I’m not sure if this qualifies as an “unpopular opinion”, but I get a predictable amount of flak whenever I bring it up: I think the assumption that a company should outfit their developers with “the best” machines is problematic. If my company could give me a brand new 13” MacBook Pro from a couple years ago, I’d take it over the 16” 2020 model I have. To many the hardware a company gets its engineers is some sort of inviolable measure of how much they love you, and a company that doesn’t buy you the beefy model of the latest laptop is clearly a horrible place to work. But personally I tend to use moderately old hardware and then upgrade every once in a while to the latest model, and every time I’m always interested to see how some software can go from being utterly unusable to “reasonable”. I read articles about how Discord made their app’s scrolling 60 FPS and I go “yeah, right” because my iPhone SE gets nowhere near that…but on my iPhone 12 mini it kind of actually does. Trying to run any sort of Swift Playgrounds or previewing on my Early 2015 MacBook Pro is an exercise in frustration…but throw two extra cores at it and give the process a couple more gigabytes of RAM and it’s usable.
It’s clear that all of these things never get tested beyond the high-powered machine that the developer used. And I don’t see the trend of developers being completely out of touch of what devices their users are using going away anytime soon. But maybe we should start considering “experience correction” tools as part of a regular testing methodology. A friend of mine once lamented that the web would be a much better place if opening the Chrome developer tools automatically enabled the network throttler, and I think I’d have to agree with him.
It’s clear that all of these things never get tested beyond the high-powered machine that the developer used. And I don’t see the trend of developers being completely out of touch of what devices their users are using going away anytime soon. But maybe we should start considering “experience correction” tools as part of a regular testing methodology. A friend of mine once lamented that the web would be a much better place if opening the Chrome developer tools automatically enabled the network throttler, and I think I’d have to agree with him.