

Author: “No Bugs” Hare Follow: Job Title: Sarcastic Architect Hobbies: Thinking Aloud, Arguing with Managers, Annoying HRs,

Calling a Spade a Spade, Keeping Tongue in Cheek

Motivation

It is well-known that market share of Macs out there is around 6-7% (see, for example, [Clover]); if we take into account only laptops, it will be more like 10% [Tseng].

On the other hand, Mac laptops are extremely visible, and quite a few times, I was observing that:

in public places such as airports, share of Mac laptops is indeed below 10%

on the other hand, in meeting rooms – share of Macs around me is much closer to 50% (sic!).

Experiment

Of course, I am very-well aware of dangers of such observations being outright misleading (“selective memory” bias etc.), so I was sceptical of my own observation skills. It was only during a CPPCON17 that I realized that there exists a way to perform an objective measurement of this kind of stats:

As Mac laptops are indeed very visible, we can easily review all conference videos on YouTube, and calculate a share of Macs used by speakers

Indeed, the difference between Macs and non-Macs on videos is (most of the time) fairly obvious:

non-Mac Mac

Of course, it doesn’t indicate which operating system they’re using, but hardware can be identified rather reliably.

Results

Recently, we spent a few hours doing it for last 3 years of CPPCON – and got the following results:

SPEAKERS USING: Macs non-Macs Unknown Total1 % of Macs1 CPPCON2015 24 54 4 78 31% CPPCON2016 33 62 5 95 35% CPPCON2017 49 64 11 1132 43%

Conclusions

I know that any conclusions and speculations in this regard are extremely risky (I will be beaten hard both by Mac fans and Windows fans, not to mention Linux fans just for a good measure); still, IMO from the (semi-scientific) results above we can make the following observations:

share of Macs in use by top C++ developers 3 during their presentations on CPPCON, is much higher (like 6x higher) than average market share of Macs Once again – it is ONLY about hardware, with no indication of the OS they’re using. One may speculate that it might indicate that as soon as C++ developer reaches the point when Mac price is no longer too significant, s/he’s more likely to use Mac over non-Mac box. In other words – it might indicate that C++ developers tend to prefer non-Macs for benefits/price ratio, but tend to switch to Macs when price is no longer that much of a concern. 4

during their presentations on CPPCON, is much higher (like 6x higher) than average market share of Macs share of Macs in use by top C++ developers, has indications of growth over time In other words, there are some preliminary indications that top C++ developers tend to migrate to Mac hardware over time. This goes in contrast with overall Mac share reportedly shrinking (from ~7% to ~6% over last few years),



I am done for the day. Let the flame begin! <wink />

Acknowledgement

Cartoons by Sergey Gordeev from Gordeev Animation Graphics, Prague.