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Comment by cglee | Hacker News Reader

As a web developer, you'll also probably need to test in Windows and IE. For that, get Fusion or Parallels and you can have Windows and OSX running side by side.

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That's true - and another reason to go with Mac.

On my Mac I can test Mac versions of Safari, Firefox, and Opera. I can also have virtual machines to test for Windows Firefox, IE6, IE7, and IE8 at the same time. If I were on a PC I would only be able to have one version of IE installed.

It's still funny to me that to develop websites that work on all of the Windows browsers a Mac is the only thing that makes sense.

"If I were on a PC I would only be able to have one version of IE installed."

That's not true. You can have virtual machines to test multiple versions of IE, too.

Microsoft has released a program called "Web SuperPreview". It enables you to compare pages both in IE6 and IE7/8.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e6...

The performance is kind of "meh", though, especially in VMWare (where it's practically unusable). I personally prefer IETester: http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/

I used to use Parallels but I've switched to VirtualBox. It's free, open source, and works at least as well as Parallels: http://www.virtualbox.org/

This would be the key reason to get a mac. To test anything in OSX legally - you need to be running Apple hardware. (Boot-camp/VMWare Windows and Linux). Until/unless Apple go to selling the OS on it's own - from a testing perspective (if you have to do that) - then a mac is the only way to go.

You can also try free http://www.virtualbox.org/ from Sun.

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