So Apple claims that a growing number of people are using the Mac platform each and every day. If you Google around for “Mac market penetration” (and manage to avoid the inevitable penetration porn) you’ll probably find numbers that vary between 5 and 10%. An anonymous Las Vegas news & entertainment site which had roughly 1.5 million page views so far this month claims 5.3% of its users favor the Mac platform, and I, judging that to be an adequately sized pool from which to draw a conclusion from, will assume that number to be relatively accurate.

So, 5.3% of all web traffic belongs to Mac users. Ideally, that would mean that 5.3% of your sites profit is dependent on Mac users, whether you make money with ads, memberships, sponsorships, or other. But, lest we forget, we are living, in a Windows world, and I am just a Window girl (or boy), so in order to support the Mac platform, I must first purchase a Mac. Now, I’m not here to debate the merits/cost of a PC vs a Mac, I don’t care. Let’s just say that, for argument’s sake that getting a Mac will cost you, at a minimum, $1000 - it’s a nice even number. This would imply that you’re site would need to be generating $20,000 in profit in order to justify supporting a Mac.

Remember though, owning a Mac doesn’t make your site Mac compliant. You must use your system, and test your site on said Mac before you realize any real value. Let’s assume that for every hour spent designing a web application, you have to spend 10 minutes testing, of which 5 will be spent testing for a Mac. That’s 3 hours and 20 minutes of Mac testing per week, or rounding up for simplicity, 2 work days per month. An average salary for a programmer here in Alberta is around $45,000/year, implying that testing for the Mac platform costs a company around $4,500/year per programmer. As you may be able to guess, the larger the application, the more programmers involved, the higher the cost of supporting the Mac platform. So far, our application needs to be profiting $110,000/year in order to justify a lone programmer supporting the Mac platform. (We have three… *sigh)

To be fair, you probably only need to buy a new Mac every five years or so in order to maintain your rigorous testing regiment, so, if you’re the financial forecasting type, you’re spending $14,500 every five years so that 5.3% of your users have a marginally improved web experience, and that assumes you only have one person testing for the platform. To justify this, in that same five year period you’re site will have to profit $275,000, and remember, that’s profit. You’re still on the hook for developer salaries, software, bandwidth, hosting, rent, and let’s not forget, PCs. When you take into account how skinny some sites are running, that $14,500 could really be better spent on sales and marketing to the 94% of users happily running Windows, software upgrades, new PCs, or improved facilities.

Here’s the rub though, all of the sites I build strive to support Macs. Why? I suppose it could be a number of reasons:

• I believe in web accessibility, regardless of platform or handicap.
• I like the Mac platform and fully intend to buy one in the near future.
• Sometimes, honest to God, it just works, and you don’t have to change anything.

I’d have to say though, the number one reason why I support the Mac platform is because Chris Sealy, President and MOB of Statusfirm, runs a Mac, and he gets downright pissy when a site that he’s paying for doesn’t work for him.