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
Wouldn’t you want something purpose built for it? Like a Panasonic Toughbook or an Intel 10850k?
You’d think, but the macs held up great, and were easier to replace as they were often rented so needed to be sourced regularly.
Strange because that’s where penguins live.
You’d think with all those penguins…
The one place where MacBooks having terrible cooling is a feature.
Macbooks would not survive the antarctic outdoors…
Me either
Must be a design flaw, maybe you should try a refund.
I keep messaging the devs but no response.
I read the title and was like that can’t be right. I know that the South Pole base runs a data center so I’ve always just assumed that ran Linux. Then I looked at the graph and realized it’s desktop usage and it makes sense now.
Maybe it’s not about the scientists but about the tourists. What kind of people go on vacations in Antarctica?
Tourism visitor numbers in Antarctica have risen to over 100,000 a year
With all those tourists… let me guess: Antarctica is facing problems with trash scattered all around?
You mean apple products?
Well, they are half-eaten on the back, so checks out.
Apple products have really great temp resistance
Username Checks Out
Wierd, given all the penguins are there
Penguins are OS traitors.
The Russian spy penguins all run their own homebrew OS developed by Putin himself.
I know right?, even though I post this as a joke but I’m genuinely surprised
I wonder how realistic that is; almost all of the science people I’ve met run Linux
It’s the cold. See comment: https://lemmy.nowsci.com/comment/10188718
Yeah I feel like especially for like data analysis equipment which you would think there would be a lot of there. Stuff like that probably just has no way to get counted
what do you think the 17% unknown is?
Whatever OS the space monsters living under the ice cap use
Linux is the only interplanetary OS.
BSD/very outdated Linux kernel? XD
TempleOS
The long nights demand the holy light of TempleOS
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?
But you have a lot of cold air to cool it down, and on a side note it makes your room warmer which you might want in that cold region 😅
(But the energy savings is hard to argue with)
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.
MacBooks haven’t had overheating problems since Apple switched to their own SOCs.
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.
How long ago was this?
Many years ago, HP was actually pretty good even on their budget lines of the time. Then those got shitty to keep costs low, and it just creeped up from there until shitty cost cutting was evident throughout all their other lines up through premium business class laptops
Also, HP’s bullshit on other areas like Printing is what earned them the top spot
Dell suffers the same enshittification on their laptop lines that HP did, just a bit behind. I cannot tell you how many batteries turned into spicy pillows in just MONTHS after being opened even on their supposed premium business laptops
Lenovo used to be shit, but I’ve noticed they’ve stepped their game up the last few years while OTOH Asus is the opposite being good at first but now starting to show signs of enshittification.
Basically, brand loyalty is BS any brand can turn to shit at any time and any brand can go to being a diamond again (Except HP, they’ve become irredeemable in my eyes) and those business contracts to get bulk discounts serve no purpose other than to lock in IT departments to that specific brand instead of being able to be flexible when the times change
I had my internship there this year. The issues with my lenovo laptop started in 2021 after I bought it, managed to get my money back after 2 years late last year and decided to go full time on the Steam Deck as my personal computer alongside a portable monitor.
The HP laptops all felt pretty solid when I set them up, the company gave me a spare Lenovo laptop that was just laying around that worked okay, forgot which model but I think it was probably around their 1200 euro range probably. But the HPs didn’t have much in terms of keyboard flex and the trackpad felt really nice, however I was only having it for a couple of hours before they were being repackaged to get to the customer so no real time to judge anything.
I ralso recognised having brand loyalty towards prefab computers were pointless pretty early on. Everything from the lack of upgraidability to the lack of easy access to repairs and sending enormous parts for minor things just wasn’t cutting it for me. I’m glad with my Steam Deck now actually, with my monitor and wireless keyboard and mouse I can manage my own IT stuff at home from anywhere and do my dev stuff pretty comfortably. Knowing I can also go to ifixit to buy spare parts whenever I want is a nice bonus!
As for HP being shit in every other area, yea, I’m always gonna keep in mind to not buy their printers and stay away from them as much as possible.
What did add up on Lenovo’s side was their customer support in my country. They were very kind and helpful regarding my issue but I couldn’t sit around and wait for it to be fixed and them trying 100 different things.
But thank you for telling me your experience, I’ll make sure to keep it in mind when getting my job and hopefully have the opportunity to be able to give someone something that won’t break!
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?
Almost sounds like it, these were all recent experiences. I’ve been looking at Lenovo previously as a potential “look-at-first” brand, can’t really say goto since if there was something more fitting I’d drop them in a heart beat back when looking for laptops but their offerings were cheaper and on paper didn’t seem to lack much.
We went from surface to Lenovo 😄
That honestly feels like a downgrade to me
That could be… I did not decide 😂
I actually don’t know! It was a meme a while ago, but they might have fixed it by now.
So this is why the globe is warming
Macintosh heat sinking into ice-caps.
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.
It’s the cold. See comment: https://lemmy.nowsci.com/comment/10188718
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.
to be fair the apple II was a fairly common computer in that age (appleII 80’s im talking here not the 90’s stuff). they were like the first things out there and ibm came later and ibm clones came still later. But yeah mac worked for the position in the schools.
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
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.
My sister got a tuxedo at work 😮 and damn are those nice laptops! Best battery life I ever saw on a laptop not running macOS.
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.
Statcounter relies on web tracking to try to estimate the usage shares. Theoretically, there could be millions of science PCs running Linux, but one guy is browsing the internet with a Windows PC. Basically, take this data with a massive grain of salt…
Do you really believe that this is a real data?
these reports are very flawed. a lot of websites are only capable of identifying windows or apple computers. tons of them mis-identify linux as windows.
They use Apple. And then bitch that its update process is so bad, it can’t restart where it left off when the connection breaks, it can’t use caches/mirrors properly, blabla. Bitch, don’t use it then.
Wise Mac users move to Antarctica to prolong the life of the badly cooled devices.
Scientists using macs connecting to servers and other machines running Linux.
Unknown share is high too; Linux usage on desktop in Antarctica could be as high as 15%.
Year of the Antarctic Linux desktop is here
Are theses scientists working on bringing back a dinosaur? 🦖🦕. It might be a movie 🍿.
Maybe they disable tracking because Internet is a premium up there?
Where do you live that Antarctica is “up”?
The South being down is a convention, Antarctica is actually sideways from you if you live on the equator
Because earth is round, technically Antarctica is above every countries on the planet if you go the long way
