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Cringely Predicts Apple to Ship OS X for Any PC
boosman writes "In his current column, and in a similar op-ed piece in The New York Times, Robert X. Cringely predicts that Apple 'will announce a product similar to Boot Camp to allow OS X to run on bog-standard 32-bit PC hardware.' I dissect why this is unthinkable and challenge Cringely to a public bet on the subject."
...dork.
Right, because all the big OEMs like Dell install OSes downloaded from The Pirate Bay. Oh, they don't? But surely Joe Sixpack is competent enough to install a new OS and is even aware of the existence of OS X (and hacked OS X)?
Face it, whoever's installing OS X on a non-Apple computer is not Apple's target market anyway. They're not paying now and wouldn't pay if Apple released a legal version, just like they pirate Windows today.
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The eternal question about Apple is if they're a software company or a hardware company ... and when it comes down to it, I think they'll choose hardware.
The release of the Bootcamp Beta opens the door for Apple becoming a Windows OEM and shipping dualboot systems with Windows and OS X. Apple still has decent margins on their hardware, and can make plenty of money selling to customers that just want a stylish Wintel box. Plus it gives people a low-risk opportunity to try OS X.
Apple has also had a very strong relationship with Microsoft in recent years, and I don't see them competiting head-to-head for Dell's sales.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Just about every professional should know when to leave their profession. john Dvorak should have left 10 years ago. He has been wrong on SO many things.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What is your reason for wanting OSX on a generic "Dell" as opposed to a Mac Book Pro?
Is it simply because you already have the hardware and can't justify spending money on new hardware? Do you feel the Mac Book Pro doesn't have the same cost/ value quotient as your Dell?
If such is the case, then perhaps you should wait three years when your Dell becomes obsolete, and when it comes time to replace it, replace it with a MacBook Pro (or equivalent). That way, you'd be able to run OS X, Yellow Dog Linux, and probably Windows Vista if you so desired (something which I doubt your Latitude or Inspiron notebook won't be able to do.)
Why does anyone pay attention to Cringley? I mean, do any of these 'industry pundits' ever have to keep track of the accuracy of their 'predictions'? No... they just make ever-outlandish predictions because it gets them some publicity and gets some eyeballs for ad revenue over to their website. Just say 'no'.
Nothing to see here except a crank who made a fairly obvious, if not very likely prediction.
Boosman's response is far better than Cringely's column in pointing out the real problem: device driver management.
My experience with OSX drivers is that Apple barely gets enough support from device manufacturers (DMs) to stay above water. In some cases they bring development in-house to try to improve quality. Doing so in the Darwinistic land of PC hardware is impossible: the DMs must provide good drivers. Getting OSX marketshare up to the 25-50% level necessary for DMs to pay real attention will require years. During that time, OSX-on-nonApple-HW customers would provide a stream of complaints that would tarnish Apple's reputation but, more importantly, would slow down their development of OSX and give Microsoft a chance to catch up.
I personally would love to run OSX on other hardware right now, but PC hardware is getting _so_ commoditized that prices are falling to the point where the human cost of a poor operating system may outweigh the marginal cost Apple charges for their hardware for many people.
Apple is now 100% on that commodity train and as long as their marginal cost stays rational, they'll slowly grow marketshare.
They make themself believe they have to. And this is one of the reasons for the mess they brought themselves into.
But this is so last century.
Virtualisation. Obsoletes. This.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
Yeah, right. They may be `shaping up', but it will take at least a decade before they reach the level of Apple in 2006. Never mind that they'll have to catch up with Apple's 2016 experience then.
That's from a former on-and-off Linux user since 1998, full time user since 2001, who switched to Macs in 2005 and isn't looking back in the least. I had to suffer (strong emphasis on suffer) Ubuntu for a couple of days in February, and I was reminded how painful Linux is and seriously wondered how I managed these four years as a Linux-only user. Windows is paradise in comparison. (Oh, by the way: I've never seen such blatant imitation as KDE's Control Center is of OS X's System Preferences. I actually laughed out loud the first time I saw it. I'll forever use it as an anecdote to characterize open source developers and their culture of imitation.)
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As I said over on Macslash:
.NOT wouldn't have been able to take over the windows developers quite so easily.
