I didn't know it wont work for mac ...i guess i have all ms
I use a Mac here at home for development, and at work for writing the software for commercial products. I have been able to persuade PE5 (and to a degree) PE6 to work within a WINE environment allowing me to use them on my Mac, but this is a bit (quite a lot actually) of a faff and often needs restarting. I find that it works very well indeed within a Windows installation under VirtualBox although that requires a Windows licence, a copy of Windows and that I work within Windows - none of which I care for - hence me using Mac(s).
Not being able to use the simulator tends to push me towards another (Wonderful Bovine BASIC) language. As I can't get the simulator to run on my development computers, I don't use it. It is possible to happily write for PicAxe using MacAxePad, and I've written quite a few (some small, some large) programs this way. Yet if the simulator doesn't work, I can't debug any program using the simulator. The IDE for PicAxe doesn't really exist so I may as well use a native PIC and a compiler that compiles to a native .hex file making use of the extra speed and code space.
Whilst I can't be certain that I would always use PicAxe products commercially, if I don't write the code for PicAxe processors due to not being able to take advantage of the simulator, they definitely won't get used in the end product, some other processor will.
Having said all of that, I still love the PicAxe system and do still use it, just nothing like as much as I might if the full IDE (with simulator) ran on my Mac(s).