Last Updated on February 6, 2022
I was having a conversation with a co-worker yesterday afternoon when he mentioned a web application we use at work to track our work hours. The application doesn’t perform well on Macs, which means that we have to come to work if we forget to submit our time sheet quickly enough and we don’t have a PC at home.
How ridiculous is it, at this point, that there are programs that don’t work on Mac?
No, really. Set aside your silly bias, you PC people and just stay with me for a minute here.
The Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984.
As much as I hate to admit it, because doing so makes me feel old, that was 26 years ago.
More than a quarter of a century. And there are still programs that aren’t made to work on a Mac?
In the early days, I could certainly understand such decision making: “Maybe that Mac foolishness would just go away,” engineers might have thought.
But after almost a generation, Mac’s not going anywhere. And the iPhone is only making the world more Mac-friendly, with no help from AT&T, I might add.
At this point, I have a really hard time taking a software manufacturer seriously if they are still refusing to program for Mac. My workplace is all-PC. And trust me: it’s in no way better.
Back in the early days Mac and Wintel machines (I refuse to call them PCs, because aren't both technically 'personal' computers?) had the different chip architecture (RISC and CISC, respectively), so I could understand the difficulty in writing programs for both. In fact, when I was in high school I remember going to Staples back home in PA and musing at how small the Mac software section was in comparison for Windows (Windows 95 was new back then!). Though now, don't both run on Intel chips? Only thing I could think is that maybe the programmer for said software doesn't know how to write programs for Mac, and I would be totally honest when I say I wouldn't hurt myself to write a different version of my software if it required me to either pay someone else to do it or to learn how to do it myself – not for such a small percentage of the potential market. Plus, one of the things that many Mac users have touted to me are that they can run Windows in Mac, so they can run such programs…
If this doesn't make any sense, forgive me, I've been sick all week and am finally starting to feel a little more lucid than not.
Glad you're beginning to feel better, Chris.
It does make sense, although the "small percentage of the market" thing, at this point, doesn't sound like such a valid argument anymore. (Not from you, but from the programmers.) Considering the continued success of Mac, even if there are more Windows-based machines out there, and the economy, why wouldn't they want to give themselves the chance to reach that many more customers?
You're right that there are programs that allow Windows-only software to run on a Mac; they essentially make the machines reboot in a manner that more closely mirrors Windows. But I'm not about to turn my Mac into a Windows-based machine. I've seen what Windows is capable of at work for two decades now, and frankly, I'm still not impressed.