I'm sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here either with regards to the original topic or even how the second part of your story relates to the first.
Also back then, Macs weren't so much a luxury like they are today (this is pre Jobs) -- they were just defacto standard in the creative fields. DTP and Photoshop were strictly better on the Mac up until about that point and it would be a number of years for PCs to erode the entrenched Apple dominance in that field. Much like UNIX workstations still had a lock on CAD/CAM/engineering in those days that was rapidly eroding to NT PCs. $8000 was the price for a well-equipped workstation whether it was Wintel, Apple, or UNIX (well a bit more for those). As alluded, the big issue with Internet publishing was taking into account a 56K dialup vs a corporate T1 rather than hardware differences.
It's that the teams were putting all this effort using quite literally millions of dollars of tech infrastructure, to create tech products to be delivered to very limited computers and slow networks.
And the real point: the end product was never seen on the target hardware by those building the things. No clue.
The web browser company assembled a usability lab, would get volunteer people to come in and try things out. But the feedback from that group was submitted as a report to a management group that was two layers above us.
Chain the coders and designers to $350 laptops, at least one day a week.