clear.your.mind

You get the typos for free. While Profit compared to turnover is useful, it should read Stock Price/Earnings

>verything else is nonsense, like your post.

Er yeah that was a bit of a late-night flame in the cynical South of England meets Slashdot style. Reading that back I see that it could seem quite offensive to a non-British person.

>It wasn’t supposed to be installed in the hardware you choose, but in the hardware they choose. Don’t you think that’s something wrong?

Well I suspect some of these guys are using install DVDs obtained via file-sharing, but if you can get a legal copy working on your system (whatever it is) then good luck to you.

>Driver is equal to progress? you have to be kidding me. You really think what those guys are doing is progress?

All things being equal a new driver is progress. Well at least in the history of computer science to this point, it is considered a positive thing that more hardware works for an OS. Apple + DMCA = a very weird system where common sense does not really apply. Some people are willing to accept Alice in Wonderland and others do not.

>Well, what we have here. The financial Apple Advisor in person. He knows all Apple financial operations and suddenly, he >decided by his own, that MacOS isn’t a big part of the Apple family.

Well looking at the bare figures, I would say OS X is a bit of a loss leader really. It is there to help get Apple boxes out of the door. These days, Apple mostly makes money from Ipods and selling high-end computing hardware. In my opinion it is still early days for OS X, and feature-wise, in its current guise (with no major architectural changes), it will remain more than competitive against Windows for at least half a decade.

What about after that? I’m sure Apple is keeping its options open, but the move from OS 9 to OS X was, in part, an attempt to reduce costs, since almost all of the core OS was developed outside Apple. If Apple can still sell lots of hardware without having to be in the software business then I’m sure it will go for it. John Dvorak has recently argued on similar lines. (See http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1927886,00.asp )

After all, if Apple could make money out of OS X as a standalone product then it would be shipping the universal install CDs already. Only one company has ever managed to make money out of Operating Systems without hardware, and they came along at a lucky moment and did lots of ‘interesting’ deals along the way that would not be accepted today by the regulatory authorities.

>The thing is, you are seeing this as a consumer fight against X company (can be any company) >and I’m seeing it as a business owner fight. Now, I don’t own Apple, but I can put myself on >their shoes.

Well I believe in a balance, but the scales are now so loaded in favour of large multi-national companies that damage is being done to the rights of customers, small companies, students running web forums and so on, basically everyone outside of the richest 1000 families who now own most of the western world.