Or Todd. I usually leave commentary on the State of the Mac to my Celtic Cousin Scott, but need to chime in here. It doesn’t matter that the OS is what makes Macs sing, Apple is still a hardware company. Even iTunes Music Store is simply a vehicle to sell iPods, though I’m sure SJobs revels in hanging out with rock stars as well.
Several blogs I read today have pointed to Cringley’s post on Boot Camp. Does anyone believe that Apple would push back the release of an OS for six months to placate a hardware vendor and cut its own throat and sales of Apple hardware? Would the purchaser of such hardware be willing to wait 6 months while a custom version of the OS was made that ran on their computer, while owners of real Macs could do it on day one? The only way I could see this flying is if Dell, HP and other PC vendors designed their hardware explicitly with Mac OS support in mind, including all of the device drivers neccessary.
Let?s not forget that SJobs was also the slayer of the Mac clone industry shortly after his return from a Sculley-induced exile. He’s going to think long and hard (and maybe lobotomized) before allowing hardware from another CCP (Crappy Computer Manufacturer) to run the OS. And what do you think Dell’s or HP’s support people are going to tell customers who call complaining about crashes? That the hardware sucks, or that it’s that darn Mac OS? Off course they’re going to lie out of their posterior orifices and blame the OS.
Final thought – the current client version of the OS does not require a serial number and has none of the (admittedly feeble) authentication schemes that Microsoft does. OS X Server does use serial numbers, but there is nothing that currently prevents a users from running multiple machines on the same serial number. If Apple is going to give up a hardware sale to another manufacturer simply to sell them a copy of the OS and perhaps iWork, Stevo is certainly going to try to find a way to make sure that the OS was paid for. Make no mistake about it – he won’t look at it as a sale of a copy of the OS, he’ll look at it as a lost opportunity to have sold them a real Mac.
