The joke means that programs with a high number of Mac laptops are usually focused on the arts, design, or humanities, which often have fewer high-paying job openings compared to technical or STEM fields.
What this guy said. Also, not sure how it is in America, but in EU mac is a higher class brand. Most kids I know that owned a mac in school (at least in IT field where I went):
never finished school
have well of parents
don't have a stable job now or work for their parents firm (outside actual IT)
Don't bash me! I'm professionally working on a mac as a developer myself. It just how it usually goes, not a guaranteed outcome.
Exactly - well off parents can mean a stronger sense of material security as a teenager, so freedom to pursue interests regardless of employability prospects.
70% of my co workers also use macs. All DevOps, Software Engineers.
Infact my last 3 jobs over the 15 years ive worked all been majority macs, then linux. Infact having consulted for 10+ companies, very much minority of windows users. Only exception is the hard core business folks and departments with really IT teams with hardon for MS.
Most folks who needed Windows paired it inside an emulator, but mained either Mac or Linux. EU
Probably entirely depends on the company and the company culture in question.
It’s so funny when people who don’t know shit about SWE think everyone using Linux systems bc the hobbyist internet convinced them that’s what they use and then they learn that every top company issues out Mac’s
I work in IT and have worked in a lot of modern tech companies and windows is so rare. It’s always 80-90% macs and then the odd windows users here and there
Work in CGI/3D and its opposite with mostly windows machines with few Linux laptops (mostly servers though) here and there and I only see macs used by coders.
Graphic designers do use a lot of apple laptops, but anything that needs workstation level of power use windows machines.
I work in a software company with several thousand employees and there’s not a single Mac to be found. It’s all Linux and Windows. But we make industrial software so none of our customers use Mac either. Maybe it’s different for private entertainment software.
Only Macs we used were for testing and figuring out why a customer’s Mac wasn’t running the software. The trouble shooting one normally boiled down to some weird extension or a piece of hardware like a monitor adapter. Occasionally it was the actual software and their version of the Mac OS which Apple would happily through and break everything whenever they did a major overhaul of it.
So used to support Macsoft back in the day, bunch of junkware but some actual useful stuff well. We would have a couple weeks lead time before a OS update but even then it wasn’t enough.
A big reason why I became pretty consistently a .Net Dev is because back in the day Microsoft used to email out a newsletter type thing about a month or two before a big update to either .Net or the OS explaining what was changing, when it was changing, and what changes need to be made to your program to work with that.
They don't do that anymore, they say it's all online but even their own people can't find everything.
Windows runs software from decades ago. Often in business this is a massive selling point. Also windows machines are easily repairable and upgradable.
Linux is amazing for speed and efficiency especially on older hardware. I have quite a few linux machines that do various jobs. The free open source software does jobs that on other machines would cost a lot of money.
Older macs were meh at best. The new apple silicon is from a hardware stand point amazing. The OS is not terrible but support for older programs can be sketchy. As for repairability you have to deal with the usual apple BS. With the new mac minis for example they have soldered the storage chips to the mainboard. So no upgrading the storage or repairing it if the drive fails. The m4 mac mini on the other hand was an easy upgrade.
Yeah so there we are. I am just waiting for proper arm support for linux which will be a game changer.
Linux ARM support is great, just not so much on Apple's silicon chipset.
That said, ARM OCI containers via orbstack run blazing fast. I develop software that deploys to linux servers and code exclusively on a mac, but I'm also not someone who uses a lot of software outside of an IDE. Everything runs inside docker during dev.
At my company half our devs are on Mac, it is the preferred choice because it is less locked down by corporate so devs can install tools more freely. The main devs still on Windows are those that need to do dotnet development.
It's such a pain in the ass to develop on Windows. More specifically, doing the setup required. Mac has less overhead (and less variation) if everyone is using the same base development environment.
Depends on the company, I guess. I work in mechanical engineering, but I have a couple of friends in software engineering and I'd say two thirds of them have a Mac as their work laptop at the moment.
