'According to reports, Apple's bundled iLife applications, major selling points for the Mac operating system, are already Intel-native and run at full speed. This is the most awe-inspiring stealth marketing move I've ever seen.' (Update: A reader who for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous just demonstrated to me that the software is, in fact, already available on Internet software piracy sites.) If I can think through this stuff, Apple's management can think through this stuff. I estimate that we're down to a matter of hours before Mac OS X 10.4.1 for Intel hardware is available for download on Internet software piracy sites and peer-to-peer piracy networks. 'The Intel-based Power Macintoshes that Apple is showing at their developer conference are based on an Intel motherboard, generic Intel graphics and off-the-shelf Pentium 4 CPUs. 'There is nothing at all that prevents the version of Mac OS X that runs on the developer transition machines from running on any PC with compatible components,' Jeff Harrell writes for The Shape of Days. Report: Apple Mac OS X 10.4.1 for Intel hits piracy sites

The purpose of limiting OS X on intel to Apple hardware is to give them a chance to make the transition first *before* organizing a profitable cloning arrangement, assuming there are enough people who want to sell mac clones.īut you will never see Apple authorized crap hardware that doesn't work, like you do in the PC world. This is why so many people are perplexed at apple's actions.

IF it made as much as it does frome each OS upgrade, it would be 16 times as much revenue. If there were 40 million Mac clones being sold every year and Apple made as much from each one of them as it does from an iPod, Apple would be about 8 times more net revenue than it is now. Apple makes as much from selling a piece of hardware that you could call that profit profit of the OS with free hardware, or profit of the hardware with free softwware. Yes, they make hardware, but that's not the focus of their business model.Īpple makes more money selling an OS upgrade than selling a Mac.

The idea that Apple is a hardware company is common, but misguided. Apple makes hardware because they want their software to run well.

Apple developer tools 10.4