How to avoid the Apple tax?

[Tony Arnold]

On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 23:55 -0700, Steve Lamb wrote:
> Derek Broughton wrote:
> > Ludicrous.  Apple is not in the OS market.  They provide an OS for their
> > hardware.
> 
>      Er, say what now?  This might have been true about a decade ago along 
> with the notion that Macs were superior at graphics processing and what not 
> but lets be realistic, Apple is not designing the hardware.  Intel is.  nVidia 
> is.  Modern Macs have become more and more commodity as time goes by.  The 
> only thing Apple does is pick a narrow subset of commodity hardware, deem it 
> "a Mac" and then program the OS to fit that narrow standard.  However that 
> very same hardware is often used in a PC, so much so that people can easily 
> plop XP or Vista on a newer Mac without a hitch.

I didn't see the original posting of this thread, so maybe I'm missing
something here, but why would anyone buy Apple hardware if they do not
want to use the Apple operating system? If they want to use non Apple
software, then they can buy any commodity hardware. It's not too
difficult to buy a PC with no operating system, if you don't want
Windoze either!

Apple's strength has always been that they control both the hardware and
the software, thus you know the software will work with the hardware and
I thought that was the main reason for buying from Apple. Oh, it looks
pretty too!

Like I said, I'm probably missing a point here!

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold