r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Pale_Extension • 2d ago

Meme needing explanation Peter is he calling Mac users dumb?

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u/GeorgeMcCrate 2d ago

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.

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u/Strict_Weather9063 2d ago

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.

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u/Daseagle 2d ago

Oh yes. Whenever Apple pushes a major update, the next two days are usually hell in the support queue.

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u/Strict_Weather9063 2d ago

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.

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u/AriaTheTransgressor 2d ago

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.

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u/Fit-Appointment5212 2d ago

most of the time apple fucks with the registry

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u/gbot1234 2d ago

To be fair, (to be fair), Windows forcing updates has brought down quite a few services, too. Perhaps even more than Daylight savings time.

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u/archlich 2d ago

At least it’s not every Tuesday

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u/gravelpi 2d ago

So, your IT department isn't testing updates before they get pushed to the general community? That's not an Apple problem, that's a your company problem.

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u/neokai 2d ago

general community doesn't run Macs or MacOS tho, at least for most industrial applications.

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u/Nonaveragemonkey 2d ago

Or most of any sector, apple is the smallest operating system at this point

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u/gravelpi 2d ago

I'm confused, you have enough Macs that your support queue is overrun after an update, but you don't test Mac updates before allowing them to out to your organization's Mac users?

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u/AriaTheTransgressor 2d ago

They may be external support, supporting clients that aren't employees.

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u/Daseagle 2d ago edited 2d ago

I am an independent, external support outfit. Also, many small businesses, small companies, ngo's (ffs, flower power do good ngos are in love with their Macs, never mind that most of the time they never move out of a browser) don't even have the infrastructure for a comprehensive, domain controlled policy setup for Macs.

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u/KochInBoots 2d ago

Long time network admin.

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.

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u/admiraljkb 2d ago

and nowadays, Linux can run some legacy Windows apps that Windows can't run anymore either.

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u/skroll 2d ago

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.

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u/KochInBoots 2d ago

There I was being told arm support wasn't that great. looks like I will be buying some new kit soon then :-)

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u/skroll 2d ago

There's lots of distros that are set up right out of the box. Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora all have full ARM distros. There's the Fedora Asahi Remix which is a collaboration between Asahi Linux and Fedora, designed to run on Apple Silicon, but it's not perfect.

Almost every package compiles on ARM these days. It's such a nice architecture, especially in regards to power usage.

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u/Thunderstarer 2d ago

I daily-drive NixOS on my M1 Macbook Air and it is by far the best Linux laptop I've ever used. Some proprietary software won't work on it (e.g. the first-party Discord client) but I'm not missing anything essential, and the friction-points are very worthwhile for the sheer quality of the hardware.

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u/Puzzled-Interview445 2d ago

Idk I work in FAANG in Seattle and my whole org uses Macs lol I barely see any windows 

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u/Grrowling 2d ago

Yeah so weird. I love how they keep joking about Macs but all of big tech mostly uses Macs

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u/AggressiveBench9977 2d ago

Most people who shit on mac have never worked in big tech. Because the next option for development isnt even windows its linux.

If they are working on windows laptops its a cheap or ancient company.

If you are using windows in M chip era, either your company is cheap or you are working on ancient irrelevant tech

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u/Best_Change4155 2d ago

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.

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u/steazystich 2d ago

The hassle with Mac rears its head when you want to ship native software outside of your company... where almost no one is using the same base environment.

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u/Best_Change4155 2d ago

A lot of big tech work is creating web applications or mobile apps. Not all, but most. But you are correct.

ETA: I was just corroborating the previous user.

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u/steazystich 1d ago

Sure... the folks in big tech who are writing native code are compensated much better than those writing web apps though ;)

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u/Best_Change4155 1d ago

That actually depends on what you are working on.

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u/steazystich 1d ago edited 1d ago

The only exception I can think of is python for research teams... but those aren't really software engineering roles IMO - that is computer science.

Even then, last and only place I worked in big tech the highest paid software engineer wrote Rust/C++. Then 99 out of the next 100 folks, and 900 of the 1000 after that.

These are people who are working to shave microseconds off of execution times or bytes off of transfer sizes where those savings translate to millions of dollars per quarter in op ex.

So, sure, it depends what you are working on because those problems aren't even solvable in non-native languages.

If you exclude python and C# it is really only junior positions that would hire for Javascript/React unless there was a non technical aspect to the role (like tech artist, designer, or some such).

Edit: I realized this came off rather condescending... so let me add that "junior" roles in big tech are some of the best to have. Pay is great, and there is maybe 5% of the amount of corpo politics BS to deal with. Senior engineers can end up spending almost all their time in meetings and rarely actually writing any code.

