Let me say straight off. I am neither an Apple Zealot nor Apple Thrower.
I grew up with "IBM Compatibles" and loved 'em (well actually Amiga to begin with). I have grown up on the Microsoft® teet if you like. But like all babies (at the age of 27) you must eventually ween off of the fatty nutritious goodness of one Operating System and at least sample or suckle what other vendors are offering.
After all the child-hood bashing of Apple (I had an IBM remember) and as much as it will leave a bad taste in my mouth after saying this, "I like what I've tasted from Apple ... lately"
I actually agree with a lot of (gulp) what Apple has done recently. There was a time when I thought Apple would have been swallowed whole by who knows which hardware / software / .com company. They really did look like fading away from my perspective. Their share price did not make any significant gain from 1988 to 2004 which is terrible considering how much the industry has grown in that period. However thanks to some clever products and marketing Apple back on track and more importantly in my good books.
What really hurt Apple in the 80s and 90s was custom proprietary hardware and software. While the rest of the world was forming specialist companies and getting economies of scale on their hardware Apple's Mac was stuck with smaller, slower and more expensive hardware that they developed or licensed. Like their old hardware slowly Apple has moved from "in house hardware" to mainstream components and none so obvious than when Apple moved over to an x86 Mainstream CPU Architecture at the start of 2006. Now apple picks the premium parts from the PC market and packages it up in a nice friendly OS X interface without having to fight the specialist hardware companies directly. Very Smart.
As for the proprietary software. Even though OS X is still "proprietary" it was based on BSD (Unix OS) and from what I've been told first hand can easily have Linux OS Apps ported with little to no effort. This is brilliant! I can't even begin to explain how this is going to help both Apple and Linux, but here goes ... "large application base is what keeps people on Microsoft Windows." If Apple (and Linux for that matter) get enough user friendly applications that are equal to or better than the usually pricey Microsoft applications then people will start buying Apple hardware and its associated applications.
But why not a mainstream OS then? If Apple are jumping on the mainstream hardware components market, should they run a Microsoft Windows software compatible OS? I mean after all Apple is essentially a hardware company.
Although it's possible to customise Microsoft Windows to the point of non-recognition would people still see it as just another "PC"? In my opinion ... Yes! What defines Apple is its visual style both on the box and when its switched on. Installing and running windows on any of the Mac flavours would have put them side by side with Dell and HP. Keeping a unique OS helps seperate Mac from the Dells.
And because of their "component picking" and "unix based OS" I believe Apple will in the next few years make large headways into the server / hosted box market. Unlike IBM and Sun who have costly "in house" hardware running with their software "unixish OS", Apple have mainstream components in a well maintained OS. Now I'm sure the IBM and Sun custom CPUs have their advantages but when your aiming for the large peice of pie called "small to medium sized businesses" cost matters and they are not cost competitive. XServers are. Now you may say that companies like Dell are more cost effective than Apple's XServer and you are probably right. But what Apple are providing is a Unix based OS tested on good hardware cheaper total cost of ownership (IMHO) than the other big players.
Anyway way I'm rambling so I'll end it here, however I do have more to say on how the iPod, iTunes and Mac Books are also great products, but I'll save that for another day.
Hopefully that was hype free and unbiased. Oh just so you believe me I'm a microsoft .NET developer and I think that it is pretty cool also. In fact I'll do .NET digest blog entry as well sometime soon.
shwaindog
