I posted this to a newsgroup yesterday, the more I think about it the more I think someone *could* make a go of selling a Apple like solution. Anyone care to comment ?
When are those people over there ever going to wake up? Jobs could put Gates on welfare if he'd port the Mac OS to the PC. I'd buy it in a heartbeat, even with Apple's usurious profit margins ..
Every time I hear this I wince, Do you know what OSX would become if it was ever ported over to the X86 platform...
OSX is nice, clean, relatively stable and deserved of the "Just works" title simply because the developer of the OS is in 100% control of the platform. The only machines that (in a legitimate manner) can run OSX are designed and manufactured under licence from Apple themselves. Because of this I would expect random crashes and installation difficulties from an Apple no more than what I'd expect from say an Xbox.
Port it over to a platform like x86 where there are a thousand manufacturers competing with their own little tweaks, variations and buggy third party drivers combined with the massive task of support for legacy hardware and applications and you'd either have the unstable mess that is Windows XP or limited manufacturer hardware support as towards Linux.
Think about this- (and if anybody forms a business model based on this I thought of it first :-) )
For the sake of argument (and because we are on a SuSE newsgroup here) Lets say Novell came up with their own hardware platform, base it on X86 architecture if you like.
Now imagine that they only supported SuSE linux when it was running on that platform, and the only third party hardware and software they supported was that which they had agreed (by arrangement with the manufacturer) was compatible with SuSE linux.
Imagine how stable and easy to use that system could be, everything could just plug in and work, there would be almost zero hardware compatability issues because they would have been resolved by Novell/The Hardware manufacturer before you bought the kit....it would be just like an Apple (or a Sun box)
Of course some people would shun it, they would say that they can buy a computer cheaper from Dell cheaper than the Novell one and then download a free Linux distribution to go on it, or they'd say that Novell don't sell a computer that meets their particular needs, or they dislike the fact they they are tied into one vendor. But some people want more of an appliance than a computer and that's how I see Mac's, you take them home and plug them in and they just work.