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Comment by ricardobayes | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's tough to believe it's only 15%. In USA and Western Europe Macs became the de facto general purpose computers.

I think you're living in a software developer bubble if you believe that.

In Ireland, the only Mac owners I know are other software developers. Everyone else uses the €500 windows laptops that were on sale however many years ago their last one broke.

I've seen tons of business people on them. Though admittedly at tech companies

mac and apple devices are like 90% of the laptops for people in the art field from what i've seen. And I live in western Europe.

> ...and Western Europe...

Lol what? Macs are still pretty much non-existant in Europe except in some 'hipster hotspots' like Berlin (typing this on a Mac and far away from Berlin, but still...)

E.g. for a reality check, click on the 'OS Version' line in the table at the bottom to unfold and see detailed OS stats, among gamers macOS sits at 2.45% across all Steam regions (at least it's growing though): https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Using steam gamers to assess Mac market share is unrepresentative in the opposite direction to surveying SF tech workers, given Apple has not bothered to support high end games such as those which steam sells for many years at a time.

I think with the steam deck, we'll see Linux overtake Mac OS in the steam charts in the next year. I don't think Linux will then be as popular as Macs in the world at large.

They could just go the console way. Apple TV sooner or later get an M CPU and it has a great performance.

On the other hand the games are missing, I have Apple Arcade but... it's nothing like compared to PS Plus or GamePass at all

Since you sent a link, I send you another one: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/united-kingdo... In the UK, macOS + iOS combined overtook Windows (even by a little, but still).

TBH I am very surprised that iOS is below Windows. But still, the original article is about "computer operating systems", not about mobile phones.

According to your link, Windows has 3 times the market share of OS X. In Germany it is closer to 4 times.

Like I said, macOS and OSX combined. 36% vs the 34% of Windows

You said iOS in the previous comment and OSX in this one, the chart has an entry for Mac OS and no seperate one for OSX, so assuming iOS is the one you're basing the claim on.

While macOS + iOS > Windows, Android outnumbers macOS, so claiming the combined macOS + iOS share means that mac is more popular than Windows is like me using that Android market share to claim that desktop Linux is more popular than MacOS.

I'm unclear why you would add iOS to that comparison. It's a toy OS that is comperable to Windows and OSX in name only.

Mobile global market share is Android 72% iOS 27%, but in the United States it's Android 43% iOS 57%.

According to statcounter, Mac has ~25% market share in the US. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...

* In your personal bubble

* Which is made of software engineers and tech companies

* Which are all very wealthy relative to the rest of the population

* Which most likely have it paid for by their company.

15% feels like an overstatement if anything.

No. I work on a start upy science park where every fifth car is a tesla, the cafe roasts it's own beans in "Bertha " and the barista is 6'4", dresses like a lumberjack, has a magnificent beard, and insists that they are non binary because they once painted their nails. Even there, in the most wanky of environments imaginable, only about half of the laptop wielders in the work pods / shared spaces / flow rooms (shudder) are using a Mac.

People in Europe don't have, or won't spend, thousands for laptops. I think you live in some strange bubble or don't live in Europe.

> In USA and Western Europe Macs became the de facto general purpose computers.

For Western Europe: surely not in Germany.

There's a ton of legacy Windows systems and Windows systems in non-tech offices. Plus schools, universities, etc...

And you know millions people who loves playing games and build their own computer to use the CPU they want, the RAM they want, the GPU they want etc.

Macs are nice to some extent but incredibly locked down for my taste both on hardware and software level. Have to use it at work but I'd never ever buy one on my own.

I still see way more windows laptops. In fact I have never even seen an M* based Mac. 15% seem a bit high to me.

Well roughly 0% of gamers use Macs, and there are a lot of gamers. So that's a huge chunk. Also, most of the devs I know are Linux users on PC hardware. Creatives all tend to be Mac (of course) while general business users tend be split more evenly.

So yeah 15% seems right.

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