Reasons why not to go Macintosh

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Reason 32 : "I'll wait until Mac OS comes out on the PC"

Validity level:

I probably wouldn't be banking on this if I were you...

The argument that this should happen, is that it would gain significant market share for Mac OS X – i.e. just the OS, not the whole Macintosh platform – and give Microsoft a bit of competition in the PC market.

At first, this sounds like a no brainer. But it skims over one simple fact; Apple is a hardware company. Its software – specifically Mac OS X in this case – is merely part of the Macintosh package; an instrument to sell more hardware. Enabling consumers to choose generic, non-Apple hardware to run OS X on, would not achieve this. In fact, inevitably, the direct opposite.

Yeah, but, Microsoft does well out of it

Microsoft on the other hand, is a software company whose mandate is – unsurprisingly – to sell as much software as they can to run on as many PCs as possible. They make most of their money selling licences to OEMs for Windows to be the standard installation on their PCs. Yet while this may be a very profitable business for Microsoft, the likelihood of Apple being able to tap into this financial source to any meaningful degree, is highly unlikely. Microsoft has that wrapped up tight.

So that just leaves the after market for boxed, retail operating system packages; i.e. separately purchased and installed afterwards, not the standard OS installation. But how large and profitable is that market? Profitable enough to counteract the inevitable reduction of hardware sales as a percentage of existing Mac buyers decide to buy their hardware from someone else next time? In market share; probably. In profitability; not even close!

Further reading

Of course, all this is arguably conjecture. It's a much discussed topic that I'll leave any further ins and outs of here for now. But further reading can be had here in this 'Daring Fireball' article. I think it covers the topic rather lucidly.

For now, to summerise, don't go holding your breath of this ever happening. If you want and prefer Apple's Mac OS, then for all practical purposes, you're going to have to buy Apple's hardware too; as likely will always be so.

See also 'I can just run Mac OS on my PC'

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