My main point stays intact (not that I was expecting it to be shot down, anyway) — as yours and Jeffrey’s and a lot of other web coders out there: code for the majority, and you lose a potential audience; code for all, and you’re far better off — and it’s not very hard, either. Far easier to update later on, too.

I’m also looking a little farther down the street, although I didn’t say it in my post: with Apple going to Intel chips, and given the rise in popularity of Apple today (the iPod has really boosted Apple, no doubt — and sales shares in the personal computer market for Apple are almost double now than a year ago), is it possible that Apple might see a rennaissance in market share over the next few years?

I really hope so; it’s far more stable and capable than anything Redmond has put out to date (this from a 17-year MS-DOS/Windows user!).

As for designers turning away Mac users, intentionally or otherwise, it’s hard to judge. A good example is the Gap’s site, as well as subsidiary Banana Republic—see Jeff Veen’s recent post about it, and the comments that followed. It is something I always try to stress to audiences when I’m talking about browser share on a site: make sure a given browser can use your site before you put faith in the numbers your stats package spits out. If you have 2% Mac users, it might be that Mac users don’t care about your content, or it could be that your site is broken in Mac browsers. Ditto for Opera, Konqueror, or any other browser.

I don’t think it’s a question of Mac users clumping in terms of online linking and movement, though. I didn’t know that most of those people used Macs. I could pull some sort of “well, the best people use Macs!” crapola, but that’d just be me being snarky. I do think it’s the case that one Mac user tends to breed more, as they wax poetic about their machines, or just do cool stuff that other people want to do, too. My father is on a Mac now because we wanted to do video chatting, and we couldn’t get iChat AV and AIM for Windows to do it (despite all the claims it was easy). He bought my old machine, I bought a new one, we plugged in our cameras and fired up iChat… and it just worked.

So there’s that.