'ol Kyle hits the nail on the head again...
Actually, it's more like ol' Kyle hitting a big nail right into his own head, piercing his crack-addled brain.
Where to begin...
Let's start with the "terribly overpriced". When I bought my Mac Pro with dual 2.66 Xeon dual-core chips and a GB of RAM (since upgraded to 3GB) and a 250GB drive with a 256MB Nvidia card, I shopped Dell for comparable dual-Xeon machines. The closest I could get was a machine with identical specs and a slightly more powerful workstation graphics card but with only
one Xeon CPU (not two). The price of these CPUs is/was about $670 when bought in lots of 10,000. Dell wanted over $4000. My Mac Pro was $2250. And Dell's low-end workstation graphics card didn't come close to being worth $650 especially for a home workstation. When you start examining Apple's line closely, the Macs are generally as cheap or within a few hundred dollars of a comparable quality machine from Dell/HP/etc. I used to believe the Apple=overpriced thing. And they were. But there have been real changes there. If you want some cheesy commodity machine best suited for impoverished Third Worlders, then buy that crapola thing Dell builds for that $499 market. But the rest of us will buy hardware with quality components, knowing that we get longer service life, better driver support, etc. And while there is still a premium for Apple, it fades or even disappears as you get to their strongest offerings (Mac Book Pro, iMac 24", Mac Pro). While Apple's other high-end machines aren't quite as compelling, the Mac Pro was for my purposes and most creative or tech or high-end home users by far the cheapest option.
As for his 'For those of you that will label me as an “Apple hater,” I will staunchly wave my three iPods in your general direction.', I would point out that lots of Microsoft employees also own multiple iPods. I'm not sure what MP3 players have to do with quality computer hardware. I guess it means that even M$ Fanboi Kevin would be too embarassed to admit to owning a Zune. But he might just neglect to mention that part where, as of Dec. 2, 2006, when the Zune still couldn't operate with Vista machines. Maybe they finally fixed it, I haven't heard. But it indicates how shoddy their support for their own flagship MP3 player was on their new flagship OS.
On to his "Give me the opportunity to buy Mac OS X Leopard for PC", it's a moot point. An Intel Mac
is a PC. Apple is a hardware vendor and, in computers, that is their profit center. Essentially, he's saying that Apple should let him have OS X so he and other people can drive them out of business entirely. Look at what happened when Apple tried allowing third-party hardware vendors in the Nineties. A real disaster financially. Just as important, the machines they built were poor clones of real Macs and subject to a lot of mysterious hardware errors. As Jobs recently reminded us, if you care about software you will build your own hardware. The two are intertwined for a good user experience and reliability.
Byle Kennett: "I have always wondered if Steve Jobs limits Mac operating systems to his proprietary hardware configurations for the cash or if he just won’t admit to the fact that if his OS powered 90% of the world's computers, its shortcomings would be more apparent and his snappy ad campaigns would fall flat."
More commodotization FUD. The control of basic hardware configurations is absolutely essential. For instance, I bought Need For Speed 4 (or was it 5?) for my PC. I even got juvenile and bought a quality driving wheel. And while the AMD machine I used and video card easily exceeded the requirements and my machine had only quality parts, the game was not uniformly smooth or well-executed. As is so often the case with games and multimedia, uniformity of hardware is a great equalizer and makes a game fairer. And designers can focus far more effort on actual playability and fast transitions from one menu to the next, contributing to a fast-paced fun game experience. Unlike PC first-person shooters, you don't necessarily win because you blew $4000 on a machine with dual video cards and watercooling an overclocked processor so you can get some microscopic advantage over the rest of the pack. Or just so you can have lots of eye-candy special effects. Since I had a hacked XBox, I grabbed a copy of that same game for the Xbox. In general reviews, it was considered okay on the PC but strong on the Xbox. In fact, I never again played my more expensive PC version. I just like the play and feel and consistent experience on the far better engineered Xbox version. Now, there is a reason for this. Because the console market is about ten times bigger than even the Windows game market, the stakes for success in a PC game are far lower for any game company. The console is where they win or lose and that is where they assign their best talent and do their best work. Interestingly, with enough programming talent, my little Xbox competed pretty well against my AMD machine which had four times the graphics, three times the CPU power, and 15 times as much RAM. It comes down to programming talent and genius and
designing for a closed platform. Since I once worked for a game company (assembly language programmer for a coin-op 680x0 system), I do have a little relevant experience but that was 15 years ago and that kind of programming is a young man's game. Again, Jobs is right: if you care about software, you build and control your hardware.
It would make about as much sense for Bennett to complain that Xbox 360 and PS3 software isn't opened to commodity hardware machines. They are, after all, little more than run-of-the-mill desktop computers in a console case. But Sony and MS won't do it. Why? Same reason as Apple. They have a direct financial interest in the hardware and, more importantly, it allows them to control the user experience by targeting a very limited hardware configuration. Much like Apple, over the course of a console's lifetime, you may have several revisions of major components and peripherals added. But you strictly control the hardware. It relates directly to whether and how well the machine performs as designed. It's the only way to do it.
By contrast, Vista requires you to buy hardware 2-3 times more powerful to run the trickle-down versions of major console games, nearly always with degraded playability but with more eye-candy. Oh, and 200fps @ 1080p instead of a puny 80fps @ 1600x1200. No thanks.
You can have the commodity hardware problems. You're welcome to them. I'll take a closed hardware platform and playability any day. And I'll take a solid UNIX OS with a strong user-centric GUI design any day. And, BTW, since I have an XP license and run my Mac Pro as a full quad-core Xeon XP machine, I don't really suffer when I boot Windows to run what few games the MS platform has that interest me.
I'll leave out all the times Apple has wisely EOL'd outdated hardware and terminated software support (currently, the Intel Macs will not run OS9). And Apple is smart to do that. MS almost never does it entirely and leaves all kinds of ancient cruft in there. It's bad design and bad corporate policy. It's just sloppy.
BTW, when will MS finally provide you guys with an iLife suite? Well, I guess you can at least play Solitaire until you run out and spend a bunch more money just to get decent video/music/photo software. Since MS only sells you crippled versions or offers nothing at all, it just raised the price for a basic Windows setup. Is it really so cheap now?
I think ol' Kyle is an idiot. Or merely a tool. At any rate, I don't have any financial motive to like my machines in the way he does. So his flaky fanboism is pretty transparent.