Mac Market Share Rising in general

dano (apparently) - 03:03pm Oct 8, 2007 PST
via email

I've been attending SoCal Linux Expo for five years. In their Year 2,
the only Mac I saw was in the Debian booth. In Year 4 I saw a number
of attendees with Mac laptops, and a few presenters. In Year 5,
nearly half of the attendees and several presenters (including
prominent names) had Mac laptops. One of the presenter booths is an
outfit that provides virtualization services for Windows. The guys
there were new to Macs, and they were ecstatic. (It helped a lot that
the platform is now Intel and much easier and more profitable for
them.) The Ubuntu booth had CD installers for both PPC Apple and
Intel Apple. (Though they quickly ran out of the latter.)
<http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/>

At Singularity Summit in early September, the keynote speakers of
both Day 1 and Day 2 - Rod Brooks, head of MIT's Robotics Lab and
Peter Norvig, Director of Google Research and former Distinguished
Scientist at NASA - both had Macs. There were other presenters who
had Mac laptops. At one point during a session I got up and stood off
to the side just to look up into the crowd and assay the laptop
population. It was 50% Apple and 50% PC. (And who knows how many of
the PC users were running Linux.)
<http://www.singinst.org/summit2007/agenda/>

At Solar Power Conference, there were a small but noticeable number
of Mac users amongst the attendees, though few in the booths and none
in the presentations I saw. One disappointment was the young guy who
has built a solar power calculator for home users in Excel using VBA,
and he used both his PC and his Mac to demonstrate. With the new
Office 2008 not using VBA any longer, he is dropping support for
Macintosh.
<http://www.solarpowerconference.com/>

I know that a substantial number of infosec experts have switched to
Apple, though those may as likely run Linux as OSX.

All the above is anecdotal and not hard data, but still
representative of a trend I believe.