I was yelling as loud as anyone else when Apple reneged on the promise they'd made at WWDC three years in a row that a Cocoa runtime would be available for windows, at no charge. I still think it's something Apple probably should have done, since MS's hammer-lock on the industry isn't because of their crap knock-off the the Mac's UI, it's the number of developers who are locked into their APIs. If Yellow box had been kept alive,
Nevertheless, the yellow box depended on Display Postscript, which Apple and Adobe couldn't come to terms on licensing (Probably because anyone could have written far better PDF-manipulating app that Acrobat in about a week using Cocoa.)
When Apple abandoned DPS for Quartz 2D, the amount of work necessary to implement Cocoa on windows got a lot bigger. Windows simply doesn't have a lot of the underlying facilties on which Cocoa depends today. Their POSIX layer is a joke. Their graphics are only begining to catch up to Jaguar. Their reliability? Well, don't get me started.
But, all that being said, the main reason why Apple's not going to revive Cocoa on Windows is that there just isn't enough money to be made selling developer tools on Windows. Compare Apple's revenues to RealBasic, Delphi, and CodeWarrior combined. It's not worth it just so that Apple can make life better for developers on the other platform.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Have you typed for any length of time on a MacBook Pro's keyboard where you can honestly make this assertion or is your assertion simply based on speculation and presumption?
With regards to missing standard keys, could you be more specific? Are you referring to "Prt Scr," "Sys Rq," etc? Which keys are missing that are considered "standard"?
He's wrong for a reason. Dvorak has found a niche in publishing the unthinkable, and generating endless reams of flamebait from all kinds of industry pundits.
:)
Basically, he says alot of shit to get people pissed off and therefore generates hits.
Well, that depends on how much it cost them to make the software on the CD and how much it cost to create the mac mini. These things just don't appear in the stores automagically.
I think one of the biggest factors against OS X on PC's is the tech support. Getting hardware makers to provide OS X drivers should be easy. But then customers would call asking whether the Start button is. Or they'd call asking how to eject a CD. Answering those questions will cost Apple time and money. If if there's no solution, it'll cost them goodwill.
People like Apple because it just works. Put OS X on any PC and that advantage goes away.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Random slashdotter makes ad-homenim dismissal rather than confront the actual content. Examples at any time of the day or night.
Apple's value lies in its name, not in its propagation. Apple has been selling by the credo of "unpack - plug in - work", i.e. their stuff is known to work. Unlike Windows, which is more renowned for installing, downloading and installing drivers, downloading and installing patches, tinkering with this or that to make it work, etc.
The hacked OS doesn't hurt them. It's neither a damage to the brand nor to the sales. It doesn't work? So? WE DIDN'T MAKE IT! It works? So? You wouldn't have bought it anyway. If you did, you would've bought a Mac as well.
If they did make a "PC OSX", though, it could hurt the brand. It could drop Mac sales, and most likely it would suffer from driver problems, at least in the first year or so. A year is a long time, time enough to ruin a brand name for sure.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So what will be the point of buying Apple hardware then if this happens. Gee thats nice its a pretty overpriced box.
So he is basically the ultimate troll, trying to always say stupid things that have just enough sense in them that it is barely belivable that he didn't write them only to generate flames? Could be.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
The price of a dell + an extra $200 is more than the swing for an equivalent mac product. You can't argue that Macs are too pricey when arguing you wouldn't mind paying hundreds extra for an OS. When the macbook pro came out I priced it against Dell's offerings. Without going to a much thinker book you couldn't get anything close and even then it was more money.
As for tech support, when's the last time anyone called Microsoft for tech support? I don't know anyone who's ever done it; they didn't do it for DOS, not for Windows 3x, 9x, NT or XP. Everyone I know does the following, though in varying order:
- tries stuff, swears, tries more stuff
- reboots
- clicks all over the place
- looks it up on the net
- asks a friend
You'll notice they NEVER READ THE FUCKING MANUAL!The only time I call a support number for hardware or software is for an RMA.
So why would OSX be different?
The Kubuntu control centre (i think it's called Guidance) looks quite damned similar to the OSX control centre. See here.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
You're right - it's not rocket science. It's much harder.
To do what you request, all Apple would need to do is to get all the hardware manufacturers to write OS X drivers for their hardware, or do it themselves. And then test a representative combination of hardware systems. That's the hard part. Ever seen the MS hardware test labs? They have lots of hardware. (As a side note, apparently eBay has been a boon for the hardware labs when they want to pick up an item of some esoteric discontinued equipment, which amused me.)