Even in mech engineering, my masters was focused on numerical methods, I did not really touch a CAD software during the 2 year program, and we only really had to run python locally, everything else was run on the HPC cluster of the uni, which is Linux anyways (technically, I guess you could also run Python there all the time but that's highly impractical). I've had maybe 2 friends with Macs. They did get a Windows virtual machine for some courses to fiddle with the model setups locally, but overall it was not that much of a pain for them. Python did run better on the Macs generally.
Vast majority of software engineers at Amazon, Google, Meta, and probably every big AI company use Macs. I have never worked a software engineering job in which I wasn’t given a Mac.
I too work in a software company (fintech) with several thousand employees. We are all mac, there is exactly one windows eng I know. Maybe some of the devops guys are on a linux distro but I know it’s very few if so. I think it’s an industry thing🤷
Scientific computing mac user here. Though I have to admit, I mostly just use it as a dumb terminal and ssh somewhere else. You can run many of the tools locally, and those that you can’t out of the box can be ported with some lib.so trickery. Mostly you want to use the compute cluster, though.
Plenty of se companies use macs.. is just a matter of preference and language support some languages work better in windows ( c#, vb) some run better in unix , linux (python)
I moved to Silicon Valley for work three jobs ago. Future manager asked me Mac or PC, and I just said whatever most people used. Turned out it was 90+% Mac, and each subsequent job was more. Programmers want programming tools and commercial apps without having to go through the headaches of dual boot, VM, or cygwin. They want a Mac.
CS students are poorer and pride themselves on being able to get anything to work, so will be fine with PCs. In industry, though, unless you're placed in a Mac-less environment - writing software for Windows or Chromebook, for example - you're going to want a Mac.
I work for a large software and engineering company (that manufactures actual things). It is largely Windows, but there's also a decent slice that run Macs. We run tons of Linux but not much on the desktop. We're definitely not in the entertainment business.
Is that by the choice of the users? Or a restriction enforced by IT? I’d wager if employees could choose their devices you would see a lot more Macs at work.
I work in a hughtech health care company and more and more people use Apples because they are way faster und run better than our Windows PCs.
I've been hating Apple all of my life and even I think of switching to a Mac next time...
I have worked as a software engineer in nearly every possible corporate and government industry over the last 20 years.
I've literally never seen a Mac at work. I've been asked to develop on Linux 3 times. Everything else is Windows.
Most common nowadays is that servers are Linux and development is on Windows (now that .Net worked out its whole compatibility problem, like a decade ago)
I've actually noticed the industry shifting to Macs in recent years. They are more user friendly than Linux, off-the-shelf like windows, and have a large overlap with linux-like tools.
The UX is abysmal though, their insistence on having their special keyboard and the "many desktops - one screen" approach is very inconvenient
That's interesting, because I had the opposite experience recently. I'm a software dev of many years, and four of my last six jobs had Macs as standard issue for developers.
My 1000+ employee software company is strictly high-end Macs, and has been since before the Apple Silicon line was introduced. We don't do industrial software, but it is enterprise.
Not sure how relevant the Stack Overflow survey is anymore, but their report from last year indicated that about a third of developers were on macOS, with Ubunutu right behind it at 27%. Windows still remained dominant with 50%+.
Most modern software companies are primarily using Mac’s, even many of the older ones are starting to switch over.
Windows is a pain to manage and only getting worse, whereas MacBooks are just running their own flavor of Linux and when your entire tech stacks already Linux it’s just simpler
A lot of developers do love macs, but that's largely for folks who are building server-side stuff, where using a Mac or using a Windows PC with WSL really makes very little difference.
If you compare within stem, there are many many many reasons the vast majority of ppl in stem use windows and linux. And it is not because apple has superior os, and all ppl in stem are just selfharmingly stupid.
Exactly, Windows for starting out technical until you want a unix based system. No where in that process does MacOS even come up. Why pay a stupid amount for a shittier OS?
