To be clear it's what HN Users that are interested in a web technology use.... and surprise surprise there are a lot of Macs in that sector.<p>If you posted something interesting to games developers I'd wager a lot more Windows PCs and a lot few Macs.
As with the recent post on HN's age/gender, this does not reflect data obtained ~5 months ago through a HN poll [0]. On one hand, the poll probably has some self-selection bias, it is only representative of registered users and it asks "what's your primary OS" rather than "what OS are you using right now". On the other hand, the "date range picker for Twitter Bootstrap" post was probably heavily biased towards people who use Bootstrap and it measures what OS visitors were using when visiting which is not necessarily their primary OS. Anyways, here's the results from the HN poll:<p><pre><code> OS Points
-- ------
OSX 3252 (40.9%)
Linux 2666 (33.5%)
Windows 1729 (21.7%)
iOS 104 (1.3%)
Android 99 (1.2%)
Other Unix
variant 73 (0.9%)
Chrome OS 20 (0.3%)
Other 15 (0.2%)
</code></pre>
[0] <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3786674</a>
From my Hacker Newsletter project (<a href="http://hackernewsletter.com" rel="nofollow">http://hackernewsletter.com</a>) I can say that about 70% of HN users use Gmail.
Internet Explorer didn't even make the list for browsers. I'm not really surprised, but as a web developer it's always nice to be reassured that it's dying/dead.
I'm surprised Windows users outnumber Linux users. I'd like to see a breakdown as to how this changes by time of day. I'd suspect Windows users are in second place because of the workplace. At night I bet linux gets a boost.
I was surprised to see that iOS is beating firefox. While this is just one website, I hadn't realized firefox had dropped so much in the ranks. It's still my browser of choice.
The data is presented in a neutral way, but from the comments I get a sense that people are happy that other people use what they use. Why is an Apple (or Chrome) echo chamber desirable to having discussions with people that use a variety of technologies and software?
I am surprised that the estimate for Mac is so high. I would have never expected that. It could be the topics that he is posting. Either way interesting read.