And if Apple don't do this, then the support would be a nightmare, and the user experience would just be a lottery. It's that latter thing that doesn't even come close to how Apple want people to perceive their products.
I mean, Windows drivers are often a lottery, and that's when they have 95% share of the market (or whatever it is), so it's in the manufacturer's interests to make sure their drivers don't suck. In view of the actual quality of many drivers, I'm sure the manufacturers would spend up to several days getting their OS X drivers working.
By the way, this does seem like one of those things that won't happen. I know many of the Apple faithful refused to believe that Apple would switch to Intel, or that Apple would allow Windows to run on their Intel hardware, for no sane reasons I can discern. Before the fact, both things seemed to me likely or reasonable (but not inevitable). So I was pleasantly surprised by the Intel switch, and Bootcamp - but it was 90% pleasure, 10% surprise.
Running OS X on commodity PC hardware seems much less likely than either of these - precisely because one of Apple's major advantages is their closed hardware system; they only have to make their stuff run on computers that they make themselves. That's why hardware/driver issues on Macs are much less common than PCs.
Apple may be willing to sacrifice that advantage, but I doubt it. You just have to look at the insufferably smug copy on their website whenever they mention PCs. (Of course, they used to talk about Intel CPUs like that, so nothing's certain in this world.)
Apple's view is most likely that if you want a Windows laptop that runs OS X, then that's fine with them, because they sell those, too.
The entire point, you dumbass, is that they DO NOT want you as a customer. They aren't looking to sell 100 billion copies of OSX to all the Dell fanboys on the planet, they want to sell you an Apple computer, with OSX already installed on it. They don't give a flying fuck about your shittly little Dell laptop, nor what software it runs. They are a business, not a religious organization hell-bent on destroying Microsoft.
Why can't you people get it through their thick heads that Apple is about selling a complete package, not trying to compete with Microsoft and "win" the OS war, or whatever war happens to be waged in the computer world at this moment.
Microsoft's problems are much more about their corporate culture and management.
This seems to be the big gun that people throw out "Apple doesn't want to deal with all the support issues". Well, they deal with support issues now don't they? What would they need, a bigger staff?
Apple is usually listed as having one of the better customer support departments now (yes yes, there are exceptions to everything so don't barrage me with your "I bought an iPod from them and I had to wait 5 minutes on a phone blah blah blah"). Why couldn't they continue this trend with OSX?
But look at it this way, if people buy OSX to place on their computer, they pretty much will know what they're doing. What Joe Average person goes out to buy a computer with no OS on it, then go back to the store to buy the OS to load? No one. They'll buy a Dell or Gateway or Compaq that has an OS already loaded and the only thing they'll ever buy is probably an upgrade. AND if they have a problem with their computer, they do NOT call MS, but they call Dell, or Gateway or whoever.
A couple of grandparents that buy a computer from Dell are not going to call MS for support when they have a TON of flyer's and stickers and warnings with Dell's customer support number and website plastered all over them. They are also not going to go out to buy OSX to replace everything on their computer. Though they might buy a Dell with OSX on it...maybe...and then again, they would call Dell for service.
So please all of you, stop with the bullshit that "Apple doesn't want to deal with the support issues". They could handle it with ease.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
The majority of people who get there OSes via infringing torrents weren't likely to pay for them anyway.
Even if that's true (which I doubt--this isn't a product like Windows which people chose not to buy, it's an unreleased product which they were unable to buy), a non-Mac version of OS X would not be sold only to those who downloaded the torrent.
Meanwhile, having a legit OSX for PC would likely cannibalize Apple's hardware sales, much like the mac-clones did some years back.
At first, Apple would sell fewer Macs, but many, many more copies of OS X. If it takes off (which I believe it would), it's quite possible for Apple to sell more Macs, in the long run, than they would have otherwise. Right now, there is a relatively small percentage of consumers who seriously consider buying a Mac (say, 10%). As the market share for OS X increases (as it would, with a retail, non-Mac release of OS X), the percentage of people who would consider a Mac increases as well.
So right now, the number of Mac buyers is 100% of a small number. With the release of a non-Mac version of OS X, it will be a smaller percentage of a larger number. That does not guarantee success, but success is much more likely than you and the other naysayers seem to realize.
A side issue: a version of OS X for generic PC is still going to need drivers, and lots of them. Where are these going to come from? I don't think we can count on OEMs to produce them, especially for even slightly older product, and it would be a monumental task for Apple to do it.
