Gatezone said:
Like having the cursor on a button and taping the pad to do the same thing that a click would do. I haven't looked up the add-on product somone else mentioned.
Unless there's something wrong with yours, it should work just fine. It does on my PowerBook and on the MBP I tried, at least.
I understand what you are saying and if this was 15 or even 10 years ago I would see your position on this being stronger than it is today with Apple's and macintosh brand being what it is.
It's not time dependent. Apple, if it's going to continue to develop both hardware and software, cannot compromise the software, because it's OS X that makes them distinctive.
I think there comes a point where you have greater confidence in your brand, product, service.... and hardware than that.
You've obviously never done a press conference or an investor conference

. It's not your own confidence in your products that's the issue, its shareholder and media confidence, and I assure you that's not an unpredictable response in the slightest.
My underlying point is really that at 10% (and I'll bet that is optimistic or units shipped) there is more potential for growth than the fearful brand approach would have you believe.
The thing is, that's not growth. It's more sales, but it's not a market share expansion. For Apple, they have to tie their hardware sales to OS X, because they're not willing to license the OS, so the only way to increase market share and therefore investment and further cyclical growth is to make sure that people who buy Macs primarily use OS X. If they are only shipping Windows boxes, they get to make more money in the short term, but it's not sustainable growth and it's not at all a prudent business move.
Both of us are speculating and there is no hard and fast rule about what would absolutely happen.
I'm afraid that's not accurate. There's no saying for sure what Apple will and won't do, but there absolutely is a predictable response and consequence if they were to start providing Windows, and historical precedent that such a move is not "survivable."
You can't compare these other forms to something I can teach my ten year old, or more importantly a non-techy client to do. It is radical. See I can make definitive proclamations too

.
Yes I can...Lilo and GRUB offer graphical OS selection just like the Boot Camp boot process. A four year old could use it. What Apple has done is provide step by step instructions on the computer itself...but even a 10 year old could follow any of the dozens of install guides on the Internet for dual booting. With the right instructions, anyone can dual boot on any computer.
I do appreciate your perspectives on the corporate political long-term effects, or at least the fears of effects. I'd be happy to jump to the side of letting Mac OS run on generic boxes but that has fallen on deaf ears since the PowerPC debacle, no?
That's an entirely different discussion, my friend.
There are multiple strategies for increasing Apple's or OS X market share and I don't think they would have adopted Boot Camp (unless they just plan to try to kill it off) like they have if they were as frightened, as you portray them, of the dynamics you describe.
The cause-effect scenario I'm talking about applies to Apple offering Windows as a BTO option. The existence of Boot Camp is completely separate from that. There is a difference between permitting and encouraging, and Apple is right at that line, positioned exactly where they should be from a corporate-political perspective.
There are times when a minority can deeply effect a majority if the majority representatives are further imersed into the minority experience and survive to tell about the benefits and spread the meme of something 'hot' that the minority has.
Yes, but you're not talking about that. You're talking about increasing Apple sales via selling Windows PCs...so the "minority experience" isn't relevant beyond an idle curiosity.
The iPod example may not seem related but I think it is. Apple is making money on the hardware, is it not? [...] That it can't make money on hardware alone? Can it make it on software alone? Is that why it never licenses it's software? I would say the latter sort of shows a lot less confidence in the OS brand than letting Windows run on an iPod, oops, I mean on a Macbook.
Apple can't really survive without one or the other. People love the integration of hardware and software that Apple provides, and concurrently, Apple's existence relies on that synergy. The iPod is the exact opposite of the Mac. The iPod is both the most populare hardware and uses the most popular software. The Macintosh is neither the best-selling computer line nor is it the best-selling OS. Again, Apple's confidence in their own brand is not at stake.
Dell would sell cheap laptops with OS X on them.
We're not talking about that here. There are different forces discouraging that behavior (namely, Apple's software is funded
directly by its hardware sales, so expanding the software scope would require a reworking of their finances).
But a software company that doesn't sell hardware would go broke, right? Oops, what about Microsoft?
Microsoft has a 90% market share. Apple has about 4%. There's no competitive commercial OS to fight Windows. It's not that software companies or hardware companies can't be profitable; it's that Apple is BOTH, and they can't abandon that on a whim because they've got nothing to fall back on. Their ongoing stabilitiy is dependent on the synergy of both halves.
So to get this straight, Apple doesn't want to sell Windows with it's hardware but will give away a product and the tools to do it on your own.
Precisely. That's the confidence in their brand. They will sell you a computer. Once it's in your hands, they're okay with you doing whatever you want with it, because they're confident you'll like OS X and stick with it. But that's a totally different beast from them selling you Windows from the factory. You're talking about Microsoft selling and supporting Linux as an optional add-on to Windows (of their own free will and not because they're forced to in order to avoid legal entanglement) versus Microsoft having tools to allow you to prepare to dual-boot your computer with Linux.
It wants you to buy their hardware and their OS with fewer build to order options than other major computer manufacturers. It wants to grow it's market share based on the ***public's*** perception of OS X...?
Why knock the hardware's limited configurations? Aren't you the one who wants to buy the Mac hardware to run Windows? If configurability is a problem, wouldn't you rather have a Dell?
Apple's distinctiveness is it's OS or its hardware? Both? hardware is really not as distinctive as it once was is it? I mean it's good and it might be the best PC hardware in some ways, but it is just like another PC hardware commodity because Apple had to eat crow and turn to Intel. So the software and interface is the heart of the distinctiveness or unique selling point.
It's both, because the hardware pays for the software. The software is the heart of that distinctiveness, yes. But the software cannot survive independent of the hardware, both in terms of finances and of support and development.
If the ipod went out with both on it do you really think that given the choice people would choose MSN? I mean you can't force people to buy one experience over another if they really like it. People really like the iPod and iTunes experience.
Yes, people do. But diffusion of customers goes from the dominant outward, not the other way when the dominant player introduces a minority. The iPod situation is
the exact opposite of the Mac situation (iPod=Apple dominance in hardware/software versus Mac=Apple lightweight in both sides). iTunes has a tremendous volume, and MSN Music is constantly improving to try to catch it. There's a far higher statistical risk that iTunes customers will switch away from it than will switch to iTunes, because chances are they're already using iTunes. This is exactly why Microsoft doesn't bundle OS X or Linux and why it refuses to port certain key technologies to those platforms, and exactly why MSN Music is NOT offered for iPods.