I just bought a new laptop. A Macbook Air. Part of the reason was OS X over Linux. This is for two distinct reasons:
a) Battery life. For the most part, shoehorning Linux onto a PC is going to negatively affect battery life.
b) Despite being a bit of a "hacker", I have a day job and don't want to spend too much time tinkering with my OS. OS X is more polished than Linux and is less likely to go wrong.
I'm guessing that while most HN'ers aren't in exactly the same situation as me, they have more important things to do (i.e. working on their ideas) rather than wrangle with Linux.
@robzyb hit the nail on the head - a great many of us just want something that works, every day. At some point in my life I loved tinkering with my OS, jumping between distros weekly, etc. now I just want to get things done. I used desktop Linux for 10 years before jumping to OS X in 2011.
I'm sure people will immediately chime in and say that Thinkpads work well with Ubuntu or that System76 does the job, and I'm sure it does, but the experience of running OS X on Apple hardware is simply unmatched.
>the experience of running OS X on Apple hardware is simply unmatched.
Eh. Seems a lot of people on HN believe this, but it's not always the case. Just a quick visit to discussion.apple.com will show all sorts of issues people have with the OS including bugs like http://www.cnet.com/news/some-lion-users-plagued-by-black-sc... which is a bug in the OS.
Edit: just some things I noticed in the short time I used OS X:
The gmail integration is buggy. I didn't get messages on time, and I have to either quit the app or take Mail offline and then online again before new mail will start streaming in. Sometime I couldn't get it to quit.
The 'quicklook' thing seemed really slow, which seemed to be a problem a lot of users had.
Multi-monitor support isn't that great. I had multiple windows on multiple desktops for some reason and it just felt weird.
I had issues with audio stopping and not working again until I did a reboot.
Window management in OSX is easily my biggest complaint. Installing Spectacle (open source) at least gave me back the Windows shortcuts for half screen, full-screen, and next monitor. The full screen width menu system drives me nuts, as with a 27" monitor I have to go 3ft to the left to find whatever non-keystroked command I need. It feels at least 15 years behind to me, especially given their fondness for those big cinema displays.
Apple seems to think I should unitask on a single monitor. That's not how I work, so it's not for me.
I'm a long time Linux desktop user, since the days of Debian Slink and Windowmaker, but I dig OS X. It's slick. I wish there was a desktop on Linux that could strike that balance between features, usability and stability. That being said, I'm also cheap. If Mac's were more competitively priced, I would probably own one, but paying that much over market value for what essentially is a "pretty" PC that can run OS X has always been an issue for me. I just chug along on my aging but sturdy Thinkpad with Linux. I think Apple could change the game if they decoupled OS X from the hardware. Who would pay for Window 8 when you could just install OS X instead?
Who would buy a Mac when you could just install OS X on a PC? (Note: I don't necessarily subscribe to this viewpoint, but I think Apple do, and have historically. And I speak as someone who was cheap enough to buy a Mac Mini and bring my own monitor - the only way I could justifiably afford OS X)
That's the thing, Apple fans will just keep buying Apple no matter what. Even if you could by a PC with OS X there would always be a demand for Apple hardware. If Apple sold OS X separately from Macs people would still buy Macs.
This is probably just me, but the biggest reason I use Linux is the package manager and repositories (Arch's package manager and wiki are amazing). Anything other than that, Windows or OS X, feels like it's missing something and I have to work around it.
People are saying they have to spend a lot of time configuring Linux but in my experience that's not the case (obviously once it's installed in the case of Arch, which for me is a worthwhile investment).
OS X has everything an end-user needs already (iLife apps are best of breed on any platform and come for free !), that's the beauty. For the rest there's the seamless App Store.
Now for hackers, you already get a long way with the built-in BSD commands, but one word : http://brew.sh
When I don't want to tinker with my Debian anymore, I just stop doing it and things work the way I left them. That's the main beauty of good Linux distros that keeps me so attached to them - I always can play with stuff, but I don't have to. And when I want to, it's much better choice than OS X for that.
If you want to buy the best laptop hardware available, and price is not much of a concern, you get a MacBook Pro. I hate the keyboard, but everything else is top quality.
Once you've done that, you could install Linux or Windows or FreeBSD on it, but if you don't have an overwhelming requirement, you'll keep it on Mac OS.
And if you're like most hackers, you have one work laptop and you carry it around everywhere, and it's your primary machine.
Personally, I don't carry a laptop back and forth: I have a Linux desktop at the office, and a Linux desktop at home, and a Mac laptop for travel and moving around the house.
a) Battery life. For the most part, shoehorning Linux onto a PC is going to negatively affect battery life.
b) Despite being a bit of a "hacker", I have a day job and don't want to spend too much time tinkering with my OS. OS X is more polished than Linux and is less likely to go wrong.
I'm guessing that while most HN'ers aren't in exactly the same situation as me, they have more important things to do (i.e. working on their ideas) rather than wrangle with Linux.