Comments on: The big Mac meal – did you want a PC with that?

By: darryl

darryl — Wed, 13 May 2009 22:23:12 +0000

Thanks Scott but I think you enhanced the point. Being the uber geek you are is fine, we can all profess our preferred option when we have time / know how to work this stuff out.

The point of the post though was the interesting statistic that Macs account for only 5% of web traffic. And that as developers you need to understand what the users are using, not emulating what they are using, but actually using it.

Not one of the environments nor hardware for any user is perfect, despite the fab boy stuff espoused about any platform. Man users have problems, Apple stuff up plenty, PC’s have problems, Windows have problems.

For me I am interested in understanding my audience. If 95% of my market is on PC using windows then I need to be there with them.

More importantly it amazes me how skewed marketing can be.

By: Scott Wallace

Scott Wallace — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:03:33 +0000

At the outset, let me say that I’m a Mac user. A ‘recent’ convert, although I gave up on Windows *many* years ago.

Just to address a few of comments above:
Re: Browser testing. You can use VirtualBox or VMware in the OS of your choice to emulate other environments for web development.

Re: Right-click. All Macs have the ability to do secondary mouse clicks (that’s ‘right-click’ for the non-techies). Even Apple’s Mighty Mouse has more than 2 buttons. Non-Mac users keep rolling this one out and it’s simply no longer the case.

Re: Superior Apple hardware. There’s nothing special or superior about Apple hardware. They spend a lot of time looking at cooling, layout and design and they make nice-looking computers but there’s nothing inherently better about the hardware.

The Mac’s strength lies in Apple’s marriage of the Operating System and the hardware. When you know what combination of hardware your OS is going to run on, you can ensure that the OS has less bloat and runs with tried and tested drivers, keeping the kernel lean and stable. Any user-land applications can then be designed with fixed APIs to allow for tighter integration with the OS, keeping a uniform and consistent user experience. Both Windows and Linux (to pick on the other “popular” OSes) suffer from too much choice.

Personally, I spend more time doing real “work” on the Mac than any other platform. When running Windows, Linux or Solaris on the desktop I spend more time “tinkering”, trying to get the OS into a state where I can do work.

Don’t get me wrong. I recommend Linux (or Solaris for the big iron) on the server but the desktop user experience really is satisfying for the end-user who gives up their preconceptions and takes Mac and OS X for what it is — a clean, *modern* OS that really does get the job done.

By: Steve Woodgate

Steve Woodgate — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:16:47 +0000

I think a bigger issue than browsers is performance. If every road designer had a Ferrari provided by the office no doubt our transport network would be very different. Guess that’s why we still QA our flash on the oldest windows boxes we can find – because the customer experience is all that matters.

By: John O'Brien

John O'Brien — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:58:33 +0000

I repeat (yes, this is Johnny Appleseed without the alias): You can run any browser on any platform on a Mac. So you can see sites from every possible user’s perspective, including the Windows majority. How is this not better than a Windows-only PC in “understanding users”?

By: darryl

darryl — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:43:22 +0000

I know what you say but that doesn’t mean it is the way to go. There are plenty of Cons in that article too, although not as many as Macs do have.

Each to his/her own.

I have nothing against Macs, but reality is the world of users aren’t using them and that matters to me in understanding users.

I hear lots of people like Smack too and it has some high points, but lets not go there.

Shame you aren’t using your real name