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Comment by Joeri | Hacker News Reader

Most web developers use a windows or linux machine to develop and a physical device to test (myself included). That combination prevents you from running the iOS 6 beta, because you need a mac for that. So, only a minority of web developers (those with access to a mac) actually could have tested the iOS 6 beta.

Additionally, the first iOS 6 betas had the browser in such a bad shape that it was obvious they were still working on it. I took one look at it and figured "i'll test it when they're done". They need to have some sort of clear indication of when it's actually ready for testing (and not just for testing of the native SDK's).

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Why do you need a Mac to run iOS betas? Does iTunes for Windows no longer support loading firmware updates from a file? You can register device UDIDs on the developer program Web site, and extract the first firmware file from .dmg with any one of several utilities on Linux and Windows, so I'm not sure why you'd need a Mac, unless Windows can no longer flash iOS devices.

I definitely agree with the latter point: if you try something and it is "in ruins" you are unlikely to respond with any feedback at all. That is one of the things that Apple needs to do a better job at during their betas: I have personally often just written them off until beta 4 or 5 as "it is so unlikely to work anyway" (although I do try to pick it up once they stop doing rapid cycles).

However, for your ability to test in the future: the only thing I believe the iOS beta requires related to owning a Mac is that the downloads from Apple's website for the IPSW files are stored inside of disk image files; you only need access to a Mac long enough to restore your device, but I am not certain why you would need a Mac to work with it later. (I would love to be told I was wrong there, however, so I could add that to the list of endemic issues leading to this.)

I think he means within a simulator

"and a physical device to test"

There are non-Mac utilities to read .dmg files. The NDA and the $99 fee are bigger obstacles to wider uninvited beta adoption, I'd assume, but intentional. This may or may not be a good thing: more testers isn't always better for bug report quality, and for a hardware company like Apple, it'd be bad business to encourage widespread adoption of beta firmware, without either support for devices running beta software (unlikely), nor support for uninstalling beta software. It's probably not even legal in all jurisdictions.

I'm curious to know in which communities this is true. At least in the Ruby on Rails world, Macs are overwhelmingly the most popular choice among developers. Is this not the case for, say PHP or Python/Django devs?

>Most web developers use a windows or linux machine to develop and a physical device to test.

Maybe I am living in a bubble but every single web developer I have ever met used a Mac. Why ? Because it is the only platform that has Photoshop + a UNIX shell.

Not every web developer is a designer.

Also, cygwin.

But most web designers would be slicing PSDs at some point, right ?

And Cygwin is a joke. Dealing with the page separator differences alone would make it unbearable.

I believe Aderkent meant that many web developers who are not designers (e.g. me) have no need of Photoshop - so we don't use a Mac.

By the way, Gimp can open psd files. I'm not sure it works perfect though.

MSYS is much more workable than Cygwin, but it's still not a panacea. More of a placebo really.

Me as well, but this too strikes me as a part of the Valley bubble.

It's not - Macs are vastly over-represented in Edinburgh, and in London too.

There's more Macs at the Edinburgh Ruby user group meeting than at the Mac user group meeting!

I am a web developer, and I've never used photoshop. I rarely touch graphics at all. My sense is that this is true for most or at least many web developers in general.

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