| > As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US. I know exactly how this happened, I was there. It filled a gap for a practical desktop UNIX when none existed. In the old days, there many flavors of proprietary UNIX, like Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, AIX, et al plus a few open source versions like FreeBSD and early Linux. The early Internet was a purely UNIX world (still mostly is) but UNIX was a fragmented market of dozens of marginally interoperable OS. During the dotcom boom, Solaris on Sparc became the gold standard for large servers. These are very expensive machines and not particularly user friendly. If you were a dev in those days, you were either using some type of Sparc workstation or FreeBSD or Linux (which wasn’t very good in those days). You wanted your desktop environment to be UNIX-ish but the good + cheap options were limited. Linux became better on the server and started to displace FreeBSD there but was still very limited as a desktop OS. Linux was much worse than Windows NT on the desktop at the time but Windows NT wasn’t UNIX. MacOS X came along and offered UNIX on the desktop with a far better experience than Linux (or any other UNIX) on the desktop, and much cheaper than a Solaris workstation. It filled a clear gap in the market, and so Silicon Valley moved from a mix of Solaris and Linux desktops for development to MacOS X desktops, which were better in almost every way for the average dev. It was UNIX and it ran normal business applications like Microsoft Office. MacOS X was a weaker UNIX than many of the other UNIX OS but it offered a desktop that didn’t suck and it was cheap. For someone that had been using Linux or Solaris at the time, which many devs were, it was a massive upgrade. MacOS still kind of sucks as a UNIX but that’s okay because we don’t use it as a server. Silicon Valley needed a competent UNIX desktop that didn’t cost a fortune and Apple delivered. Apple is just a remote UNIX system for manipulating the other UNIX systems your code actually runs one. |