Dell offers to sell OS X on its machines: Apple says no!
2 Comments
Published April 17th, 2006 in Apple, Noteworthy, PC, Software, Technology
Then came Michael Dell with the other side of the story. Why not put OS 10 on a far cheaper Dell Windows PC instead of a costly Mac? You’d get the best of both worlds and shell out far less.
In an e-mail to Forbes magazine, Dell said: “If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers.“
Apple’s response was quick and negative. Apple will not sell OS 10 for installation in non-Apple hardware. It will sell software to run Windows on Macs but not the other way around.
What else would you expect from Apple? But this may not reflect what happens, as we all know that Steve Jobs personally said that Apple won’t make a video iPod because “people don’t want to watch video on such a small screen“. As with other Apple rumors / ‘news’ we have to wait for Apple to make their move.
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I’m pretty sure this is going to stick. Apple don’t just sell their OS, they sell an experience and the hardware is a vital part of that.
If apple releases OSX for x86 I see two problems for them. Firstly they’ll need to support thousands of different hardware configurations which might be very difficult and as seen in Windows world might lead to lots of BSDs. How this reflects to user opinion of OS we’ve all seen with Windows 9x.
And secondly, they sell hardware and they make lots of money on it. If I had a choice to buy a Mac or put together a PC myself for fraction of the price for Apple machine- Apple would lose me as a customer. Yes, I would buy OS X but I don’t believe that’s where the buck is for Apple.
Having said all of this, you never know what they’ll come up with. We all thought we’ll never see OSX on Intel, or rather Intel in a Mac but it’s here now. We also never dreamed of Apple helping install Windows on a mac, but they did it, too.