A buddy of mine, Mike, pinged me to give me a sneak peek at the possibility of PokerTracker coming to the Mac platform. As someone who has gone almost completely Mac in my personal affairs this is exciting.
2 thoughts on “PokerTracker for the Mac – First Look”
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I think a lot of it has to do with complexity of maintaining both. As I’ve mentioned, I’m a Mac user for my personal life. I’ve got a 27″ iMac, a Macbook Pro, and a Macbook. I also have an iPad, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4S. I mention that to drive the point home that I would greatly benefit from more poker rooms developing for the Mac OS.
But the decision tends to come down to cost to maintain vs. additional revenue. When Party dropped their Mac product (yes, they used to have a Mac client) they looked at how many Mac OS clients were accessing the game system and made a decision based on how many players they thought they would lose if they created a no-download client and dropped Mac client support.
Desktop apps require a lot more development and QA resources. You have installers, application conflicts, etc, that you don’t have in a Flash program that lives in a sandbox environment. Even the design is often different as Windows and Mac OS have completely different design philosophies regarding what the default options should be on a dialog box.
I thought I heard something recently about Party (or maybe it was bwin) coming out with a Mac client. I could be wrong on that though because I don’t even remember where I heard it.
I’ve personally been horrified by the fact that most of the major poker software companies haven’t developed Mac versions and even many of the larger poker sites. With the amount of revenue these companies have coming in – PT3 and HEM have both made many millions in profits, and poker sites like Party Poker have made ridiculous amounts of cash – it’s inexcusable that they haven’t made more of an effort (and years ago, at that) to be available to the Mac crowd.
I think these companies look at the overall stats – it seems that most reports have Apple computer sales at about 11% of total sales. But these stats are very misleading for companies that offer sophisticated digital products such as advanced poker software or even poker gaming software. I am confident that a MUCH higher % of people who use the computer more than a couple hours a day prefer Macs.
This is similar to the stats that still show that around 50% of people use IE as their browser – and yet none of the people I actually know or associate with admit to using it. So IE might be highly important still for sites like Amazon or NY Times that cater to all kinds of internet users. But it’s a whole lot less important to sites like Tech Crunch that cater primarily to people who claim to know something about technology.
Anyway back on the poker sites and software, I would guess that 25% or even more of PT3, HEM, etc.’s target market is Mac users. I’d guess that a smaller number of gaming sites’ target market is Mac users, but that it’s well over 11%. It is a shame these companies have taken so long to make this a priority. As a sworn Mac user myself, I’ve been basically unable to play on full-feature versions of many of the poker sites or use HEM or PT for years.