Were Apple to once again start licensing its operating system to third-party 'Mac clone' hardware makers, it could reignite the OS wars. Yet whether Apple will go this route - and whether doing so would be smart - remains to be seen.
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Member since:You can say that Apple is a harware company all you want and it won't change one simple fact.
Apple, and all successful companies, are money driven.
If the fees for clone makers can be set high enough that Apple can make as much or more money than they currently make per machine then they'll do that.
Member since:2005-10-12
Everyone knows Apple is a hardware company.
What some are still trying to figure out is the logic of the Mac community's opposition to licensing. This is the best effort so far. It goes like this:
The Apple hardware is argued to be superior to commodity hardware made in the Far East. The Apple experience is superior to the XP experience because one company controls hardware and software. And Apple hardware is the same price as, or cheaper than, comparable quality white box hardware.
However, if Apple allows X to be bought independently and to run on non-Apple hardware, everyone, including the dedicated Mac users, will immediately stop buying the superior Apple hardware, forsake the superior integrated experience, and buy the white box hardware to run it on, which will, very strangely and inexplicably, now somehow be cheaper than the real thing made by Apple, undercut them, and put them out of business as a hardware company.
It is a very odd sort of scenario, when you think about it logically. If the experience is so superior, the hardware so well priced already, and the hardware so much better quality, surely people will just carry on buying it? In fact, they will probably buy the Mac Intel hardware in droves, if it too is unbundled from the OS, just to run XP on such superior stuff?
Edited 2005-11-05 17:47
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:Jeeze people.. just make your own.
http://www.i-hacked.com/content/view/202/42/
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Member since:
I didn't read the article, nor all the comments here, but I think there's something people are forgetting:
Apple is a hardware company.
All the software (Mac OS X, iTunes, Safari) is just there in order to sell more hardware (Macs and iPods). It's that simple, really.
So it doesn't remain to be seen, it simply won't happen.