Definitely mean the design “and” development community. Web dev community that is.

If you go to tech conferences and web geek gatherings these days, more people in the room will be on Macs than PCs. I reckon at these events it is about 65% Mac users in the UK. In the States it is higher.

The last web conference I was at, they got the room to hold up their hands if they had an iPhone and you had difficulty seeing anyone who didn’t have their hands up!

Web “app” conferences (not mobile app) can be up to 90% Mac users in the room that I have been too, but that is probably “unrealistically” pushed up by the Ruby on Rails guys as they have a strong app background and Macs have always been the platform of choice for them.

Compare that with the % during the dot com boom – I didn’t know any developers on a Mac, just designers.

Out of the 9 developers I use / work with, only you and two others are on PC still, the others have all switched to Mac from PC. I think one of them will move soon as well though.

You are on Linux now – so in six(ish) years I have gone from working with 100% PC / Windows based web developers – to only two being left on Windows, with one of them probably moving soon anyway! Ouch.

Google is the default search on all Apple products at the moment – including the iPad as far as I know (correct me if I am wrong though – it certainly is on the Mac and iPhone).

Rumour is they will go to Bing.

Why? Cos Microsoft will pay them big money. I don’t see this as some evil plan against the open web or anything to do with not using the better option. If someone offered you millions to use Bing, you would say no and go with Google? No, didn’t think so LOL.

Also, Google is becoming a big mobile competitor to Apple, so I can understand them wanting to get Google off their iPhones and iPads. Defaulting to it is a bit like you promoting another developer on your homepage, or Tesco letting Sainsbury’s advertise their products in their store.

Would you do that, would Tesco… no, of course not.

Is it in their customers interest, probably not (you are right), but they nearly went out of business before, so there is a lot more going on here than just being anti-competitive. The tide can change fast and Google are a big threat.

Apple are the biggest control freaks around though and I am sure some stuff they do would end up being investigated if they had a larger market share overall.

I think this Flash thing will cause more damage to Apple’s image amongst the web dev community than they think. The dev community has been shifting and now it is like “great, now you can’t be trusted, remind me why I switched”.

I still don’t see how Adobe are a threat though in the same way as Google. Maybe I am missing something? Yes – i guess Flash apps on the web may take a few sales from Apple, but surely it the benefits would outweigh this.

Again though, most people won’t care. If my misses gets an iPhone or iPad she won’t notice any of this and if she got a phone other than the iPhone she won’t use it for apps or the web (as let’s be honest, they are not very good at it), so nothing lost I guess in the “real world”.