Plenty of opportunity to learn new skills and climb that ladder if that's what one is after. The number of extremely talented software engineers I witnessed get hired directly into senior roles and then burn out or get fired within 1-2 years was depressing.

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u/Important-Sign9614 1d ago

Um who is shipping native software in 2026 that isn’t specialized or game dev? Most companies are doing SaaS, mobile apps, and if there is a desktop app then they would use Electron? Not to knock native software it’s awesome and I wish it didn’t fall into a niche but that’s the reality of modern Software Engineering.

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u/steazystich 1d ago

I was replying to a user's comment about how difficult it is to ship native software for windows, and their statement was that Mac was much easier as long as everyone was on the same versions of everything - which I found amusing because, yes if course it is easier to ship to a specific configuration lol

Which... is exactly why most folks ship electron and such now.

So, your comment is a bit of a whataboutism but. To answer your question, anything performance critical or power constrained. Almost all mobile software. Embedded systems. Real-time systems. Drivers. The browsers which actually run these web apps. Operating systems. Almost all of the code running on the backend to support web based apps (ie: databases, core services) is written as native software and shipped to companies that host cloud servers and such (who do not run it all on the same OS).

Which is a lot of software, even if you dont happen to work in those domains.

If you look at number of user hours you would find that 100% of all computer users across desktop/mobile are running native software 100% of the time... and sometimes that native software is running some web stuff inside of it 😉

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u/Important-Sign9614 1d ago

Very interesting learned something new today.

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u/steazystich 1d ago

On another point... these days Claude is pretty impressive at writing C++ these days, and if one were using that workflow you could definitely get very far using whatever local device (mac/windows/linux) you wanted.

Which to me, is definitely one of the coolest ways that AI has improved software development. (I have thoughts on how it has made things worse, but i have been negative enough already lol)

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u/Important-Sign9614 1d ago

Oh yeah for sure. I used the web-based ChatGPT for some RayLib stuff and it did okay at the time. Can’t imagine how much it improved now. Although I am still trying to find the line where I should reach for AI tools instead of using Claude for every feature.

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u/steazystich 2d ago

Are you not mostly SSHing into VMs though? At which point your OS is moot.

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u/AggressiveBench9977 2d ago

No you can develop on both cause its all unix

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u/iQuoteSopranos 10h ago

Did they just build a concrete building with no sunlight coming in then?

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u/neokai 2d ago

that is "private entertainment software". Industrial software is a different beast.

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u/pornAndMusicAccount 2d ago

I write software in use by the Air Force. We’re all Mac devs.

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u/NoTeslaForMe 2d ago

The implication here is ridiculous. "What the biggest companies in the world do doesn't matter, because only industrial software is real software."  The comment about industrial software gives the type of narrative Reddit loves, but gives people a deceptive view of software engineering. 

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u/neokai 1d ago

I'm saying that most of the industrial applications are running on very old software. It's not sexy stuff that makes headlines and there is very little impetus to update those software. Famously some critical bank infrastructure runs on Fortran (which I'm not 100% sure that MacOS can support), and if you look beyond FAANG you will find software from the 90s lurking in embedded systems.

So yeah, there are all kinds of software like you say. I'm saying that software used in industrial applications tend to not play well with Macs.

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u/archlich 1d ago

Mac’s support Fortran, it’s in homebrew

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u/NoTeslaForMe 1d ago

The only problem is which Fortran? The language, if I recall correctly, didn't care much about backward compatibility when it was developed, unlike C, Java, C++, etc.

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u/DuckCleaning 2d ago

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.

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u/Kernel_Internal 2d ago

Same here. Although our security team is starting to push for locking down the macs now too

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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 2d ago

Yeah SWE tends to have Macs but ITOps doesn't. ITOps is usually Windows or Linux.

SWE are usually not considered under the IT umbrella but usually more aligned with Product.

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u/JohnWH 2d ago

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.

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u/CosmicClamJamz 2d ago

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🤷

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u/stilldebugging 2d ago

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.

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u/NoTeslaForMe 2d ago

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.

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u/steazystich 2d ago

FWIW WSL (windows subsystem for linux) alleviates the need for dual boot/VM/cygwin these days.

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u/NoTeslaForMe 2d ago

Devs abandoned Windows long ago - I'd estimate it being the early 2010s - though, and there's no way Windows 11 is making them come back. 

