I’m sure they really miss your patronage. Might make them re-think their entire strategy. If they had allowed clones maybe they’d be the corporation with the largest capitalization in the world instead of the 2nd.
Apple actually did license Mac clones for a while in the mid-1990s. When Jobs returned to Apple in '97, he quickly killed the clone program.
So, let me ask the question that would make both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs scream “Heresy!”
Is it possible to have a computer that dual-boots Windows 7 and Mac OS X?
Yes, just about any Mac bought in the last few years comes with software to do exactly that.
This is better suited for IMHO than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’m running Windows 7 in a virtual machine on Mac OS X as I type this message. You can either run it the way I’m doing it (which is seamless; it’s just like any other application window, except this one has Windows in it) or you can boot straight into Windows when you start up, if you want to do it that way.
So, if you can run Windows 7 on a Mac, can you run Mac OS X on a “PC”, since Macs have basically the same hardware anyway? If so, wouldn’t that mean that the difference between a Mac and a “PC” is nothing more than software?
You can run Mac OS X on PC hardware, as described in the link I posted in post #12. As to whether that means the difference between Macs and PCs is nil, that’s a deep philosophical question that I will leave to those who have more expertise than me. 
The reason that you can run Windows on a (recent) Macintosh computer is that Apple switched to Intel processors, so that the hardware is basically the same as that used by PC manufacturers and Microsoft doesn’t care which brand of hardware you use. Apple, on the other hand, does care, so you can’t just run OS X on non-Apple hardware.
Architecturally, yes. Apple was getting it’s but kicked and couldn’t keep up the performance race with PCs, so they essentially switched to using PC hardware. If you buy a Mac though you buy a specific subset of PC hardware which the Mac software is designed and tested to work with.
When you buy a Mac, you are buying a machine that is from a single vendor, which gives you the benefit of everything in it generally just working together without any fiddling. If something isn’t working right, you go back to Apple (and only to Apple) and tell them it’s broke, and they fix it.
If you buy a PC, you get parts made by numerous different vendors who generally don’t talk to each other. You’ve got Microsoft saying how things should work with their OS, but they can’t control other companies and can’t force the other companies to do things exactly the way they want. If something breaks, you can end up with the video guy saying it’s a chipset problem and the chipset guy saying it’s a video problem and since nobody has ultimate responsibility for fixing it, there isn’t any one specific person you can beat on to get it fixed.
That’s the difference between a Mac and a PC these days. It’s not just software. It’s single source vs. open architecture, and who ends up supporting it as well.
Delete: beat by better answer.
I should hope so, since Microsoft doesn’t make any PC hardware. :rolleyes:
cmyk:
Just to nitpick, they do make keyboards and mouses, don’t they still?
You can build an iPod, iPhone and iPad CHEAPER than Apple sells them?
Seriously?
IMO the Mac was cool from the start. I’m not saying this from a “fanboy” perspective. (I find the whole fanboy thing ridiculous. As it happens I have mostly been a Windows user, but I have used Macs quite a bit and like them just fine). But the original Mac, yes it may have been beige rather than translucent Bondi Blue, but it was still much more of a designer object than its contemporaries. It had some of the Apple hallmarks of quality components, nice construction, higher price tag. Aside from popularising the desktop GUI, it brought things like desktop publishing with proper, high-resolution fonts to the masses, or at least the slightly better-off masses. It was cool.
IBM damned well DID complain; they had intended their PC Jr (the original desktop PC) to be every bit as proprietary as the Apple, Commodore, and Amiga systems were. But people were successfully able to reverse-engineer the hardware, and IBM didn’t own the rights to the operating system - Microsoft did, and as you noted, Microsoft didn’t care about IBM’s plans, they just wanted to sell lots and lots of copies of DOS (and later, Windows).
It was a historical accident that Wintel systems became as open as they did.
Nitpick: the PC Jr followed the IBM PC (and so the PC Jr was not the original desktop PC), so did you mean that the IBM PC was intended to be proprietary?
Apple was terribly managed in the early 90s, but they were still cool, just terrible in too many other ways. When I went to graduate school my roommate was from South Africa. He had never seen a Macintosh before in his life. He was impressed, “It’s just like Windows 95!”
I’d say the cool factor started with the iMac. That’s when Apple moved directly and obviously towards form as a major factor in their designs. Over time they nailed both form and function and voila. Apple realized long before any other computer industries that computers were no longer hidden in a back office. They were becoming part of a home and style was a major factor for that.
Yes, I did. Thanks for catching that!
A lot of people seem to be under the misimpression that Wintel systems (unlike that evil Apple) were somehow designed from the beginning to be an open architecture. Actually, in the early days of computing EVERYONE’S systems were closed architecture, and intended to stay that way. Everyone thought the money was going to be in selling the hardware (since the hardware was very expensive at the time); not many saw the importance of the software as an alternative profit center. (Of course, for Apple, the money still IS in the hardware. But generic PCs are commodity items these days, which is why companies like Dell are struggling - since they don’t make any software, they’re having trouble maintaining a reasonable profit margin on their machines.)
As I remember from documentaries on the history of the PC, the goal with the original IBM PC was to be fast to market, so they used off-the-shelf hardware. That’s probably the big reason that Compaq and others were able to clone it. But had IBM managed to prevent cloning, it probably would not have been as popular.