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by smacktoward 3407 days ago
The Mac's entire brand identity can be summarized in three words: "It Just Works." Any time people see a machine running MacOS where those words are not true, it damages the entire brand.

Thus Apple is happy to forgo the extra revenue they could get by selling MacOS separately, since by doing so they can ensure that the world is not full of crappy beige boxes slapped together by incompetent OEMs sourcing parts from the lowest bidders with the word "Mac" attached to them.
2 comments
grzm 3407 days ago
I think that's only part of it. A larger part is that Apple is a hardware company. The profits come from the hardware. To sell the OS separately at a price that would justify the loss in profit from hardware wouldn't be feasible, particularly given its market share. Compare with Microsoft, which was able to profit largely because of its dominance.
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julie1 3407 days ago
(hum)

It just work except when the System 7.5.3 was out and powerPC & 68K were coexisting.

The 'it just work' notably required to go in some arcane control to unfragment memory (yes RAM), and to do ctrl+ apple? + esc to kill unresponsive .... Adobe photoshop or illustrator on the PPC 7500 I used to maintain. THE application one needed.

The colometry profile for scanners and printers where not top notch, and well, real mac users (the one with a job) had to play with the devil switches and terminators on SCSI devices to put their work on external media...

We talk about graphist in the 90's here, not hardcore geeks.

The "it just works" was a lie. It was way more an expensive status tool.

The only stuff that differentiated mac users from PC users, was how much software they were cracking and sharing without any concerns or moral questions.

I sometimes feel the predominance of mac users among "top geeks" is a bad sign.

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grzm 3407 days ago
It was way more an expensive status tool.

The stability of modern operating systems indeed makes it easy to forget how often we dealt with system crashes (remember the bomb?), especially with resource intensive applications, and even more so when switching between them.

Yet a lot of work indeed got done. The number of newspaper design departments and graphic artists who relied on Macs is hard to underestimate. It was much more than just an expensive status tool. Back in the day, the Mac was a tool that a lot of people relied on, in spite of its flaws.

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