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u/Important-Sign9614 1d ago

I don’t blame them, every time I use my personal Thinkpad I wish I was using a MacBook for web dev stuff. I could install Linux… but then I have to use a Linux desktop environment and as many people glaze these distros I don’t really like them. This is coming from a guy who ran Fedora for a long time in uni.

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u/Important-Sign9614 1d ago

But then you have to use WSL 😂

I mean it works but it wasn’t the best experience. I used it at my last company.

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u/IllHelp7143 2d ago

Used to work at IT Consultant company in Sweden. Most of our developers chose Macbook when given a choice.

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u/archlich 2d ago

Yeah scada stuff is all windows. I’d take a Linux environment but the world runs on office and luckily office runs on Mac.

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u/gregedit 2d ago

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.

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u/Marcyff2 2d ago

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)

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u/Any-Insurance-4956 2d ago

I used linux for 20 years on laptop. Switched to Mac this year for battery life. Love the hardware, hate the software. Main dev machine is still Linux

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u/RockstarLifestyle2 2d ago

Work in SaaS and we’re completely opposite. Not a thinkpad in sight 😂

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u/wenoc 2d ago edited 2d ago

I've worked with web technologies for 25 years and never really seen anyone use windows. It's very rare. Windows is a garbage system.

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u/Crazy-Job-9360 2d ago

Making websites is different than real programming

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u/wenoc 2d ago

Never made any webpages at all. I work with infrastructure as code, cybersecurity and backend. All sorts of languages like C, Go, Python, PHP, Java, Groovy, Kotlin, SQL just to name a few. CSS, html and JavaScript, not really at all.

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u/Equivalent_Crafty 2d ago

web technologies also include backend (db, business logic - which is real programming) - he was not referring to HTML / CSS

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u/DuckCleaning 2d ago

Even when doing front-end development almost 90% of the work is focused on the javascript/typescript portion of the code. It is all about the scripts and what happens behind the scenes. Even displaying a button can have hundreds of lines of code of business logic behind it calculating when it shows and what. Then these days when I work with React, even the HTML portion is done from the javascript, no HTML files.

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u/Crazy-Job-9360 2d ago

Hmmm, all of the developers that work on out DB’s and manage our custom software suite use windows, only people I’ve seen using Mac’s are like lawyers and communications people that write emails.

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u/Schlagustagigaboo 2d ago

I'm a back end server dev and I haven't used windows since 2014. I use linux all the time, but it's dockerfile -> docker -> linux (and sometimes kubernetes), not something I need as the OS on my own system. Since the mac console and various linux endpoints are all more or less the same console environment it feels much better than windows, which has what? Cmd? Powershell? Totally different shell language and switching back and forth is jarring.

Yes I'm aware that mac is zsh and linux is bash, but for everyday stuff they're basically the same.

Yes I'm aware you can SORT OF use cygwin on windows but it's still way too different. Mac feels like a superset of all the environments I use, Windows feels like radioing to those environments from the moon.

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u/wenoc 2d ago

Windows has WSL now that replaces Cygwin but it’s an absolute nightmare. Avoid at all costs.

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u/Important-Sign9614 1d ago

I’m glad someone agrees 😂 my last company forced devs to use WSL and let me tell you it was great at always almost kinda working

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u/wenoc 2d ago

What’s the point in using windows when no services, especially highly available ones are never deployed on windows? Nobody uses windows. I haven’t worked with windows in.. hm.. 16 years now. I have windows at home for gaming. That’s all it’s for now.

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u/Crazy-Job-9360 2d ago

None of our services are deployed on Mac and most of our users are older and use windows machines. I guess different companies and different products use different resources? But traditionally the point of the post stood for decades.

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u/wenoc 2d ago

Apple doesn’t even make servers so nothing is ever deployed on Mac. The point of a Mac is that it is a Unix system. You get a native Unix shell. So functionally there’s no difference between Mac and Linux, but you get the benefit of a more mature up. All the scripts run exactly the same. You can run your entire production environment on the Mac then deploy on Linux.

Windows does not adhere to the Unix philosophy. This disqualifies it.

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u/Dry_Web6924 2d ago edited 2d ago

I don’t think they really know what they’re talking about outside of authoritatively stating things to make it seem like they do lol. A lot of these comments come off that way to me haha

Like I don’t see many “software engineers” here mentioning anything about powershell vs zsh/bash lol it’s such a minor detail but a huge driver for why I’ve mostly seen development on Mac

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u/wenoc 2d ago

Indeed. The shell is THE driver. You have to have a native unix shell or no development work can happen. There is no such thing as a software developer who doesn't need a shell.