Not my problem, and not an insurmountable problem. BSD runs just fine with your various and sundry devices.
Perhaps Apple would, at first, only OEM OS X (no OEM is going to include OS X if it can't work on their PC). Or maybe only via online order, which first points you to download a "compatibility test" program which will list any devices which won't work.
Like I said, not my problem, and not insurmountable.
"I tried OS X on my old emachine and it failed to see my scanner, didn't work with the e-button on the case to launch internet explorer, and sleep never worked properly either -- no way I'm buying a crappy apple computer..."
Why would they think the Apple computer is crappy, when it's their eMachine that sucks? I realize your average consumer isn't necessarily a genius, but you'd have to be pretty stupid to think Apple would sell a Mac with a bunch of hardware that isn't supported.
But the funny thing is that your scenario is one that already exists with the Mac mini, with the exception of sleep not working. People are already buying minis and finding they have some hardware that doesn't work (like scanners), and using keyboards with little e's on them which don't launch Safari.
How about replacing the bold part with, "I guess OS X doesn't work well with crappy hardware, so I should go out and buy a Mac"? Or the more ambivalent, "I guess OS X doesn't support much hardware yet. I guess I'll pass for now until they get their act together."
They're neither. Apple is a system company.
"if they wanted to write a good new OS, they could do it"
No offense, but if history is your guide, we have 20 years to say they can't.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The reason Apple hardware works better is because they write the OS for their specific platform. Doing OSX for PCees would drive costs on OSX through the roof trying to support all the junk HW out there.
The OP specifically mentioned user friendliness and desktop quality. Anyone claiming KDE or Gnome is anywhere close to OS X has been blinded by fanboyism or is just plain practicing Orwellian doublethinking. And let's not even start on the quality of bundled applications, or the simplicity of installing an application on OS X (just drag it to the Applications folder), and so on. Apple is just years ahead and I seriously doubt that there is enough talent on desktop Linux projects to ever reach Apple's level (certainly in terms of designers there isn't).
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First of all I don't think Apple can do it - they have an OS that works on a ridiculously small percentage of the possible hardware combinations out there. This will not change magically.
Secondly, Apple is not a software company, they make all their money selling hardware. If their OS could run on any hardware and tons of mac-heads buy the OS only, they would lose their hardware sales.
Jobs killed the Mac clone business for a reason, that reason is not gone. Apple fights the hackers that port the OS to other machines, but provide free bootcamp in response to the hackers that try to run other OS's on their machines. The strategy seems pretty clear.
John Dvorak should have left 10 years ago.
Why? He continues to make a salary that you may only ever dream about. His type of journalism pays *very well*.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
drivers.
Currently, OSX runs well on a limited selection of hardware - it's all chosen by Apple - and non of it at the time of writing can support third party AGP,PCI or PCIe cards. Opening up OSX for all PCs is going to cause all number of problems for Apple - firstly by making sure that OSX supports pretty much an infinite number of hardware configurations, and secondly to support people directly who are having problems.
One of Apple's strengths is its control of the hardware its OS runs on. Throw this away and you're also throwing away a large chunk of OSX's stability...
This is about Apple taking on HP, Dell, and the other hardware manufacturers.
No other PC box can dual boot two OS's practically out of the box. With all due respect, no PC box can boot ANY stable OS out of the box. PC manufacturers ONLY boot Windows, and poorly at that. Their job should be easier only having to write drivers and put the boxes together.
Once consumers realize that Apple hardware can run Windows with more stability from well-written drivers, they will realize the value of owning a Mac. We're already seeing evidence of better performance from the Boot Camp and hacked XP on Mac benchmarks.
The day OS X ships alongside a Windows OS will be sooner rather than later. It's a calculated move on Apple's part to ship OS X Leopard 10.5 around the same timeframe as Vista/Longhorn. It's a sure bet that Leopard systems will run Windows out of the box whether through boot camp or virtualization.
Lets face it, the only reason consumers are buying PC boxes is to run Windows. PC manufacturers didn't have to worry about Apple hardware before, but now that they boot Windows alongside OS X they're gonna start sweating.
Microsoft is more than willing to take money from switchers, but don't realize that the end user will end up hating Windows since it's so much easier to compare the two OS's.
Oh I look forward to the next 18 months.
