“With the whole Pystar fiasco making headlines recently,” Gizmodo is running an interesting poll regarding Apple’s Mac OS X:
If OS X was available on non-proprietary hardware would you ditch Windows, Macs?
• Yes, I would switch to OS X – 37.5% (1780 votes)
• Yes, I would ditch my Mac for non-proprietary hardware – 10.2% (485 votes)
• No, I would not ditch Windows – 16.1% (765 votes)
• No, I would not ditch my Mac – 28.4% (1347 votes)
• Other – 7.7% (364 votes)
4741 total votes. Results as of 04/21/2008 10:26:25 pm EDT.
Cast your vote here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “RadDoc” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: This is a well-worn topic, but the one twist that we always found interesting is the idea of Apple releasing Mac OS X one version behind to selected OEMs. For example, these lucky OEMs would get the most up-to-date Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, certified by Apple to work on their specific hardware configurations, while Apple would retain the exclusive to the current Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
Licensing OSX to other vendors would put Apple out of business.
It boggles the mind that no one… including MDN, it seems, is capable of basic elementary-level arithmetic.
Macintosh Computers cost between $500 and $5,000.
OSX costs $129.
What do you think they make more money on?
Same thing goes with iPods and iTunes…
Does Apple make more money selling $.99 tracks or $300 iPods?
The software is important as it drives hardware sales. One version behind or not, licensing OSX would result in only the die-hard Mac enthusiasts keeping their Macs. It would relegate the Mac to mere small-genre cult status again. While some of us here might like that on some level, it is simply no way to do business.
Now, everyone… please, please, please…. I implore you all to remove your collected heads from your asses and drop this ridiculous topic once and for all.
Lim… Floppies held 1024K. Also 400K and 800K. That’s it. the ill-fated SuperDisk held 128MB.
Why, O, WHY do people keep dredging up this crap?
Apple is Apple and the Mac is a Mac and OS X is OS X BECAUSE Apple designs and builds it ALL.
The cost of tech support for the zillion and one possible PeeSea configurations alone would probably kill off Apple.
Give it up, ferchrissakes!
Not enough options in the questionnaire.
If an appropriate replacement was singing a siren song, maybe.
But it would have to compete on so many levels, not least looks.
Gizmodo’s poll is probably very representative of everyday buyers and users. NOT.
There’s a reason there aren’t enough questions. Pollsters steer you down the route they want you to go, strengthening their statistics, otherwise too many options would mean to broad a spread.
If OSX was released for PC hardware I would keep my iMac.
Why? Because its an incredibly elegant computer for the home. Sure, there might be more powerful out there, but who cares! Anyone here really get a stopwatch out each time they run some computational task? Thought not.
I Apple did go down this route, I suspect the non-office installed base wuld significantly increase, but sales would not (Damn Pirates)!
Long live the Mac.
Please read:
http://gagravaar.wordpress.com/2008/04/02/theres-a-very-good-reason-why-it-just-works/
Put simply, Mac OSX on open hardware is not a Macintosh.
It’s a morass of low-budget, crap hardware with badly written drivers that would make OSX as buggy as Windows.
Windows users – just put your friggin hand in your pocket and pay for quality hardware for chrissakes. If you’re not willing to do that, then piss off back to Windows-land and stop complaining.
Why do you think you are contemplating the Mac anyway? Because you’ve been told it’s reliable?
THERE’S A VERY GOOD REASON WHY THAT IS THE CASE, APPLE MAKE THE WHOLE WIDGET.
OK, how about if Apple:
– would only release the last release of a previous OSX major version to RELIABLE PC manufacturers (say HPQ, but I may be misguided here — maybe a smaller company with an excellent quality control record would be more appropriate –read: controllable) ;
– would shift (or enhance) its attempts to prevent OSX to be installed from all non-Apple PCs to allowing installation on these reliable boxes only. Maybe every version of OSX should maintain some sort of encrypted list of acceptable hardware signatures.
