Saturday, June 11, 2005

My Disappointment with Apple

Although Apple moving to Intel is good news, it's terrible news that Mac OS X will not run on plain vanilla Intel machines. Steve and Co. really need to get their act together and let this fly.

If people could buy OS X for their PC I bet you would get a lot of people switching to OS X who would never have thought about getting a Mac before. If the "essence of the Mac" is truly the operating system, as Steve himself said in the keynote speech, then why should Apple be afraid of this prospect?

2 comments:

David McCabe said...

The whole idea is that Apple writes and and gives away all this awesome, software, so that you'll buy their expensive hardware. If you don't need their hardware, they won't be able to afford to give you the software.

Unknown said...

1. The hardware is not so expensive after the switch but the variety is limited and so it's easy to ensure compatibility (OS X runs the same on any Mac) and the hardware is almost always great (so users don't complain about software when the hardware is borked as they frequently do on Windows).

2. The culture is a little bit different to and people giving away 300 bucks more seem to be the kind which doesn't need CD-Keys and Internet activation. Btw. iWork can be cracked by deleting one file, can you imagine the trust Apple has in it's users (try to imagine Microsoft leaving out the CD-Keys)?

3. I own an iBook and even if I were to run Linux on my Macs I would still prefer the hardware to the PC notebooks I had experience with. For example I had an Asus Pentium M which overheated by design. I saw one more laptop (same model) that did the same so I'm pretty sure it was broken at the drawing board. And by overheating I don't mean it was hot for my legs — the temperature activated the internal protection and the CPU was constantly switching to the lowest frequency and 90% instruction throttle (rendering the system unusable). After a year or so I finally investigated the problem and lowering the voltages was sufficient to fix this (-20dB from the cooler was an added bonus). Did I mention it permanently run the GPU cooler?

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