

PG Essay Return of the Mac Revisited - csuper
http://www.cupomud.com/2010/02/os-of-choice-for-hackers-creators-and-nerds/

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ugh
Just skimming the list of The Setup I count at least eight people who always
used Macs. That’s more than twenty percent. Which means that if you
interviewed them five years ago you already would definitely have gotten a
different result then PG. Five years ago.

Not a kosher comparison.

~~~
csuper
That is a good point. But certainly some of the folks PG observed had always
user Macs as well.

It would be interesting to know how many people he had interviewed at the time
he wrote the essay.

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ComputerGuru
The numbers in TFA mean absolutely nothing: he's comparing oranges and
orangoutangs.

What _would_ be nice is if PG could post the latest stats :)

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philwelch
Where to start.

First off, he's comparing proportions of OS use from two totally different
datasets--one is proportions of web visitors to ycombinator.com, and one is
systems described in interviews by usesthis.com. You can't meaningfully
compare two totally different populations like this, can you?

But even if you could, you wouldn't want to represent the results as some type
of off-axis skewed 3D pie chart, because those _only distort the data_.

So you have dishonest data, represented dishonestly. If you want to make a
blog post about this, ask PG for his ycombinator.com visitor stats for this
past...whatever period is equivalent to the period he got his numbers from in
2005. And visualize it using honest two-dimensional pie charts. And then you
might have something useful to say.

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nirlevy
The author documents a drastic change in browser use to view his site from
2005 to 2010. Mac goes from 18.8% to 78.9%.

But I am hesitant to trust his website as a reflection of the entire "Hackers,
Creators, and Nerds" Community.

~~~
simonw
The 2005 stats are from visits to ycombinator.com (I think that was before
news.ycombinator.com launched). The 2010 stats are a breakdown of the 38
people interviewed for <http://usesthis.com/>

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run4yourlives
"For your sake I hope Zed Shaw misses this one."

Classic, and accurate. Zed would be justified in his rant here I think.

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bch
NetBSD here.

