[benjamincburns]

I don't know that it gives me a "deep appreciation," but it definitely makes me aware of a fundamental difference in business strategy. Microsoft is a software company that tends to dabble a bit in hardware. Apple is a hardware company that tends to dabble a bit in software.

Microsoft needs to build an ecosystem of well-supported hardware in order to survive. DRM aside, to do so it needs to enable hardware vendors to build whatever type of driver support they need. However as a (mostly) hardware company, it's in Apple's best interest to build an OS which works well on their hardware, and only their hardware.

There's nothing (that I'm aware of) about the Mach kernel that prevents anyone from developing their own drivers, but no company in their right mind is going to do that when they know that it will be nearly impossible to provide support for anything other than Apple-approved configurations.