This is much more leniant than MS’s Genuine Advantage scheme. Besides, refinements can be brought to Apple’s verification scheme by packaging them in the unavoidable minor system updates, which will be no doubt required to fix the last remaing driver and security issues.
@Willie G
I’d normally agree with you however there could be a little mileage to the licensing of older versions. I mean for example. How many Mac users would want to move back to Tiger now Leopard is finally low on bugs? Not many I’ll wager. 10.5.2 is behaving well so far and 10.5.3 is being seeded to developers.
What could be trialled is for Apple to say do a deal with a few hardware companies for Tiger on a specific sub set of popular semi-low end business machines. With the proviso that Macs are sold for any true workstation scenarios. Run this deal as a loss leader for a specific amount of time. Then use this time to get more IT companies clued up on Macs.
Then say after a year when they get a little traction in the general enterprise market and a few more IT departments on their side Apple could build a simple Business box. Basic graphics card, just a bit above minimum RAM, basic Core2duo processor, one firewire port and 2 USB ports, an extra couple of PCI slots and enough RAM slots to take it up to say three gigabyte. Maybe a mid height tower. Still stylish but made of the composite plastic they use on the white MacBooks to keep the price down. They could be the sort of price a decent worker’s PC goes for so there is still some profit in it for Apple.
To keep it out of the consumer market it could be sold only in bulk and to business or education customers (like they did the eMac). There could be a minimum of 5 machines per order. Businesses could deal direct with Apple and have their own Apple account manager. Don’t sell it through Stores or resellers to guarantee that these Macs are only filling offices, cubicles and schools. That way they could get IT to favour it. They could offer it as a dual boot version with Windows running on a VM for the first year as Macs get more popular in the workplace and they could drop Windows as an option when they get a foothold.
I’d love to see this happen.
There’s always a way and I trust Steve and co to find the careful way to do it.
If Apple certified the precise hardware configuration and also charged a licence fee for each model sold, this could work well for Apple.
Selling a large number of licences for OS X-compatibles, without the expense of building, shipping and supporting a physical product would nicely compensate for any loss of Mac sales. But only a proper Mac will have all the latest bells and whistles right out of the box.
In addition, allowing OS X-compatibles to only be sold with an older generation of OS would differentiate them from proper Macs and would also mean that Apple would sell many more retail copies of the current OS as upgrades. The same goes for iLife and of course there would be considerably more sales of iWork and Apple’s other software and accessories.
Allowing carefully vetted hardware configurations to be sold by third-party manufacturers would also mean that OS X-compatibles are available from more than one manufacturer, which gets round one of the obstacles that currently impede sales to certain customers.
I think that there’s an inevitability that this will happen at some point. With Vista stalled and Microsoft visibly faltering, this could be a very timely opportunity to make a bold move.
Moot question. As long as Steve Jobs is alive no clone will have OS X.
There is much more profit in hardware than software. Apple is a hardware company that sells software, not a software company that sells hardware. It would be an uncharacteristically stupid move for Apple to give their profits away to competitors. It doesn’t matter whether or not I’d give up a Mac for an eMachine running OS X. It will never happen.
If the other hardware manufacturers want to compete, they should use Apple’s business model. It isn’t patented. They don’t even have to do any thinking, just imitating. All they have to do is get rid of Windows, go out and acquire a distro of UNIX, and create a vertical solution.
We don’t need Apple to give away the store and ruin its bottom line for its investors and weaken its position until we can’t buy Macs any more. It would be better if there were more apples in the orchard, not because we’d buy them, but because the competition would spur Apple to greater excellence (if such a thing is possible).
If human-human interface guidelines were under as strict control and passion as computer-human interface guidelines, the headline would be “If Apple’s Mac OS X were available …” not “was available”.
But it ain’t.
You can take my Mac, when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the mouse.
Why enjoy Leopard on cheap hardware? Its like driving a Ferrari with a Mini Cooper engine.
Mac is quality time.
Windows and cheap computers are a waste of time.
