When there, click the operating system (OS) options popup menu in the $399 machine's area and look carefully. There is something there that you might be surprised to see. Mac OS, to be specific.
You may not know or care about the history of Apple, Inc. (no longer is it Apple Computer, Inc.) sovereignty (so to speak), but it is an interesting one, to those aware of it. So Psystar, based in Miami, is challenging the fairness of Apple's tight-gripped EULA (end user licensing agreement). I may be a fool, but I like it. Not for its potential to somehow hurt Apple, but to (hopefully) allow the OS to penetrate different markets, or access them from different marketing, selling and purchaser perspectives. The part of this I do have a problem with is: where will OS support come from, should there be a need for it? However, so long as OS upgrades aren't blocked in reaction to the Psystar efforts, Apple's OS requires little "support" in the sense that Windows users think of it. When I say little, I mean Mac OS requires almost no support (this claim does not regard the tech-frightened, but the reasonably savvy computer user).
Anecdote: I cannot tell you the last time I called Apple regarding an OS issue, but (without researching it) I am fairly sure it was around 1999, when the blue G3 tower and Mac OS 9.0 came out. The early OS 9 was garbage to regular Mac users. Certainly, in these G3 towers at real design and video studios, anyway. Either the OS or the G3, or both, were full of bugs that didn't really cease till the arrival of 9.1 or later. That was a painfully long time, trying to get work done! (My friend Anthony Z. knows what I mean: I was working at his Warehouse Multimedia Studios back then.)
I think Apple should free its OS to the world. Not in whole, not at risk of their way of doing things, but to allow people to option it, and well, to see what happens. This is not 1995, and open source is not so weak a world as it once was (for end users).
Michael Dell commented that he would like to give his customers any OS options, and would offer Mac OS if Apple let him (that is paraphrasing Dell's words of interest when Apple moved to Intel processors). Apple's reputation as far as OS is stellar, even considering OS 9. In fact OS 9.x worked just great on a PowerBook G3 that I bought in 2000. except among people who know relatively nothing about computers. The foray into licensing Mac OS in the 1990s was a flop because the machines turned out being really crappy, except for perhaps Power Computing.
Apple should let the world of open source and the consumer market do their thing. Let users decide what's junk and what's not -- it's been working rather well lately, even if Microsoft's still-clunky OS is still dominating. If Apple does not sanction Psystar, but merely lets it happen, then how is Apple owing anything to consumers of Psystar?
Consider this: I have downloaded and tried many open source software products. I have been sorely disappointed and sometimes highly pleased. Some rather notable products, especially a variety of MS Word (word processor) replacements, have been just plain disappointing: Dumb things made them too awkward to use, such as the typing cursor didn't sit at the correct point, various commonly used fonts acted very strangely, spaces between words stretched all over the place, and much weirder stuff. The ones I tried were plainly not writers' software.
It was easy for me to decide, therefore, to try and ultimately buy Apple's own iWork suite. It simply worked. It wasn't instantly second nature to me to use the trio of software in iWork, but I saved $300 or so over getting MS Office for Mac and I was happy with how they behaved. (Keynote is far better than PowerPoint; Numbers, for creating functional calculations and little spreadsheet tools, is definitely better than Excel; Word is still the model software for word processing, but it loses out to Pages for my needs, for trying to be all things -- layout app, grammar teacher, dictionary -- when it cannot handle it). I'm happy with iWork for home and my personal writing, spreadsheet and presentation work; I wish I could use it at work, where I am using the whole MS Office Suite on a PC. I've even created gorgeous templates in Pages that I would never have wanted to try to create in Word.
My own brother kicked himself -- hard -- for having waited till 2008 to buy a Mac. If I may say so based on his comments to me, Don is so darn happy with his home computer now, after barely even using a Mac before, it is quite funny and almost hard for me to believe. I have often thought that I must have simply "taken" to the Mac OS year ago, but then I heard my brother's reaction to finally owning a Mac a few months ago, and I was in awe.
I can still appreciate the difference, too: I have been using Dells and Lenovos at work for the past four years, and it amazes me that the OS (XP or or some other recent OS version) was not more than five to seven years older than it is. Archaic doesn't even begin to describe it. But I guess I am a spoiled Mac user.
What my experience tells me is this: perhaps the time is right for Mac OS X to be optioned for open source in other company's hardware. If the hardware cannot meet the necessary specs, then how will any of the open sourcing companies succeed? The market will destroy the junk, and embrace the good stuff. It has worked. It worked when Apple attempted to allow clones in the 1990s. It ended up stopping the cloning, sadly, but some of the cloners had some decent machines. Just not enough.
Here's a thought: Too bad we cannot seem to do something similar to open sourcing in the auto industry. If it was opened up to vast innovation possibilities, we might have a flying car that ran on solar power by 2020. So long as eager innovators are appropriately encouraged, good things are always possible.
It is an industry's nature, and a company's, to be closed or open. Whether the decision is for profit, or for quality, or both, I think Apple can afford to open the door to its OS and still keep a high level of quality connected to its name. If I put top-quality gas in a junk car, I cannot blame the gas company for my car's operation. I hope something can be figured out so a similar idea could fit computer CPUs (the car) and OS availability (the gas). I love the Mac OS for a lot of reasons, but I want to see it blossom past Cupertino, CA, into a major force in the world of technology. One that will dominate -- because those who do not use Mac OS do not know what they are missing. But no amount of encouragement will change the world of computing so long as the world is ruled by uninspired men with their awkward and stubborn Windows PCs.
Have a look at these articles, and note the sites (MacNN and Mactropolis), which helped inspire my comments:
and
Note: I do not claim to be any more than an expert user of Macs and other PCs and the software that sits on them. I have been using Macs and PCs professionally since 1992, and I began using Macs in 1989, and IBM and compatibles since 1986. Feel free to comment back, or to share this comment with others.
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