OSX86 doesn't hurt anyone. No corporate profit margins were hurt, the only thing hurt was someone's ego (hint: someone's ego who has always supported lock-ins). I'm surprised that nobody has ever dared to compare the hardware lock in of OS X with say, DRM, which everyone hates with a passion.
Not much of a hint, maybe you could be more specific.
As for the
whys and
why nots of this from Apple's perspective, one need only return to the history of this type of thing, and the lessons that Jobs learned from that history.
Our first example, NeXT Computer decided to shift to a software based strategy back in 1993. It seemed simple enough, and to a degree was quite simple... move NEXTSTEP to 486 based processors so that it could run on generic PCs. The plan seemed so simple and straight forward that NeXT shutdown hardware production long before the 486 version of NEXTSTEP was ready to ship.
What people have forgotten (or in the case of most Apple and Windows users, most likely never knew to begin with) was the general reaction to NEXTSTEP's arrival on PCs. What many people assume was that the price of NEXTSTEP was the flaw, but NEXTSTEP wasn't aimed at the desktop market, it was a workstation platform. Price wasn't the issue. The issue was compatibility with the vast amount of PC hardware configurations. This made the first version of NEXTSTEP for PCs (NEXTSTEP 3.1) difficult to deploy and maintain.
First impressions
are lasting ones, and for the rest of the time that NeXT/Apple continued to sell NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP (up to 2001) they continued to fight that early perception. And in a
NeXT forum someone recently asked where that early perception came from... showing that I'm not making up this perception issue.
Jobs isn't one to repeat a mistake, he usually attempts to fix failed strategies before trying again.
Our second example. Rhapsody for Intel based PCs (1997-1999). This time, rather than attempt to push the OS out the door before letting hardware and software developers have a chance to create products for it, Jobs figured that giving them a chance to work with the new OS first would help make sure that it was able to put it's best foot forward when introduced to the public.
What people have forgotten (or in the case of most people, most likely never knew to begin with) was that beyond being a platform for application development, the Rhapsody Developer Releases were designed for makers of third party hardware to develop drivers. This was specifically done to avoid the same problems of perception that NEXTSTEP 3.1 for PCs faced years earlier.
The problem... few NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP developers of drivers ported their software to Rhapsody, and few NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP applications developers continued to maintain both PowerPC and Intel versions of their software (opting for mainly PowerPC versions by the release of Rhapsody DR2). Even worse, almost no new hardware developers joined in to help make drivers for Rhapsody for Intel.
So even with a couple of years of preparation and foundations based on OPENSTEP, Rhapsody was facing a similar (if not worse) launch than NEXTSTEP 3.1 had. The final version of Rhapsody for Intel runs on a small fraction of the hardware that OPENSTEP for Intel can run on. And often times Rhapsody for Intel has stability issues when forced onto inappropriate hardware configurations.
What we know today is that Apple continued to maintain the Rhapsody for Intel build line which eventually became Mac OS X for Intel. What is not fully known is that Apple did not maintain the same amount of drivers for Mac OS X for Intel as was available for Rhapsody for Intel (which in turn was a much smaller amount than existed for OPENSTEP for Intel).
Anyone who knows Jobs at all knows that he hates bad impressions... specially bad
first impressions. Maintaining Mac OS X on Mac hardware is the only way Apple can avoid the same impressions that NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP suffered from on PCs, and the very impressions that has kept Linux out of the desktop market all these years. Almost all the hardware in the world is designed to just work with Windows, and anyone seeing Mac OS X or Linux on generic hardware is going to expect the same compatibility that Windows has... and one only need look at people's perceptions of Linux to guess how they would view Mac OS X on PCs.
Between that overwhelming hurdle of perception and the fact that any loss of a sale of a Mac would have to be made up by the sales of at least four copies of Mac OS X for PCs to maintain stable (
but not growing) revenues makes the whole idea pointless from Apple's perspective.
I mean, how many people are willing to do twice the work they currently do, endure looking bad in the process, and make no more than they currently do? That is a bad model for anyone,
including Apple.
But
SC68Cal also thinks that this is some form of
hardware lock-in... How?
The US government has never considered the marriage of hardware and software as a single product to be lock-in. On the other hand, they have convicted Microsoft for abusing their monopoly position to keep other operating systems off of generic PCs who's manufacturers do not make their own software.
Maybe he is thinking of the iPod/iTunes music store...but I would point out that the DRM is not something that Apple wanted... or needs for that matter. 90% of the purchases off the iTunes music store that I've made have never seen an iPod (mainly because I only own a first generation iPod shuffle). And many people don't feel a need to carry their music around with them, so iPods wouldn't even the main beneficiaries of iTunes media, Macs and PCs are.
No, it isn't hardware lock-in that makes the iPod the market leader... and Jobs knows this very well. What makes the iPod so strong is, in fact,
perception.
