[rbanffy]

> but they are mass-market consumer oriented which is not interesting.

Kind of. Apple focuses their high end gear on creative professionals. Us Unix geeks have much more modest needs, which are often satisfied by the average uninspired Dell design. Still, Apple has a decent Unix underneath all that glitter. At the same time, there are almost no desktop-friendly Unixes besides the free crowd. HP and IBM have given up on the Unix workstation market eons ago. IBM’s POWER gear can crush the best Xeons and Epycs, but they have nothing to compete with the “good enough” low end.

It’s a shame Oracle doesn’t offer Solaris on their cloud the same way IBM offers AIX (and Z, which, surprisingly, is a certified UNIX as well) on theirs.

[jjav]

> Still, Apple has a decent Unix underneath all that glitter.

Had. That's what pulled me in to Apple laptops after spending the 90s convinced I'd never use a Mac.

With OS X, suddenly it was BSD, but with a Mac GUI! Cool. When OS X (10.0) came out I quickly bought a mac first time ever.

But Apple has spent the last 20+ years making OSX less and less BSD, locking out more and more core functionality into obscure nonstandard behavior.

[rbanffy]

Well... For me and a lot of people, it's still good enough - it runs MacPorts, Python, I can compile things and so on, but, TBH, I also have a couple Linux boxes lying around on my desk and on the network one hop away from my desk, so the deep hackability side is solved outside the Mac in my case.