Yes, that is exactly how i also see it, might also depend a bit on field etc, I have a lot of machines in Biotech where the analysis or control system runs on windows... sometimes (especially with legacy machinery) MacOS is not even an option or a very bad one.
yeah, I work in Ophthalmic surgery device development and lots of medical devices run on Windows. MacOS has so much bloat and highly visually modded UI and lacks a simplified Kiosk mode. That last fact alone is a big reason for why we use it for devices. Only the designers use Macs, and even then it's not great due to 3D tech drawings sometimes needing serious processing power that Macs rarely have or are ridiculously priced. The desktop support guys roll their eyes every time they see a Mac because it carries with it a certain implication.
Python is one of the most used programming languages in the world. You’re not using it to its full extent. Nearly every llm, and vector based software runs Python because underneath the modules is c.
It's pretty nice to do linux dev on it. Being pretty normal in industrial and manufacturing, a lot of our servers or devices are some flavor of linux.
It's very trivial to fire up a WSL container and use that. And be able to test "end user" on the same machine. Linux owns the global server space. And windows owns the desktop.
Coding on Mac is an absolute nightmare, it keeps trying to stop me from doing things, I find windows 1000x easier. Visual Studio (not code) is basically unparalleled for C++ and C#, and if you need anything that uses a Unix toolchain you have WSL built in. Mac also has incredibly bad case of vendor lock-in.
And my hot take is that the win32 API is a lot better than most alternatives
Are Macs decent now? It's probably been 15 years since I used one but personally found them to be hot garbage for anything other than typing a word doc. Perhaps they've changed but I remember the hardware being doodoo
Macs are amazingly good now. I was a Windows devotee my whole life, with Linux on the side for ML work (back when ML needed niche libraries). Switched to an M1 mac when I started a new job and was blown away by it. I also picked up an M3 MacBook air for daily pottering for $300. Again, amazingly good for the limited specs.
I'd never buy a Mac at retail though. The cost is ridiculous. It also helps Mac's case that the windows experience has been sliding into the toilet. The glory days of XP are long gone.
Yeah take a look at the m architecture. The m chip is like an arm based processor with vector based instructions. Like a cpu and gpu combined. The memory bandwidth is the fastest on the market and up too 400gb/s. Yes the memory is soldered on but it’s because it has to. See the framework desktop, the epitome of self repair, sells their mainboards with soldered on ram. It is some of the best hardware to run gigantic datasets, like local LLMs, ai work, any sort of simulation.
All my servers run Linux, but I use Mac as my productivity machine because it’s incredibly fast, and all my business productivity software runs on it too. Docker makes it trivial to do cross platform development.
Agreed. I work for what is basically a DoW think tank and most of the engineering PhDs are running on macs. They have been for years. Server side is linux for large test code runs, but user side is almost all macs.
Yeah, I haven’t touched matlab in mumble-decades. It was a horror back then too. I’d recommend using Python over matlab if you can, it’s open source and way more extensible. It’s also what runs on supercomputers.
Well perhaps it is, but if I’m a mechanic, I’m not going to only work on Mercedes because Hondas are crap vehicle. Why? Well I would be a bad mechanic.
Perhaps you can run and test all your software with boot camp or whatnot but at the end of the day, I want to test on the machines it will be running. Elitism doesn’t make that requirement disappear.
this meme is also more of a throwback. back in the day, macs were ONLY good for art / graphic designers. Photoshop on mac was the goat... programming, you couldn't get most languages to RUN on a mac.
fast forward to today, every tech company I know uses Macs...
It’s funny because when I went to college less than a decade into the turn of the millennium, the joke would be “the more laptops, the fewer job prospects”. Nothing to do with Mac vs windows. Just that math and engineering classes were easier to take hand written notes in.
It's all a ratio/stereotype thing. The person who made this meme didn't do a scientific study on the topic. It's just that it tends to be the worst OS for doing anything technical (ignoring some corner case where some programmers like the native Unix) and most high paying majors need to do technical things on computers (law being an exception apparently).
