from Hacker News

Why the hell are all app demos done using Macs?

by dadads on 8/10/11, 3:23 AM with 16 comments

• by tomfakes on 8/10/11, 3:35 AM

  I think there are a few reasons

  1. Mac UI looks good, browser fonts look good there too 2. A lot of open source stack developers use OSX as their dev machines, so the code has already been tested there 3. Since OSX is BSD, a lot of the same server code runs, and runs well on OSX, so demos can run well with everything hosted on the same machine without needing VMs or other tricks.

  Windows can do all of this too, but some stuff doesn't work as easily on Window. Microsoft server stack runs great on Windows, but 'the cool kids' are all running open source stacks.

• by jordandanford on 8/10/11, 3:25 AM

  Mac OS X is generally seen as the most visually appealing OS, so I figure that's likely to be the reasoning

• by ajsharp on 8/10/11, 3:46 AM

  Chances are, that's what the developers are using to build the product. Same with the people making the screencast, if this is a different party than the developer(s) themselve(s).

• by PonyGumbo on 8/10/11, 12:30 PM

  I ended up re-doing screenshots of my web app on OSX because the browser windows have slightly thinner frames. It just looked better.

• by jlambert1 on 8/10/11, 4:12 AM

  I think a lot of hackers are using macs, and a lot of startups are using them too. It's part of the new "uniform" for startups.

• by GHFigs on 8/10/11, 3:42 AM

  What difference does it make?

• by bloudraak on 8/10/11, 3:45 AM

  The fidelity seems to be better on OS X than on Windows, and therefore the site justs looks more crisp. Its something that I noticed testing websites on both Windows and OS X.

• by CyberFonic on 8/10/11, 5:31 AM

  If you want to be really funky, create your demos on Haiku (BeOS work-alike) !

• by dstein on 8/12/11, 2:25 AM

  pg covered this nicely:

  http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html