>How that situation would be different from now? There's no non-apple branded hardware certified by another manufacturer to run MacOS? That's the difference.

>How that situation would be different from now? There's no non-apple branded hardware certified by another manufacturer to run MacOS? That's the difference. You better believe Dell would sell XPS devices targetted to that market if they could. >For $999 I bet most people would just torrent it. For $99 there wouldn't be enough purchases to justify a lot of additional work, especially support No doubt people would torrent it - they always do... they do it now! But for $999 or somewhere above your $99 strawman there's a place for Apple to support non-apple hardware and deal with support issues. That's the point of it being so expensive. >What Apple probably would do is just to release their OS X free without legal restrictions and with some working installer, loader, etc. It's not a lot of work and you're not getting support if you're not buying their hardware. Of the two I think selling their OS for use on non-apple hardware is more likely than open sourcing. In my humble opinion I don't see them giving away their OS. Honestly I don't ever see them selling their OS for non-apple hardware either but at some hypothetical price at least they'd be opening up a new revenue channel. That wouldn't happen with an open source give away.