MacBreak missing a demographic

Fri, Nov 2, 2007 11:32 PM

I listen to the MacBreak Weekly podcast every week. I have liked Leo Laporte ever since The ScreenSaver days. He has several good regulars on the show and mixes in topical guests as well. However, I think there is a demographic of Mac user that the show is missing.

There is a growing audience of new Mac users in the tech sector. Just to the O'Reilly Open Source Conference and take a count. Mac OS X and the switch to the Intel platform has brought about the most stable, easy to use *nix based desktops and laptops the world has ever seen. I was a long time Windows user. I made fun of Mac users. I even ran Linux on a Dell laptop for a while. Boy, that was fun. Nothing like waking up and having to edit X configurations so you can work. Apple just got it right. I can run my AMP stack on my MacBook Pro with no problems. And the Mac UI is wonderful. I am becoming a fan boy.

So, on this weeks MBW, Leo and the panel were talking about Leopard. The subject came up about the best new feature for home users, power users and mac software developers. There was neither anyone on the show that fit into my demographic of Mac user nor did anyone mention us. No mention of Apache 2.2 or PHP 5.2. No mention of a much improved Terminal.app. No mention of a built in SSH Agent that works with your keychain. If you work with Linux/BSD server, you use Terminal almost as much as any other application.

So, Leo, please include this growing Mac demographic into your discussions. There has to be someone out there in our space that is as knowledgable as Andy Ihnatko and Scott Bourne are about their topics. Merlin comes close when he is there, but I think he is still and old school Mac user that happens to have gotten into the geekier parts of Mac OS X.

Still, love the show. Keep up the good work.

4 comments

Makea Says:

Good argument, but the episode in question featured John Siracusa. He's the reason why I even bothered to listen to the podcast in the first place.

Unfortunately, web developers are too niche of a audience. However, we are very well supported by apple in this regard: rails, capistrano, latest builds of php and apache/fastcgi.

I agree the new terminal is fantastic and I love the new automounter. I'm able to browse solaris nfs shares via /net without the amd utilities. The new nfs mounter gui is cool too.

If apple would support syntax highlighting in TextEdit, it would be even perfecter!

alex lindsay Says:

We've added Macbreak Tech and will be adding Macbreak Dev this winter...they will be dedicated to the more geeky elements of the community (and include stuff I really want to cover).

a

Anthony Says:

I think that is why they have Macbreak Tech. Now maybe that show could stand to be a little more polished, like Macbreak Weekly, but I think the idea is that if you geek out too much you are going to lose the regular users, and that is the larger audience they want to hit with the show.

doughboy Says:

The 5 graphics and 3 video production people I know are all using PCs now. I really think that is the shrinking market. Especially graphics.

As for John Siracusa, I am not sure what your point is about him. He had an in depth review of the OS, but it was still from the perspective of a Mac software developer or advanced, non-technical user. There are lots of things in OS X for our demographic. If Apple did not care about us, they would not have made the change we see in Terminal, Apache and PHP. I just think MacBreak Weekly does not know that we exist even though it is clear that Apple does.

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