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What would he say to the idea of selling Apple hardware without tying it to an OS? In other words, you can buy the great Apple form factor and design, but you
by oldschooltaper 14y ago
What would he say to the idea of selling Apple hardware without tying it to an OS?
In other words, you can buy the great Apple form factor and design, but you don't have to deal with the restrictions of the OS. You could install your own OS.
Obviously this would initially only target hackers. NetBSD can run on some Apple hardware. And there is all the Hackintosh work to build on. Eventually there would be more free OS offerings to install after giving the hacker community some time to adjust to the newfound freedom.
Apple could even sell OSX and iOS separately.
There is a lot of value just in the Apple hardware. Even without the Apple OS offerings. Apple is primarily a hardware company.
- myko 14y agoThis is already possible though. Or you mean just purchasing the hardware with no OS on it to start; which would be a savings of $30?
- sukuriant 14y agoDon't kid yourself. Some of the high price of an Apple computer includes the real price of the operating system, which is far more than $30. It also includes the majority of the price for upgrades. Apple computers are not worth $2000 in parts. A lot of that money is R&D.
- userdeveloper 14y agoThe purpose may not be to save money. The purpose may be to have flexibility. To install only what the user wants to install. Maybe the user does not want OSX preinstalled on the HDD. Maybe the user wants to boot diskless with a blank HDD only used for storage or something else, but not the OS.* The point is that it allows more flexibility. Let the user decide what she wants to install. Sell the user the hardware. Charge whatever you want. Then stay out of the user's business. How she uses the hardware is her business. *There are some real security benefits from keeping the OS on read-only media.