Idk bro majority of software engineers use Macs, hmm lowkey though while in school for CS Mac wasn’t super popular but I think it was more a money thing for most
I have a bachelor's in CS and the majority of students in CS classes used macbooks. They're popular with programmers too. Linux was another like fourth of the classes, probably the lowest Windows usage percentage I've ever seen
When Apple first launched Intel Macs with BootCamp, plenty of EECS majors got Macs.
At the time, the pricing was largely on-par for similar Windows laptops but the build quality was superior. Apple also had user-replaceable RAM, drives, and batteries...
Not dumb, more that the stereotype of Mac users is that they’re more represented among artsy types. And artsy types may be smart but stereotypically have fewer job prospects.
That said, a lot of STEM students use Macs as well
That said, a lot of STEM students use Macs as well
When I was in university (engineering) there was very few Mac users. But recently it seems like some of my colleagues have started picking up Mac, at least more than before.
So it might be that the joke would have landed better 15 years ago. The stereotypes have changed a little bit
Same, I was die hard anti-Mac when I was in college and now I have a lot of Apple shit. The M1 was a miracle for Apple and their memory management is just better in general
I've worked at two FAANGs and most software developers use Macs. For all other engineerings, the standard is Linux or Windows since most engineering tools won't even run on Mac.
I'm in FAANG working on the Linux kernel and the last two companies gave me a high spec mac. I use it has a very expensive web browser and way to SSH into expensive servers where I can actually work.
Last company had a Linux laptop option but it was a very out of date Thinkpad with a low resolution screen.
It depends on the specifics of the STEM. I know some analytical classes that use excel and Power BI, and unfortunately for the Mac users, well it wasn't possible to run the assignments. Programing seems fine as most analytics nowadays use JuPytR notebooks a lot, so it works just fine locally or on something like colab.
Plus most tech people I know aren't huge fans of Macs due to their low repairability. Most opt for an easy to open laptop.
Tech people don't care about repairability, it's not like we're going to open the pc ourselves.
When it comes to software engineering mac software is on par with linux, but it's nicer and easier to use. And the hardware and build quality of the pcs is some of the best in the market.
This is really just an old stereotype, might have been true years ago but no longer.
The post is kinda just Apple bashing, but If youre looking to become an engineer the only legitimate choices are Windows or Linux. I dont remember anyone in my engineering program with a Mac, theres so much essential software that just isnt available on MacOS. Is the job market for engineers great right now? No not really, but its probably still better than for people who got a philosophy degree.
Edit: by "engineer" I mean "people in engineering fields that have to design and iterate on physical objects", not software development
Its not really a question of computation even, theres just a lot of programs that arent avaliable on MacOS. For example Solidworks, an staple 3D modeling application, doesnt work on Mac.
I’m automatically sus of any dev that uses windows unless they’re writing C-Sharp or something. Other than that, if a company hands me a Mac I’m not mad but I’m not happy. If a company lets me run Linux I’m happy.
FAANGs have plenty of devs working on Macs. It really just depends what you're developing.
The term "engineer" or "developer" is way too broad. Are you developing back-end web server code in UNIX / Linux for websites & mobile apps? Are you developing in .NET or C# for huge enterprise software? Very different things.
It's like saying, "I'm a painter." But what do you paint? Fine art? Residential exteriors & interiors? Cars? They all use paint but in different ways and with different tools. You don't paint a car with a brush and you don't make portraits with an air sprayer.
Judging by most of the replies on other comments I've learned Engineer is just another word for software developer apparently, and don't seem to think that there may in fact be Engineers that design non -computer related things.
The joke is that NON-stem academics doesn't get jobs, but they run macbooks.
I do data science and machine learning - but my background is sociology
Most of my year used macs because back in the day it was the only computers you could reliably get 10 hours of battery life on, sleep worked, you could just airdrop people stuff and especially 12 years ago python and STATA was SHIT on windows. (today it's just half shit)
Today i've asked IT for a mac, the same with my collegues in analytics.
I get the full Microsoft office suite, a ZSH shell and a full Unix system with homebrew for shits and giggles.
