In our last podcast, we talked with Don Reisinger about a whole slew of Apple shenanigans. Well, by we I really mean Jeremy. He did an excellent job, by the way, so you need to keep your eye on your feed for the upcoming edition of Macgasm. Anyway, Psystar came up and Don had some really interesting opinions about it. I’m not going to rehash them here, mostly because I want you to listen to the podcast, but more importantly, because his opinion was something I totally didn’t see coming and you should probably hear them straight from him. He had some excellent points that I failed to think about. That’s why he gets paid the big bucks! ;)
I’ve been rewriting this Psystar post for a month, and most of the time the article ends up deleted because I have complete mood swings with my opinions. One day I think it’s completely absurd and runs contrary to my philosophy on what makes the Macintosh such an amazing platform from both a software and a hardware stand point. Other days, I think it would be the smartest and most genius move for Apple Inc. However, no matter what my daily mood swing brings, a couple of words continue to crop up into my articles: “closed” and “proprietary”. So what does Apple stand to gain from allowing beige boxers to install OS X on that crappy AMD box with a billion different hardware options? The only thing I can see, is a nightmare consisting of driver packages that are as poorly supported as all those early Vista drivers. Does it sound like a good time to you? Of course it doesn’t and why would it, it runs contrary to the “just working” nature that Apple has spent countless dollars advocating in those Justin Long as a “Mac” commercials. It wouldn’t be an, I’m a Mac and I’m a PC commercial. Instead it would be, I’m Windows XP and I’m Vista. I’m archaic and I’m well supported, and I’m fresh and new but developers have ignored me. While the movement from XP to Vista might not be the best of comparisons to illustrate my point, it certainly does underline the problem users would face. Crappy drivers. It’s taken well over a year for Vista to get its kinks worked out with third party vendors, can Apple afford to do that? Would those potential new OS X users be as understanding as they seem to be with Vista? I don’t really see this as being beneficial to Apple, and I don’t see these PC users being as forgiving as we are either. So what’s the point? Outside of total OS domination, I don’t really think Apple Inc. sees it in their cards for the immediate future. But, I also didn’t think Canada would ever get an iPhone either so, who knows. Maybe two years from now, Apple will have once again proved me wrong.
Don and Jeremy did make an excellent point about it not really being an “open” option, and that it would probably result in Apple Inc. working insanely close with 3rd party manufacturers much in the same way as they did with AT&T and the iPhone. If any company can do it, it would be Apple, but I just don’t see it happening, especially with Micheal Dell.
Who knows what Apple has in store for the future, but I fully intend on riding the wave into the future. In Jobs we Trust! ;)