This is Cringely we're talking about here. He's basically an inverse oracle: everything he predicts will not come true.
Such classics in the past include:
"Apple's future lies in computer-like devices"
"Microsoft has already been crippled by the department of justice"
"Sega may dominate personal computing"
"Ending the culture of secrecy doesn't matter"
"The next generation of processors will be clockless"
"Intel will ride its new Merced processor to profit"
"Y2K will be a bigger pain in the butt than most people think"
"The stock market will continue to rise"
"AOL isn't in the market to buy Netscape"
Etc.
Personally, I'd love to see some sort of Survivor style contest for that PBS columnist / NYT editorialist position. 19 Bloggers and Cringely are forced to live in a house together, where each week they make predictions about large announcements that companies make. Those with the most wildly incorrect predictions are forced into a future-past bakeoff, where they have to explain historical technological shifts to MIT professors while cooking representative food items. The professors then confer over dinner, and then walk up to the loser and shout in his face "You Fail!"
I'm guessing Cringely lasts three weeks, soley on his love of food.
The ______ Agenda
All this talk about "catching up to Windows" and "catching up to XP" is quite backwards to me.
For me, I recently tried to actually use Windows XP for work. I felt like my hands were tied, and I wanted the flexibility that Linux gave me. The Windows tool bar is primative, I wanted KDE. The Command window is little different that Win95 command window. I wanted Konsole, or another modern shell. Add-on software, compilers that are naturally available (install or a apt-get/yum command away) in Linux, aways seam awkward in Windows. Drive letters and two char dos newlines, yuck. And the requirement of virus software to work around MS bugs really does not help with my impression of security and stability.
So I switched back to Linux for good, and run the win apps that I must using Wine.
As for OS-X, I have a dual-booting Mac Mini-PPC. I tried OSX for a while, but again felt too limited. I just wanted to run KDE, firefox and thunderbird.
So again, I use Linux alone.
Um, they just did. Remember the new bootloader? You can run Windows on any Intel Mac.
-Uberhund
Apple is a hardware company. Their hardware support extends to creating user-friendly applications that non-techies like to use and an operating system that 'just works'. Now Apple releases Boot Camp -- even more support for end users who want tools they can use to do the things they need to do, rather than provide a guaranteed employment scheme for armies of troubleshooters. Apple isn't competing with Microsoft, they are competing with Dell.
For everything else, I use OS X and I have purchased a number of shareware apps for OS X since I switched in 2002 including some upgrades to those programs.
Maybe what you say will happen but I think it is more likely that you will see Apple and OS X marketshare increase which will encourage "more" ports of not only games but applications rather than less. Have you actually used OS X on a regular basis?
I will admit that the hardware is sexy and they include some unique features with their laptops like the MBP which I bought recently but I initially bought an eMac because of OS X.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Neither is she
Someone responds with a one-line reply and you label them a snarky douche. Someone responds with a well formatted post containing distinct points and you whine it's an essay. Are you 14?
This is not a technical issue. I'll repeat that - it is not a technical issue.
Microsoft could indeed do that, but then, say, when you upgraded to XP, half your hardware would stop working*. Add-on hardware/peripherals are highly commoditised, which means they don't spend a whole bunch of time achieving quality bars for drivers. If it runs, they ship it (and sometimes if it doesn't).
Compatibility is one of the reasons Windows is so successful - just read a few of Raymond Chen's posts on the subject, for example. I mean, here's one where he's talking about supporting undocumented behaviour, and gives reasons why MS does this. And you want them to drop documented, correct behaviour? The Microsoft conspiracists would go mad, for starters.
Here's a choice quote from Raymond from that post:
Of course, there are other people who believe that this pursuit of compatibility is wholly wrong. I'm not totally in either camp, but I do like it when I upgrade Windows and most stuff still works, so I'm more closely aligned with Raymond's views.
Given that MS want as much hardware as possible to work with their OS, why would this be a good thing? Are you saying they engineered this situation purely so that Apple wouldn't be able to enter the commodity PC OS market?
Like Napoleon, I prefer the explanation of incompetence. Most driver writers suck at their jobs (this is a generalisation of the fact that most people suck at their jobs). They have people shouting at them to finish the software so their employer can ship the hardware, and if they're one of the few who do bring up the subject of quality people look at them funny.
