What you don't seem to get, is that its negligible that it CAN run on other hardware... and maybe even perhaps do so without problem. Apple's *platform* is comprised of certain components that they select along with their OS.
You need to get the notion out of your head that the OS and the hardware are two separate products.
They are one single product... a platform unto itself. Think of it more along the lines of a Sony radio. The speaker and the casing aren't seperate even though they can be seperated.
The confusion comes for so many people in two parts... #1) Apple allows you to buy boxed copies of the OS to upgrade their single product and #2) Microsoft confused the issue a long time ago by selling software to a a group of vendors that were willing to bundle parts together and create what is now known as a PC.
Microsoft managed to be on the winning side of that strategy simply because they happened to be on the side of IBM during an era when the industry was still in its infancy and consumers were insecure and wanted to go with what they considered the safe bet, which at the time was IBM... lest the competition go out of business and they lose their investment.
It's not a coincidence that so many technology circles went out of their way to promote the notion that Apple was going out of business. That mode of thinking helped Microsoft and its OEM partners. You can bet that they would tell their PR firm to promote that idea whereever they can.
Don't kid yourself that Microsoft's popularity is somehow the result of open systems being more prone to growth than closed ones. If that theory were true then Microsoft's strategy for software would be bearing fruit in the MP3 player market now rather than stagnating like it has been. Don't expect things to change until Microsoft does two things. 1) Build proprietary MP3 player hardware to go along with proprietary music player software... and then #2) make something better than Apple does.
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What you don't seem to get, is that its negligible that it CAN run on other hardware... and maybe even perhaps do so without problem. Apple's *platform* is comprised of certain components that they select along with their OS.
You need to get the notion out of your head that the OS and the hardware are two separate products.
They are one single product... a platform unto itself. Think of it more along the lines of a Sony radio. The speaker and the casing aren't seperate even though they can be seperated.
The confusion comes for so many people in two parts... #1) Apple allows you to buy boxed copies of the OS to upgrade their single product and #2) Microsoft confused the issue a long time ago by selling software to a a group of vendors that were willing to bundle parts together and create what is now known as a PC.
Microsoft managed to be on the winning side of that strategy simply because they happened to be on the side of IBM during an era when the industry was still in its infancy and consumers were insecure and wanted to go with what they considered the safe bet, which at the time was IBM... lest the competition go out of business and they lose their investment.
It's not a coincidence that so many technology circles went out of their way to promote the notion that Apple was going out of business. That mode of thinking helped Microsoft and its OEM partners. You can bet that they would tell their PR firm to promote that idea whereever they can.
Don't kid yourself that Microsoft's popularity is somehow the result of open systems being more prone to growth than closed ones. If that theory were true then Microsoft's strategy for software would be bearing fruit in the MP3 player market now rather than stagnating like it has been. Don't expect things to change until Microsoft does two things. 1) Build proprietary MP3 player hardware to go along with proprietary music player software... and then #2) make something better than Apple does.