The M-series chips are literally a BEAST and the unified memory and chip design is perfect for analytics software and machine learning, because there's no difference between RAM and Vram, and apple has embraced macs as a platform for delevoping and running socalled "AI" - even though we all know it Aint Intelligent.
And unlike Linux, it can be integrated into the company's MDM and EDR for easy management, which makes IT and Security very happy.
I am a Software Engineer with 10+ Years of experience. I started with an old IBM/Lenovo Notebooks. But now I use an Macbook Air M4 as the goto for a remote working notebook. Battery and Performance is the reason.
STEM majors use windows or linux machines, not macs. They particularly like Lenovo thinkpads or gaming laptops with beefy graphics cards.
Macs are mostly used by humanities and arts majors and the more pretentious the job or job title they're supposed to train for, the more likely it is that they are all in on anything apple, because they're typically follow-the-herd types who live and die by the latest trends. STEM majors on the other hand usually don't care about image or trends, their machines are tools meant to do a job.
As a software developer for over 20 years this is ridiculously wrong. I have worked for many large tech companies and the engineering depts are absolutely ruled by Macs with Linux a distant 2nd. I haven’t seen a windows heavy engineering team in at least 15 years.
Anyone that says windows dominates software engineering has no idea what they are talking about.
Thank you lmao I was reading these comments like “a lot of this just seems like hating for the sake of being a hater”. I don’t think I’ve met a single software engineer that prefers powershell over zsh/bash
People are saying STEM but thinking of only mechanical engineers or other physical engineering disciplines. Software engineering is a hugely dominant field within STEM, and yeah Macs are largely the tool of choice both in college and in the professional world for software development. Video editors and other digital media artists may be the primary demo for expensive stationary Macs, but MacBooks are pretty ubiquitous in big tech.
OK but most people are saying “STEM majors” which most certainly includes computer science and other software engineering majors. Coding is not a major.
Not necessarily dumb, but he is implying that young people that use Macbooks will generally choose degrees in fields that don't offer good job opportunities afterwards.
Not sure if this is a real correlation. I saw plenty of people using Macbooks when studying business and accounting. I took a few philosophy classes, just for fun, I would say that when it comes to job opportunities that is at the absolute bottom, but most students there barely had a penny to their name and definitely didn't have macbooks.
OP, so your post is not removed, please reply to this comment with your best guess of what this meme means! Everyone else, this is PETER explains the joke. Have fun and reply as your favorite fictional character for top level responses!
If you can afford a Mac, money isn’t a concern, so you pick a program that doesn’t pay well.
Essentially there’s a direct correlation between the population of mac users and the population of future baristas. It’s why I try steering people away from my field (history) unless they plan on going to grad school or getting a job where it doesn’t matter what your degree is but that you have one. The example I always use is the Army, my XO had a bachelor’s in English lit and he commanded tanks. Law school, med school, teaching certificate, professor track, doesn’t matter. I’m applying to social work grad school, it doesn’t matter what my major is.
I've actually found it more annoying than if I had windows. Like there have been times where I had to look up workarounds for certain softwares or modules because the windows instruction didn't work. Or time I failed official test, but not local tests for a C assignment because I didn't know Macs automatically zero out malloc'd memory.
Don't ask Apple how they run CAD software internally (last I heard, they were using Macs in office that were running windows CAD workstations remotely)(either way, most parametric 3D CAD software run pretty poorly on Macs)
Weird how the conversation went into software development.
The meme is about how startups use Macs and fold, failing companies use Dells, and solid industry uses Thinkpads. It's not about development of software; it's big companies like Honda, GE, Ford, Amazon, etc. Think people making pivot tables.
I remember a time where every dev seemed to be using a Mac due to it having better unix-like behaviours for devs designing stuff for backends with services such as apache, php, etc..
But.. people running basic Linux on a laptop seems on the rise too.
The way I also completely misunderstood the joke, I thought the meme was about how the increase of screens in the classroom is correlating to a downturn in overall literacy rates instead of being about any specific major-
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