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I'll bet that many of the people who worked on iTunes probably developed on Windows as well. I'm sure Apple would prefer that every iPod user own a Mac, but at the time it launched, the market would've been like 90% PC, so surely there would've been an incentive to ensure compatibility with your dominant user-base.

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> I'm sure Apple would prefer that every iPod user own a Mac

Not if it's an old mac ;-) I was an early iPod touch adopter (bought with X-mas money IIRC). Plugged it into my iBook G4 and was informed the version of iTunes was both too old and the latest this laptop was going to get.

Plugged it into a Windows 2000/XP machine (which I think was already old for the time) and it managed to get the latest version of iTunes.

Now of course, I'm aware of the context of the PPC to Intel shift and that there was a non-zero cost to maintaining both streams of iTunes build but it really put me off Apple at the time.

In Shayer's article (not the top-level BBC article) he makes the comment that they developed the iPod OS on Windows machines since the compiler and tools for building on ARM were not yet available on Mac. You make a good point about developing software for other platforms, though, and I'm sure there are also quite a few Mac and Linux boxes in software divisions at Microsoft for the same reason.

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