Laughing Boy wrote:

The embedded poem reads: "Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he'd do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined./Please don't steal Mac OS!/Really, that's way uncool./(C) Apple Computer, Inc."

Interesting easter egg. But I agree - Apple should reexamine licensing OS/X before someone releases it into the public domain FOR them.

/me drools at the prospect of running Final Cut Pro on a PC I can build for a third to a quarter of what a Mac would cost.

-LB

I don't see it happening. It's a different mindset. Apple is a lifestyle company... letting people run the OS on any piece of cheap hardware they want moots the value of the brand they've so carefully crafted.

I don't know off hand the margins apple makes on hardware, or the margins they could expect to make from OS sales to beige-box owners, but I expect they make good money on hardware sales, otherwise people wouldn't bitch so much about how they could build a comparable box for so much less. That being said I do have a sense of the value of Apple brand. There's a reason that mac users tend to have multiple macs, and an iPod (or 2), and iSight and an Apple sticker on their car. No one rolls around with Dell or Sony or MS logos on their car. That shit is a commodity. I don't think Apple wants to commoditize their brand. It may seem like a silly decision to some, but I kind of respect the lack of compromise.

I also have a hard time accepting the logic that a company must be more liberal with their software in order to prevent some assholes from pirating it. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm not yet ready to accept that solution. The fact is that there will always, *always* be someone willing, able and motivated enough to crack a piece of software. Licencing the software wouldn't change that. I suppose it might reduce the number of pirates, but the software's still gonna get cracked and released, so I'm not even sure it'd work.

Anyway, the most pragmatic reason not to do it is the support nightmare it would create. 99.9% of the time my mac hardware and software Just Works. I've *never* had that experience with a pc. You let people start buying MacOS and they're gonna install it on their $300 piece of shit WalMart pc, expecting to have the kind of experience I have every day right now. But of course, they won't, the experience will suck, and they'll blame Apple. I'd rather keep my OS as it is now... headache free. Even if that means it's hardware bound.