[cheald]

Have you ever tried building a hackintosh? If you don't have just the right hardware, the whole thing hard-crashes. It doesn't even boot with fallback drivers. It just says "nope, not what I expected, goodbye." Additionally, it only works on non-Apple hardware due to the efforts of a homebrew community - out-of-the-box OS X just plain won't run.

The fact that Windows XP would boot into an at least marginally-usable state on random hardware puts it lightyears ahead of OS X in that regard.

I've been running various flavors of Linux machines for 15 years now, as well. I'm quite intimately familiar with the driver woes there (wireless drivers still basically never work out of the box on $LINUX_DISTRO), but again, it's so far ahead of OS X in that regard, it's not even funny.

[mseebach]

You're setting the bar extremely low. MacOS is explicitly not supposed to run on any other hardware configurations than exactly those sold by Apple. It was never it's intended behaviour. There is nothing to be ahead of, MacOS didn't even bother to get out of bed on race day.

[cheald]

That's my entire point. We frequently assume that most hardware "just works" because it follows some specification or another. It's not until you run into a system that just flat out blows up when it runs into unexpected hardware that the work that Windows and Linux developers do becomes apparent.