often comes from more moneyed employers, or are the "see and be seen" sort, or they really get value out of it. For the former two sets a Mac is a pretty likely device.

I'm heading to a regional one in August that is registered as a nonprofit and is less than a week's salary to attend (and I work in the public sector in the Midwest so don't think that this is big left cost salary).

That said, even with a strong Microsoft bend to many session technologies, macs still are several times more frequent than non-mac.

Since the conference isn't trying to pull in big bucks (its a break even - 501.C non profit even), attendee costs for 2017 are $425 (food included - and they don't skimp on food). Even if you're going to add on the hotel the conference is located in, its only $175. Toss in a plane ticket and it is probably still less expensive than the national ones for the "get in the door" ticket.

There are lots of regional or local conferences that are not absurd in pricing.

For another example of an upcoming local one: https://stirtrek.com which is a one day $99 one. Its draw is likewise local.

Yea, NoFluff is $1000 to walk in the door for two days. I'm very glad that there are others that are closer in line with not needing to drain the training budget to go to.

Reason is simple: they are very overpriced for ours salaries (and I am in a first world country, I think their costs are prohibitive in places like India/Cina/etc) and - personal reason - as a webdev I can basically do everything I need in a 250$ old t430 with fedora, so I can't justify to spend like 10 times more just for a shinier piece of hw which is not even easy to upgrade.

Macs have dominated in the areas I have worked in for the past 6 years. I would say in the companies, hands-on meetups and conferences I been to in London and across Scandinavia: 75% use macbooks, then perhaps 15% dell xps with ubuntu and 10% mix of lenovo, MS surface etc.

Though I think this split will change with the recoil of the new touch bar macs.

(Again this is just from my smaller demographic of location and people.)

The calculus of owning a Mac changes drastically if you live near an Apple store. If my Mac has a problem, I can book an appointment at the Apple store, real person will try to fix it, and I can have it back ASAP. The customer service is half the price.

Probably because London has more people than most European countries.

Yep, it's almost true. London 8.5M. If you count all 50 "countries" (some are a joke though) it ranks between the 21st and 22nd.

Though in my city (Paris 11M, I think), similarly sized, there's only 2 Apple stores.

Ref:[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_...]

Paris and London are 500km apart, a couple hours of train or plane away from each other, both capital cities, both have ~10¨7 people.

Which? Vatican City is fairly extraordinary, granted, but I think 'a joke' is unfair...

I used to run Linux on a laptop, but eventually I gave up and switched to Macbook so that I don't have to deal with drivers and low-level config issues on a daily basis.

In my university, 60%-70% of CS students use a Macbook. They are not working or attending conferences yet, so the change is going to take some time.

Just for comparison, with what I should spend for a macbook here I would pay 3 years of a Bachelor Degree + half a year of a Master Degree (obviously I am referring to just university tuition costs, not rent or other general expenses) in a top 3 university of my country with international recognition.

What in gods name are you talking about? Are you using a distro from 1995?

The graphics and wifi drivers broke down every now and then and sometimes it broke the OS completely so I had to reinstall the OS.

Need to fix multiple config issues and compatibility issues when I wanted to install some Linux-alternatives for Windows applications.

Plus I need to do video editing and Android apps so I still have to constantly switch back to Windows with dual-boot.

Mac just seems to be a perfect balance, giving you all the standard terminal stuff plus everything just runs out of the box.

Now I use a mix of Win, OS X, and Ubuntu depending on what I am trying to accomplish. I make heavy use of Linux servers, but have no inclination of using one as a primary end-user desktop environment again.

When people complain about Linux my first question is if they had given it a serious try in the last 2 years.

[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/838855/crashing-freezing-hang...

I think you're seeing selection bias here. The devs that attend conferences are a very, very small sliver of the total population, and the price of attending a conference (not only the ticket, but travel and PTO necessary to attend) also overlaps heavily with the more "well-off" devs, which probably have a higher percentage of Mac usage.

FWIW: I've had a personal Macbook (for two years in college) and a work Macbook (when necessary), and in both cases I only ran linux on them.

Most devs don't attend dev conferences.

[1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen...

"This change will allow us to do X in Y days when normally it would take some multiple of Y."

It sounds like what you want is a more salient list of pain points in the current development environment and exactly how the proposed new thing would address them. Additionally, you'd want to hear the new set of pain points that the new thing will impose (cue the quote about some devs knowing the value of everything and the cost of nothing).

You may also, for their benefit, direct the next kid with the cool idea towards a link that's commonly thrown around here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence

I'm going to pull the more direct section "What this means on Wikipedia":

> If you're considering nominating something for deletion, or changing a policy, because it doesn't appear to have any use or purpose, research its history first.

> You may find out why it was created, and perhaps understand that it still serves a purpose.

> Or if you do feel the issue it addressed is no longer valid, frame your argument for deletion in a way that acknowledges that.

(Nice link. I was unaware of the name for that heuristic.)

I think that is a really important thing to bear in mind when reading Hacker News, or pretty much any online venue. People who contribute or even post comments are not the majority. SO rates me in the top 20% of Ruby developers, because I answered a few questions on the site.

After all, you consider C# an uncool language.

That couldn't be further from the truth... I love slinging C#, it's far and away my favorite. It doesn't have that HN hot-shit cachet that Go or Rust or Scala or Lisp-likes or ML-variants have, however.

The last two teams I've worked with have all had Macs, even though at least half the team were writing .NET in Windows.

Then there's my main personal laptop which couldn't get the latest Mac OS so I just wiped it and installed Linux. I wouldn't do that to my daily work machine though, too many little things just don't work quite correctly, but all in all it installed pretty easily and runs less sluggish than OS X did.

* Better as in good hardware, consumer appeal, and a relatively performant and stable machine for getting work done. Not necessarily best value or gaming, etc.

My windows and linux installs never reliably go to sleep on their respective laptops when I close them -- and I cannot be bothered to figure out whether it's a hardware problem, or a software problem... I'll just bring the mac which does sleep reliably.

It also has pretty good battery life compared to my other machines.

Edit for spelling.

Although SO now has a much wider audience, the more engaged, longer-term members are more likely to fill out this survey.

Also, how many of those people with Macs had a Linux distro installed on them?

more seriously, once you get the hang of it Ubuntu machine is just ridiculously more productive than win and osx.

I'm surprised that not more devs are using it.