I used the same laptop and had very different experiences. Sites like the current HN worked much better at home. Large images didn't load fast there. Of course developers didn't create very large JPEGs or 10 MB JavaScript files back then but we had the same kind of problems, scaled down to smaller sizes.
Also back then, Macs weren't so much a luxury like they are today (this is pre Jobs) -- they were just defacto standard in the creative fields. DTP and Photoshop were strictly better on the Mac up until about that point and it would be a number of years for PCs to erode the entrenched Apple dominance in that field. Much like UNIX workstations still had a lock on CAD/CAM/engineering in those days that was rapidly eroding to NT PCs. $8000 was the price for a well-equipped workstation whether it was Wintel, Apple, or UNIX (well a bit more for those). As alluded, the big issue with Internet publishing was taking into account a 56K dialup vs a corporate T1 rather than hardware differences.
It's that the teams were putting all this effort using quite literally millions of dollars of tech infrastructure, to create tech products to be delivered to very limited computers and slow networks.
And the real point: the end product was never seen on the target hardware by those building the things. No clue.
The web browser company assembled a usability lab, would get volunteer people to come in and try things out. But the feedback from that group was submitted as a report to a management group that was two layers above us.
Chain the coders and designers to $350 laptops, at least one day a week.
Back in the 20th Century, I was on a team for a major web browser. They were attempting to extend web browser technologies to crawl and cache web sites. The idea was to enable complex web experiences in a time when Internet service was analog telephone, 9600 baud.
We worked for months on that. At the office. In Silicon Valley. On $6000 Compaq computers.
When I returned home via my two-hour commute, I would try it: dial up and crawl, overnight, and surf around on the train to work the next day.
I was the only person on the team to actually do this.
I could understand that; after a 12-hour day of intense times at the office, the last thing most of us wanted was more of it, as soon as we got home.
A year later, I was at an ad agency. Big clients, national brands. Everyone there used the very latest Macintosh machines. Those could be like $8000 each. Beautiful work in Photoshop, then stuffed into a web browser.
They had a room with a few PCs, but nobody went in there.