Well, I write MacOS/iOS/WatchOS/iPadOS/visionOS stuff, so I'm dependent on it.

Like most tools, we get used to our main one, and can sometimes get a bit "sneery" about alternate ones.

The Mac is a particularly rich target, because the "snootiness" is actually a deliberate brand ploy by Apple, and pretty much "leads with the chin," so we have that.

I've never been "snooty" about Apple, but it's been my platform for over 30 years, so I'm used to it, and I get a lot done with my Mac.

> guess iWork is OK, but no one uses it, so it's not helpful for collaboration

You realize Microsoft Office has been on the Mac since the mid 80s right?

> Maybe people use it for media production?

Uhh yes?

Microsoft Office has always been sub-par on Mac, and I haven't worked at a company that uses it for collaboration for over a decade. (Sure, there's the occasional person that actually needs VB macros under Excel, or prefers powerpoint, but there's no reason for me to run it.)

I know you can use them for media production. Looking around, it sounds like they still own the low-end with iMovie, but it gets questionable as hardware requirements increase. I guess it's a viable platform for that.

I know a lot of CAD software is missing MacOS ports, so they seem to have lost that market.

Anyway, I'll continue to think of my laptop as a dumb terminal with a good hypervisor bolted on the side.

I know of quite a large company - the second largest employer in the US that have thousands of Macs and come with Office. Do you really think that no one has been using Office for Mac and Microsoft has been selling it for 35 years?

It is hard to switch away from mainframes too, but I haven’t heard of a company that was founded in the last ten years that is a Microsoft Office shop.

Well, maybe your anecdata may be in conflict with reported revenue numbers? Google Office is not taking the world by storm.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...

No it’s also not the year of the Linux desktop either

Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.

Sure, you can get access to an office suite at these companies, but people certainly raise an eyebrow when emailed a docx or told to click this office online link to run word in their browser.

In the link you pasted, the studies are limiting the market in strange ways. Like what is a “workstream collaboration tool” (teams, and whatever google workspaces is. I’ve never used either, despite using google docs periodically).

So, if the question is “which wordperfect clone is winning”, then word is a plausible answer. If the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.

> Most places I have worked don’t use office suites. Instead of formatting stuff for 8.5x11” PDFs or printouts, things go into wikis/gdocs/etc, markdown files in git, python or splunk dashboards or whatever instead of excel; stuff is shared on slack, not office/google drive, etc, etc.

Yes because most of corporate America is doing work in Markdown.

Have you ever thought that your workplace may not be representative of the wider world?

> the question is “what percentage of all documents are created in each tool”, there’s no way office (excluding outlook) + gdocs + iwork sum up to a majority at most companies.

I’m sure you have a citation to back that up?

How do you explain the adoption of macs among programmers in general? Especially in universities, macs is all I can see.

Everyone I know that uses one (myself included) uses it as a toy (== not production server grade) Unix machine and/or dumb terminal.

In my university, only non computer science students used macs. At my work, I wasn't given a choice and was given a macbook because "we all use macbooks" which really just meant "we all work on the terminal", which mac is not good at, not anymore when we have WSL to compare it against.

Wow, I thought this type of comment died on Slashdot 20 years ago.

I mean, you're kind of dead wrong? I've been using Macs for almost two decades at this point as a developer, and it's never kept me from getting work done. These days it's great having a powerful Mac, with the ability to use local machine learning models with relatively large amounts of VRAM (more than any consumer GPU, though inference won't be as fast as recent Nvidia cards). It's great at video editing, too.

Don't tell IBM they are doing it wrong: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/301863-ibm-our-mac-usi...