I'm not really sure you can call macs "popular" even here in the US.... they're a professional luxury for the most part. I say this with three macs within reach of me.
Well, they're a steady 10% of the PC market, which would make 1 in 10 computer owners in the US have one. Perhaps more have Macs than any other PC brand (if we break them down individually, e.g. Dell, HP, Asus, Microsoft, etc.).
Any coffeeshop is choke full of Mac laptop yielding people. Any university the same. Most developer conferences (Java, Rails, JS, Python, Golang, etc) is 50%+ Macs on the audience (and close to 80% on the . Stack Overflow poll puts Mac desktop use by devs at 27% (Windows 45%/Linux 26%).
I mean this is fair but I don’t see much point in comparing Apple to a single commodity pc manufacturer, no disrespect intended (I love my xps 13). I suspect coffee shops and universities are simply full of the professional class I implied earlier, which makes sense to me.
Also, go to a community college and count the number of macs there. There’s a clear class bias here.
It really depends on the programming culture. Game developers and many enterprise software developers almost universally develop on windows. I’ve had conversations with some people from those areas who have been shocked at the idea software developers use macs - they personally don’t know anyone who does.
But web development shops (especially node/react/etc), consulting, and SV startups seem to pretty consistently use macs.
It’s hard to intuitively tell how popular any of this stuff is in absolute terms because we’re all individually trapped in filter bubbles based on the kind of programmers we interact with.
