I just read the Tom's Hardware review of the 12 core Xeon with 30MB cache, which breifly covers the new Apple Mac Pro  - it's all incredibly impressive and makes me salivate at the prospect of owning such a finely crafted peice of hardware. But as a web developer I have to ask myself if it's really beneficial to web developers as a whole to develop on high-end hardware.

Works on my machine

My problem with high-end hardware is that it's not representative of the commodity hardware that's out there being used by consumers today to browse the internet, most casual internet users use hardware that is three-to-five years old. I haven't even touched on mobile devices yet, which are typically less performant than their desktop counterparts - but account for a staggering proportion of web-traffic.

The problem, in my eyes, is that web-developers for the top companies in the world work on enthusiast level high-end hardware, even the very popular Mac Book Pro fits into this category - with 64% of workers still using desktop hardware, and probably more like 90% to 100% using a laptop or desktop.

A widening gap

I know I'm inviting trouble on myself for writing this, and sure you can argue that for mobile devices there are some fantastic testing tools out there that run against a multitude of devices - but how many testing services out there simulate a five year old peice of commodity hardware that your home user might be using?

I have no stats to support my argument, it's just something that anecdotally I'm coming across more and more frequently both as a developer and as a web-user. I've witnessed some top-end software makers making resource-hungry websites and then offering a native app for mobile devices - this is a sure fire way to avoid having to test on commodity hardware and defend the inability of mobile browsers to run the website.

My real-fear is that with PC and laptop sales slowing that decision makers are starting to think that these "legacy" platforms are dead - which really is a misconception since mobile traffic accounts for just 15% of global internet traffic (slide 32), couple that with the fact that people hold on to their commodity hardware for an average of three to five years and you'll realise that there is in fact still a lot of old shitty hardware out there that people are using.

Anecdotally, I worked in a few large organisations where it's common practice that most of the lower paid staff (80% of the workforce) had some very low spec hardware, just barely enough power to run the required software packages to let them do their day job. Whereas by contrast technical staff would be working on higher-end machines. I mention hardware in the workplace because people use it a hell of a lot, 60% of all online purchases are done from work, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has witnessed this.

An example: New Google Maps

If you've tried out the new Google Maps you might be aware that it's suffering from some teething problems if you're not using the latest version of Chrome coupled with some relatively modern high(ish)-end hardware. This is the apitomy of what I'm talking about, I can imagine that the developers at Google are working away on their 32-core, 128GB development monster machines - they browse through a demo of Google Maps in Chrome and it all works silky smooth. Meanwhile, back in reality - users who've accidentally made the switch over to the new maps platform are desperate to find the switch to toggle back to the old maps experience, which is more forgiving on older/commodity hardware.

The lowest common denominator

There are some very sexy web technologies out there such as WebRTC, Canvas, WebGL and the WebAudio API but they have a reputation for requiring the latest version of Chrome (which is no bad thing) probably combined with a nice desktop/laptop and some good graphics processing capabilities. But realisitcally, the developer needs to consider that the average internet user is lazy - they're unlikely to upgrade their browser, not everyone uses Chrome and not everyone uses good hardware. As sad as it may sound to the developers of bleeding edge tech, we - the developers - need to consider the lowest common denominator and ensure that they are not deprived of a good user experience simply because of the users choice in hardware.

Your mileage is going to vary on this one, maybe you've looked at your Google Analytics and realised that your users are typically quite tech savvy so you don't need to account for older browsers/hardware, but I doubt that's the case for 100% of your users.