Mac Share Among CPPCON Speakers

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:

cppcon-non-mac.png

cppcon-mac.png

non-MacMac

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%

1 excluding ‘Unknown’

2 at the time of our analysis, there were fewer videos published on YouTube than now, but we don’t expect additional data to skew the stats

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++ developers3 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
  • 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 />

3 I think we can say that “those who speak on CPPCON” is a rather representative sample of “those we can name ‘top C++ developers'”

4 Yes, I know that I will be pummeled particularly hard for saying this 

References

[Clover] Juli Clover, "Apple's Mac Shipments Down in Q3 2017 Amid Continuing PC Market Decline"

[Tseng] Kou-Han Tseng, "TrendForce Reports a 0.7% YoY Growth beyond Expectation for 2017 Notebook Shipments; Apple Exceeded ASUS to Rank No. 4"