This all started as having a little fun with Ruby and routing tables, and was inspired by similar quantification at a Reboot conference (7 or 8 I think). In short, I registered all unique MAC addresses (hardware addresses of the network cards) which ended up in my laptop’s address resolution table, and did a tally to count the MAC addresses registered to Apple.

In total, over the course of 1.5 conference days, I counted 389 machines on the network, of which 225 had MAC addresses registered to Apple. That’d bring the Mac usage at LIFT to about 58%.

Some caveats regarding the research method, I’ve tried to discount the MAC addresses of the WiFi router I was connected to, and included my own machine in the count. I’m unsure of how the Bonjour protocol made it more likely to find other Macs rather than non-Macs. However, because this is an average over 1.5 days, I hope I caught as many non-Macs as possible. The Mac usage percentage tended to hover well over 60% in individual snapshots.

It’s intriguing how different computer usage amongst the techy crowd is from general market share patterns.