Modem drivers are possibly a bad example, because most modem drivers use the Windows 'Unimodem' driver, which is a standard modem driver that can be tweaked by a text/setup file to indicate which features they support, and where they deviate from the norm. So a lot of modem 'drivers' are really just a short text file. (That doesn't mean modem drivers can't be a pain - I once spent about a day trying to find a driver for the Diamond USB modem I wanted to give someone in my family to use for dial-up internet access - unfortunately, Diamond had sold their modem business off to someone else, who didn't care if you could get the drivers for old modems or not. It was quicker to throw the POS away in the end.)
* Leave it.
One thing I've never understood is how someone can become a Mac "hater". What's there to hate about it? In fact, I also don't see how someone can be a Windows "hater" (since hating something is different from simply disliking it). Maybe someone could elaborate?
Myself, I've been on computers ever since MS-DOS, of which I've used the initial versions. I've used every iteration of Windows as well. Since a few years, I've been exposed to Mac OS, mainly due to my graphic designer uncle, and after using it for a while, I concluded that it's simply a better system. My next computer will probably be a MacBook.
Don't Talk shit about Dvorak.
/* Yes, I realize the Irony in quoting Apple's Think Different ads for a man who said that Apple will go over to the dark side. */
Granted he is wrong quite often, but he is still awesome IMHO.
Maybe reading his columns is like reading the Weekly World News. But sometimes what he says are distinct possibilities. He just likes to go off on a limb and scream things as opposed to just riding it out until there is more evidence than random events and hearsay.
But that is just my opinion...
Love him or hate him, I say "Here's to the crazy ones..."
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Forget about booting Windows on Macs. That goes against Apples' best interests.
m ac/
What is the main reason most people won't run a Mac? Because we have one or more Windows apps that we MUST run. And the solution is very simple:
1. Change the Mac to Intel processors (underway).
2. Test Windows on the new platform (underway).
3. Develop VM technology inside OS/X that can run Windows (underway).
4. Jobs launches the new Mac tower as the only machine that runs OS/X, Windows and Linux AT THE SAME TIME.
This will allow Macs to be used inside corporations that are locked into certain Windows applications. They only have to displace about 10% of those Windows PCs to almost double their sales. And dual core processors could be setup to allow for one core per OS. Should run pretty darn good.
Want to see a VM that runs Windows inside OS/X? Look here:
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/
From the above site:
"Use any version of Windows (3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, Me, 2000, NT, XP, 2003), any Linux distribution, FreeBSD, Solaris, OS/2, eComStation, or MS-DOS in secure virtual machines running alongside Mac OS X."
The software is beta, can be downloaded for free, and will sell for about $40. I might have to buy a Mac...
Place nail here >+
If they are anything like her performances on TV, or in syndicated newspaper columns, you got some really novel definition of "logic". The woman gleefully operates by manipulating most base, animalistic instincts (which most civilized people are ashamed of admitting of even having -- never you mind flaunting), in her "audience" in order to exploit them for her profit and social standing.
Her kind operated throughout history repeatedly, on all sides of political and ethnic divides, and its method of operation very well understood by now.
To spare you a long story, some hardwired-in "pack" instincts people have, inhereited from the days of roaming the jungle, enable creation of social chierarchies, chief feature of which is existence of an "in-crowd", for which of course an "out-crowd" must exist. In order to solidify the cohesion of the "in-crowd", one needs the "out-crowd" to be a constantly villified enemy, accused of all sorts of unspeakable things, against which any action by the "in-crowd" is implicitely "justified" (for the "greater good", you see). Any opposition to this idea, or as a matter of fact any activity whatsoever by members of the "out-crowd" are to be used to create a perpetual persecution complex within the minds of the members of the "in-crowd", regardless of the factual balance of power. This is beautifully exemplified when one such group holds all three branches of governance of a powerful nation, owns most of its media and in fact most of that nations' resources as a whole, and yet still persists in casting itself as oppressed victims. Or if a majority religious group claims that a "war" is conducted on its beliefs by the very state they control. Every "in-crowd" needs a set of demagougues to maintain it. Some of these demagouges have to hold extreme positions, to invite ridicule and scorn, as is required, because stronger the attacks on the ridiculous nature of such positions, the better for the maintenance of the irrational persecution complexes and fobias of the "in-crowd". And so on.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Otherwise, you are basing your ideas on a bit of hear-say and a few facts ... Otherwise, why are you commenting on her?
See above.