excellent. the more people who run OSX outside of Apple hardware may yet convince Apple to release a version of OSX for home builders. why they didn't do this in the beginning I'll never know.
why they didn't do this in the beginning I'll never know.
Why should they? Then they'd be obligated to support all of these homegrown abominations that people come up with. Apple made the correct choice when not supporting the DIY crowd. Not that there's anything wrong with doing it, and heck I might even do it just so I can get my MBP back from my wife.
Apple made the correct choice when not supporting the DIY crowd
Did they? They certainly lost (didn't gain) the bulk of the PC market which you could argue is a good thing, but also relegates Macs to a much smaller (albeit more profitable per machine) niche market.
They didn't lose the majority of the PC market; they never had it to begin with. To gain the PC market, you need to make/license/QA drivers—lots and lots (and lots) of high-quality drivers. Microsoft has spent the last 20-odd years doing this, and they still can't guarantee a high enough quality standard that my webcam won't lock up Explorer when I accidentally select it with Preview enabled.
Unless your webcam is made by microsoft specifically for your os (vista/xp/etc) then it is not microsoft who has to supply the correct drivers to integrate well with explorer.
That's exactly the point. The end-user doesn't care who's responsibility that hang is, they bought the hardware and software together and when it hangs, it's Microsoft's fault. Even though we know it's actually J Random driver programmer who wrote the bogus code.
Apple's stranglehold on the hardware and software irks my hacker sensibilities, but it's the key to a much better user experience.
I really hope they don't. Apple is able to spend far more resources on making a great experience because they aren't focusing on supporting unknown hardware of the week. For the most part, OS X is rock solid on Apple hardware as a result of not opening it up.
That said, I also don't see why they can't let the DIY crowd do it. Sell a version of OS X that is licensed to use on any hardware but not supported. I guess that would go against the perfect Apple experience, though.
Apple probably felt that they got burned by the last time they allowed Mac clones and ended up losing a lot of money. (I don't think that was the cloners' fault, but I wouldn't bother trying to explain that to Jobs.)
The cloners weren't growing the market, they were cannibalizing apple's own hardware sales. Jobs knew that, and canned them as soon as he got back in the big chair.
Another poster says the structure of the program prevented the cloners from providing a sufficiently varied product - that may be true too.
It kinda was the cloner's fault, but also the fault of Apple. Apple licensed the clones with the hopes that "apple-certified" clones to grow the market. I.e. figure out new and exciting ways to market macs to windows users, and demographics where it was failing (families, because the PowerPC performas sucked.)
However, Apple failed to certify more powerful clones (i.e. clones that were better/faster/cheaper than their big iron) on a reasonable timeframe. Cloners also contended that Apple was opening up the boxes to steal their trade secrets.
And the cheaper models -- that were often equal or superior to Apple's offerings, were a no-brainer for Apple's customers.
The long and the short of it is: Apple makes something like 30% profit off direct retail of their hardware system. Even on a mini that's pretty good. Compare that to $115 for the sale of OS X, and you realize they couldn't afford to keep the cloners around.
Not just faster Macs, but more frequent updates. And they were cheaper. I owned one. And a UMAX.
UMAX complained because their C500 model later served to be the exact hardware loadout of the Performa 6400 Tower. Apple let them do "research" on what chipsets could do what, and then took the result for use in their own hardware designs.
