[coldtea]

>It's not just design, there's also a heavy reliance on Mac only (or at least Mac and Windows only) pro video and audio programs.

It's even more so in programming. Go to any developer conference, whether it's for Rails, C, Java, Haskell or whatever: a huge percentage there will have MacBook Pros, much much more than the percentage of Mac users in the general market (e.g 10% in the general market and 40 to 60% in developer circles).

Which goes to say how silly the notion that "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers" is.

Macs are for users who want a working GUI and/or a UNIX subsystem, and don't want to do any self-building and/or tinkering.

[peatmoss]

> "Mac's are for users who don't know about computers"

I honestly haven't heard that argument in years from anyone I'd consider in touch with the current state of tech.

And for a decade I was right there with you on the OSX == *nix plus creature comforts.

But the landscape has changed since that argument held sway for me. Linux has gotten way less fiddly, and the size of my scripts to keep macOS on the straight and narrow has gotten larger.

[Pokepokalypse]

And Mac OS X has an absolutely shitty software package management "ecosystem". App Store is shitty; compared to apt and dpkg. Brew is the only thing that helps me stay reasonably sane on OS X. But still; to "remove" any large commercial software is basically: reinstall the OS.

[joshvm]

You see the same in virtually any physics department (I'm not aware of a similar trend in other STEM subjects, but presumably). Everyone uses a mixture of Linux and OS X. At the start of my PhD, the question wasn't "What laptop do you want?" it was "Do you want a Macbook or an iMac?"

[laythea]

Yes but the MacOS operating system is becoming more and more dumbed down in the UI experience, which nullifies most of the "its got a good UI" argument.