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A comment on How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2. Parent comment

Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by notRobot on Monday December 28, 2020 @12:59PM (#25561379)
> It's a large part of their Mac user base.

Is it really? Lots of devs use Macs, yes. But compared to the sheer number of regular, non-dev users, that has to be tiiiiny.

I found lots of stats on the internet about what percentage of developers use Macs, but none about how just many Mac users are developers, so it'd be fascinating to see that number of anyone can find it.

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by fauigerzigerk on Monday December 28, 2020 @03:53PM (#25563099)
Apple claims there are 20m registered developers on the App Store [1]. If each of them buys a Mac once every 4 years, that's 5m Macs per year. IDC estimates that Apple shipped 18m Macs in 2019 [2]. So 28% of all Macs would have gone to developers. If developers buy more expensive machines (or more machines) than the average customer, their share of sales could be significantly higher.

However, I don't quite believe that there really are 20m active developers on the Apple platform. Evans Data estimates that there is a total of 27m developers worldwide [3]. It's not plausible that 74% of them should be writing software for Apple platforms. On the other hand, not all developers using a Mac are developing for the App Store. A lot of them will be Web developers.

I wouldn't be surprised if developers' share of Mac sales is 30%. Maybe it's just 20%. I don't know, but it's definitely not tiny.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/04/app-store-hits-20m-registe...

[2] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/13/apple-mac-shipments-dow...

[3] https://www.future-processing.com/blog/how-many-developers-a...

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by ogre_codes on Monday December 28, 2020 @01:03PM (#25561414)
It's not about the percentage of users.

Developers fuel their platform. Without developers MacOS and iOS are nothing. Apple knows this.

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by oblio on Monday December 28, 2020 @05:58PM (#25564296)
They definitely care about devs less than Microsoft. They know that they have a relatively captive rich user base and devs will kowtow to them in order to develop stuff they can sell to that user base.

That's the real target.

And you can see it by how they treat the development tools (stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 or the many deprecations, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604). Or CI/CD setups using their tools.

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by ogre_codes on Monday December 28, 2020 @08:18PM (#25565495)
Why do you think people buy iPhones? Because the Apple logo on the back? Once you put a case on your phone, most people can't tell the difference between one brand and another.

People like iOS because of the software, both the OS, and the software which runs atop it. This is why WWDC is Apple's single biggest event of the year.

Likewise, people don't buy Macs because they are metal and have a shiny fruit on the backside. Developers were among the first to migrate to Apple back in the 00s when they discovered its Unix underpinnings made it great for doing web development.

This idea that Apple doesn't care about developers doesn't hold water. If they didn't care, they wouldn't have bothered to add Hypervisor support into the M series CPUs. This is a feature which has almost no purpose outside of software development or as a server platform and Apple doesn't make dedicated server hardware so where does that leave us?

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Re:How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2 by 908B64B197 on Monday December 28, 2020 @01:35PM (#25561760)
But they make the software the other 99% use. That's what makes them important.
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