I strongly disagree that we should ever consider releasing any version of OS X on PC hardware. It would absolutely destroy Apple’s development and support model that makes Apple’s business possible and makes Apple profitable. Steve Jobs might as well nuke 1 infinite loop as go for this horrible idea.
LG & MPS
Exactly-
LinuxGuyAndMacProdigalSon:
If you understood history you would know Steve Jobs killed the clones in the 90’s because clones were siphoning Apple profits. I don’t think that Jobs has changed his position about clones in 20 years. If you doubt me, give Jobs a call, and ask him.
Some time down the track, perhaps, Apple could certify a quasi second Mac compatible supplier by allowing the company Filemaker (owned by Apple in a hands off kind of way) to build and sell Mac clones in specific, but not necessarily exclusive configurations.
Filemaker could even resurrect the Claris name and produce desktop machines using the Intel CPUs Apple doesn’t.
For example, they could have an ultra-thin desktop with integrated graphics & DVI out (VGA dongle supplied), the usual suspects out the back plus 1 expansion slot – think a shrunken desktop XServe for the average office worker; a mini-tower with a choice of integrated or dedicated graphics, 3-4 expansion slots, DVI out and all the usual ins/outs; and different form-factor laptops (12″ and 14″ wide screen perhaps). These could specifically target the corporate sector but also be available to everyone who wants them.
I think we could count on Filemaker to make some stylish, quality kit that differentiates itself from it’s fruity parent company. Filemaker could also be free to offer the machines with your choice of OS – OS X, Windows or Linux.
That way the corporate IT drones (and every other drone) could no longer bang on about being ‘locked’ into one hardware supplier (I know, these drones always conveniently ignore the fact that with a Dell they are effectively locked into one OS supplier).
Discuss….
Wow, MDN has managed to dig up the only idea that would be WORSE for Apple than licensing their OS to Dell and the like. The Mac enjoys modern, superior software partly because the user base (and thus the developer base) is so willing to move quickly with Apple’s new technologies. This daft notion of licensing old versions would keep developers from using the new technologies in each OS X release and give Microsoft etc. two extra years to catch up.
People are far more willing to pay for hardware than they are for software, and this is getting progressively more so. Apple is smart enough to see this, and will not be replacing hardware profits by trying to be another Microsoft.
Those of us who were NeXT users back when NeXT got out of the hardware business can tell you that trying to run an advanced OS on generic hardware is a royal pain in the ass. Sure, once you get it installed everything’s just dandy, but having to check your shopping list of components against the hardware compatibility guide was time consuming and annoying.
I think Apple *should* offer OS X to the HPs and Lenovos of the world, at a unit price that equals their margin for a mid-range Mac, but I wouldn’t buy a non-Apple machine myself.
-jcr
I would like to see the mac mini be a little more competitively priced or specced though, its like the black sheep of the mac family, unloved. It has massive potential as a pc users first change over mac product, I’m expecting a flood of replies saying that its a good product now but I think its fair to say it hasnt been the success it could be.
The only reason the psystar shambles can exist is because of a gap in the market, apple filled these gaps ipod wise and cheap copies barely get any press or sales.
A partnership based on table scraps will not work. Let’s face it, Apple brand is attached to OSX no matter where it’s sold, selling one version back is just such a non-starter on so many levels.
I think one maybe two other high quality selected hardware providers would be good as licensees. Sure don’t want the masses that have access to Windoze mucking up the joint.
Apple should never license OS X to anybody else. In the PC world the chief source of grief to PC users is the cheap junk churned out by low cost box assemblers. They are the crack dealers of the computer industry and Apple should have nothing to do with that lot.
One important take-home message from this unscientific poll is that 61.2% of the non-Mac using respondents said that they would switch if they could get OSX on the hardware of their choice. Apple’s business reasons for ignoring this opportunity have been endlessly discussed, and may continue. They’ll be great arguments until they decide to do in, at which time it will “just work” just like everything else from Apple.