But Apple has never been a big FOSS supporter. They have usually been more closed than Microsoft.
i was referring to U.C Berkeley culture, which was one of Freedom and Rebellion two qualities which i really admire. Jobs and Wozniak came from that culture and so did many others in the initial Apple. Unfortunately now that same spirit is limited to aesthetics and great design(and not freedom). They do have their reasons for doing so, but nothing reallt justifies being closed.
Lets see, they attempted to sue Microsoft into not shipping a GUI (one
of the earliest look and feel lawsuits).
In fact it was one of the first law suits of its kind. It was motivated more due to Apple feeling betrayed for giving out their hard work to M$.
Microsoft and Apple took two entirely different routes into the market.
Apple is primarily a hardware vendor, and they attempt hardware lockin.
Can you give me an example of Apple doing hardware locking pre-1990 ? If you are referring to not giving out hardware details or only partially giving out hardware details that isn't exactly locking.
The PC revolution was driven by Compaq, who beat IBM in the
reverse-engineering lawsuit of 1984. The PC world adopted fairly open standards while Apple was closed. This kept the price of Macs high, while the prices of PCs kept falling, and performance increasing.
Agreed.
Today, by running on a locked down PC, Macs are essentially competing
with midrange to top of the line PC hardware in laptops, but they still aren't all that competitive in desktops. Again, you can get cheaper laptops by avoiding brand names, and then Apple is suddenly not competitive. Hardware will just work, as long as it is Apple approved hardware, or USB (Intel invented USB and PCI, PCIX, Bluetooth, Sun opened the Sparc architecture and NFS amongst other things). Solaris runs on Sun hardware, Intel, and Fujitsu hardware.
Agreed. Only Apple is more keen on making those who can afford a Mac do the switch. Anyway Mac's are a lot more cheaper in U.S/Europe and the kind of offers they have for students there are unbeatable.
Apples are nice toys, but they don't even come close to Sun. As for
desktops, those are being turned into thin clients in corporate environments again, so about the only place where Apple is making any headway is in tech circles, where Unix geeks are moving to Macs because they need something to run MS Office and would rather not run the even more broken Microsoft Windows.
They ARE giving the better alternative.
Anyway, if you so desire to know why i would still vouch for Apple - Its because of Steve Jobs. i haven't seen a better presenter and a more passionate and charismatic man EVER. In fact if you read his personal history from rags to riches to rags to riches its one of the MOST inspiring tales in human hostory.
If anyone's interested - just ask.
Regards,
- vihan