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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

To illustrate how bad a job Intel has done on the marketing of this technology, I for a long time thought that display port was a closed mac-only thing, and until today I thought the same of thunder port.

If they want to increase adaptation, maybe they should consider marketing it more, and outside of sanfran's macbook-based hipster blogger circles.

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Don't misconstrue Displayport and Thunderbolt - one is a royalty free standard, the other is crippled Intel only and patent encumbered. Dockport is a VESA standard that adds USB and DC power to DP to compete with Thunderbolt. I have much more interest in using that than some profiteering move on Intels part to achieve vendor lock in to its chipsets by getting end users stuck with Thunderbolt devices.

Sounds like the major issue is MSFT. I suspect Microsoft sees Thunderbolt as an opportunity to recreate the Firewire experience for most people: poor experience will kill the technology and drive would-be adopters away from Mac. Back into the arms of Microsoft.

> and outside of sanfran's macbook-based hipster blogger circles.

Man, this is a really tired trope. At the last conference I attended, ~9/10 engineers were running macbooks (and pretty much 10/10 engineers under 40).

at the last conference I attended, ~9/10 of the engineers were using thinkpads and latitudes

personal examples are worthless because of the ridic small sample size

>At the last conference I attended, ~9/10 engineers were running macbooks

They're both tired tropes. There is a pretty reasonable mix of hardware and software run by 'engineers' and no where near 90% are macs.

edit: https://www.statwing.com/demos/dev-survey#workspaces/2496

That site has some pretty good statistics related to OS usage among programmers and some hardware usage, like iPod/iPhone, which I think is a decent indicator of whether or not these people own macs.

I went to a security conference about a year ago, and not being a security guy, I was surprised to see about half the people using Windows.

This being said, I am a little sad to see the prevalence of OSX-based laptops in 'hacker spaces', partly because I don't like Apple's practices, but mostly because diversity is one of the things that makes a hacker to me; the ability to make anything turn tricks. To see a monoculture starting to emerge is a little sad.

I tend to assume this has more to do with the piss-poor state of windows laptop manufacturers than with Apple. I'm sure those guys run Linux or Windows on their desktops, but seriously you expect them to put up with a heavy and crudware-riddled HP? A fragile Lenovo? A monstrously ugly MSI? A cheap Dell that falls apart the day the warranty runs out?

'Fragile' Lenovo? Using a cheap Dell as a comparator? Not trying to stack the deck there?

It all depends to which conferences one goes to.

If you attended a Games Developer Conference than it would be Windows everywhere, even on the MacBooks. Except maybe for the engineers that only do iOS games.

On the other hand, it saddened me to attend FOSDEM and see people bashing Microsoft about OSS practices, while walking around with a MacBook running Mac OS X. Talk about dysfunctional behavior.

Don't make them think too hard about it or their head might explode.

Thunderbolt is still closed and proprietary, just not by apple in this case.

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