This is because of the cold. Apple Laptops dominate because they are (were at the time, anyway), the only screens that would survive those temperatures.
Reference: I designed and led the build of the system used by the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium for managing equipment and rentals for scientists in the arctic back in the 2Ks.
One of the things I loved about Reddit was the super niche experts dropping into the comment section. I’m so glad Lemmy has this too.
Woa… I have become those whom I cherish. Haha
I wonder how realistic that is; almost all of the science people I’ve met run Linux
My guess would be that few of these machines are used for ordinary web-browsing, or not even online.
How do you think they got these metrics? People aren’t going down there to do science or tourism without being able to communicate back home. It is almost always just statistics from the identifying header information of web traffic. It’s not at all uncommon for web traffic from Linux programs to not identify the operating system. I know in my experience identifying as Linux in a browser would be more likely to cause problems than offer any benefit.
Apple devices make sense - how else are you going to deal with the overheating problems?
apples still have overheating problems? that was a problem with the first macintosh. All because genius engineer and giant among men Steve Jobs didn’t think vents were trendy.
I guess the apples don’t fall far from the tree.
All joking aside, I haven’t had issues with Macs overheating in years, especially with the M chips. Last time I had an issue was when they tried to cram an i9 in a MBP.
Now the Dell laptops we have at work on the other hand, I’ve had to down clock them in bios so they don’t run at 100% or they will literally overheat just running windows. One of my coworkers has to run his upside down or it doesn’t get enough air through the vents to prevent it from auto shutting down due to thermal issues.
Dell
Well there’s your problem, I’ve instituted an IT purchasing policy with a whole section dedicated to banned brands, HP is first and Dell a close second lol (power is nice sometimes lmao)
Would love to hear your thoughts on HP. I had an internship at a IT company doing general setup and maintenance for businesses IT and since each consultant managed their own customer they often stuck with their own brands.
Having setup some of these I often felt like Lenovo was hot garbage, I’ve had a lenovo laptop with terrible manufacturing issues and the company I was at too and some of my friends. I would feel lucky if I get a Lenovo laptop without errors. Dell I haven’t heard anything bad of in general, one employee usually preferred buying them and then one other preffered HP. There was one or two people there who ordered Lenovo simply because they were so much cheaper for the specs but build quality and other components are just so garbage.
Of course, I’m not speaking about their budget 300 euro to 700 euro laptops now. The ones I was able to handle and setup were all 1300 to 3500 euros.
Interesting and sad to hear. Personally I’ve gone with Lenovo if I’m not going with Mac. Heck, My wife has a 2011 Lenovo which has been running flawlessly. The only thing I did was bump the RAM and put in an SSD when Win7 upgraded to 10. Maybe I just skipped the crappy years?
I find that interesting. I would expect that many scientists are “nerds” and would lean towards Linux. Also would suspect the ratio of scientist vs population would be much higher.
Guess I’ve been proven wrong.
i feel like if you’re not sat stationary at a workstation (who is these days) what you want is a laptop that’s good at being a laptop. 99% of the software developers i work with (not a small number) use Macbook Pros. they are well built, have good components, have best in class battery life (we’ll see how things shake out with Qualcomm), and are BSD based and therefore Unix compatible. my servers and gaming/CUDA PC? Linux all day. my laptop? Macbook. i’m not ideological enough to have range anxiety every time i step away from my desk. plus any decent sized org is going to have to administrate these machines, from scientists to administrators, and catering to .4% of your users is not a good ROI if your software vendors struggled for 8 years to get their Windows 98 based specialty sensor software to run on Mac.
that .4% is likely not 0 because they are nerds.
seriously tho if Qualcomm chips can make a Linux book that lasts all day i would happily make the switch
I agree quite a bit. One thing to note is ever since the m1-3 chips and breakage with brew, my local circle is going other machines. I know brew eventually fixed things but some packages never got updated/broke permanently.
i haven’t personally had trouble with that since early 2023, but it depends on your dependencies
Yeah it’s much better now. Things have mostly settled. It was more of a knee jerk reaction tbh. But it did get more people interested/exposed to Linux for dev machines. Which I think is good for the long run.
We need good options as devs. Mac/Linux are still my gotos for that reason.
Long time CentOS and Ubuntu user here. I switched to OSX because of the Apple Silicon speed and battery life. I still spend a lot of my day ssh into various Linux boxes, but running OSX on Apple Silicon has made my laptop use much more enjoyable since I’m not constantly worried about where I’m going to plug in to charge my laptop anymore.
They are nerds who care about other things than their operating system. That’s like wondering why they also don’t build their own networks down there and self host everything. Those are particular hobbies that don’t interest the vast majority of people, nerd or otherwise.
Yup. At work I manage thousands of Linux servers. At home? I run Windows. It’s a job, not a hobby for me.
mac was very popular in academia even before osx. It was like the only place you would find macs in the early aughts.
Apple was popular in academia even before Mac OS.
The Apple II was gaining a lot of popularity with colleges before the Mac even came out. And by the time System 7 was renamed to Mac OS 7 in the mid 90s Apple had gone HARD on getting Macs (and until the 90s Apple IIs) into all schools levels.
