Apple Joins Intel, OS X and Windows Face Off
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With all the buzz about “the deal with the devil” that Steve Jobs made with Intel, there has been no shortage of speculation and analysis of the future of Apple, the Macintosh line, and its other products. That’s to be expected. Nobody completely understands the reasons why the divorce between Apple and IBM actually happened, but there are some strong indicators. However, with OS X, things are a bit harder to predict.
OS X never really competed directly with Windows or Linux, especially since you absolutely had to buy an Apple computer in order to run OS X. Sure, there’s PearPC or its alleged GPL-violating cousin CherryOS, but in theory, you had to have already purchased a Mac to get OS X or you had to have obtained it by, well, “other” means. Now that OS X is moving to x86, we have a whole new can of worms opening up, as well as some direct competition.
The key to Windows, Linux, the BSDs, and to a certain extent Solaris/x86 is that they’re designed to run on any white box computer. Anyone could go to newegg.com or NCIX.com, price out a great new computer, and have a slew of operating systems to work with it. They’re also widely available for anybody to obtain and use right away. Windows has the distinct advantage of being produced by Microsoft, and having more than 90% of the operating system market in the x86 world. Windows also has an extensive driver database, hundreds of thousands of applications, a massive development community, is preloaded on almost every computer sold by a major OEM in the world, and a marketing department behind it that has its eyes trained on eating Linux for breakfast. Linux, on the other hand, has the advantage of being free, but doesn’t have all the features and comforts of Windows, let alone the drivers and software. Some see it as being not user friendly, and it hasn’t been successful in making a sizeable dent in Windows market share. The BSDs may even have it worse in this respect.
Applications, drivers, user friendliness and cost are mentioned because those are the four biggest components in choosing an operating system for the average desktop. Joe O.S. Purchaser is not going to buy a copy of an operating system if it cannot run their software or if it cannot support their hardware. User friendliness has long been a selling point of Windows, especially since it comes preloaded on most x86 PCs to date. Finally, the price for performance compared to similar systems is a heavy part of any decision. If OS X is going to have any serious inroads in the x86 world, it’s going to have to compete on those four issues.
With servers, stability is crucial, but for the most part, a server’s uptime is a result of its administrator. Then there’s security, but last I checked, Dell doesn’t sell computers preconfigured for secure applications, and again, Jane O.S. Buyer is not buying an operating system for security; she leaves that for the 14 year old down the street to handle.
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