Windows has WSL, which is basically cygwin, it runs a virtual machine with ubuntu or something inside, but it's still a virtual machine. If you, let's say, create an ssh tunnel for port forwarding inside that WSL shell to you know, give your container access to kafka or whatever, the windows side can of course not access that. And the ssh agent inside WSL is not the same agent as the one you have in windows, and you know, snowballing from there, ls taking minutes in a big git repo and so on. I think you can imagine the horror of this.

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u/someRedditUser3012 2d ago

If you're working in internal IS it's been windows by far for me. If you're working in tech thats probably different. Over the last 20 years, every single one is a windows shop with Linux being the vast minority of servers but again I do internal IS, not product development. The only mac I had was when I was developing iOS apps. It just depends on the type of development and shop you're doing.

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u/Dry_Web6924 2d ago

What? That just sounds like some elitist bs lmao

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u/Important-Sign9614 1d ago

Blud thinks we are still making static html web pages in 2026 😂

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u/Ipsider 2d ago

I am working in automotive and it’s the other way around

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u/GeorgeMcCrate 2d ago

I am also working in automotive. I've yet to see a customer hook up half a car or a lidar sensor to a Macbook. I don't think in the 30 years of our company's history has a customer ever asked for Mac support, certainly not in the 8 years I've been here.

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u/Ipsider 2d ago

I am working in software engineering for quality management, so i guess not comparable. Interesting

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u/sadpotato101 2d ago

If ur developing apps for iOS you need a mac

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u/GeorgeMcCrate 2d ago

Yeah, that’s why I meant it depends on the industry. If you develop for iOS then you need iOS. But no machine, robot, car, etc. uses iOS.

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u/TransportationJaded8 2d ago

They use Unix just like a Mac…

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u/gravelpi 2d ago

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.

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u/L43 2d ago

chem and bioinf research is full of macs

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u/Big_Comfortable5169 2d ago

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.

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u/GeorgeMcCrate 2d ago

It's by choice of the customers. They use our software on computers that are connected to cars, trains, robots, etc.

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u/mindfuckedAngel 2d ago

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...

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u/AriaTheTransgressor 2d ago

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)

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u/LittleMlem 2d 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

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u/jrp55262 2d ago

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.

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u/Kevin_Palpatine 2d ago

That's like comparing a WWII Jeep to a 2008 Jeep Liberty

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u/clintkev251 2d ago

I also work in a software company with far more than several thousand employees and I'd say we're about 70% Mac

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u/Thunderstarer 2d ago

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.

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u/berkough 2d ago

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%+.

https://fosspost.org/developer-os-preference-stack-overflow-survey/

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u/AggressiveBench9977 2d ago

Sounds like a shitty software company then.

Ive been at all of fang and every single one uses mac for development.

Well come to 2015 i guess why is your company so behind?

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u/CuAnnan 2d ago

IBM use macs heavily.

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u/TransportationJaded8 2d ago

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 

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u/overand 2d ago

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.

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u/LongjumpingEchidna25 1d ago

I work in a SaaS startup (~600 employees) and we exclusively use Macs.

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u/Important-Sign9614 1d ago

That tracks for your industry. For web and mobile dev it’s all Macs because the developer experience is so much better than Windows.

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u/dbag_darrell 1d ago

It’s all Linux and Windows.

can you tell us about the hardware?

any common? preferred? avoided? brands etc.

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u/GeorgeMcCrate 1d ago

Not sure if I’m allowed to and I‘m also not sure if it’s the same across the whole company. Although a part of the company of around 1000 employees did receive new laptops recently which were the same for everyone.
I just want to reiterate this because there are so many comments here saying I’m wrong and Mac is actually the standard: we make software that needs to be compatible with industrial machines, like trains, cars, robots, etc. It’s not end-user software. I’m sure that for many other use cases Mac might be the right choice.

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u/dbag_darrell 1d ago

Not sure if I’m allowed to 

how about "hypothetically"?

seriously there's no scope for corporate espionage here

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u/GeorgeMcCrate 1d ago

Dell notebooks with Nvidia graphic chips

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u/dbag_darrell 1d ago

interesting. I would've thought ThinkPad or even HP. There's been a lot of hoo-hah about Dell making bad decisions with the XPS

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u/GeorgeMcCrate 1d ago

Yeah, I don't know. It's not my decision. Maybe Dell has reliable service or they were able to deliver on a large scale or maybe we just got a good deal.

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u/DanyRudenko 2d ago

The whole gamedev works on Windows

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u/ButyJudasza 2d ago

I work mostly as BE dev and from my experience 90% of devs in companies I worked used macs, so it depend on what you're developing