I used to think like that because it's very much a core tenet of the mac/apple ideology (it's basically a form of narcissism at the level of a brand). But the

I used to think like that because it's very much a core tenet of the mac/apple ideology (it's basically a form of narcissism at the level of a brand). But the actual reality is that the OS does not matter that much. The application is actually what's useful and exactly why we are even using the computer in the first place. The OS is just a middle man that we can't really cut out but should make itself as transparent as possible. It follows then that the UI should be designed around the needs of the application and that it should be translated/transposed/copied across platforms regardless of the primary look of the platform. And this is exactly the problem with Apple stuff, focusing too much on superficial aesthetics at the expense of more substantial usefulness. For example, if Apple hadn't decided to completely re-skin their whole office suite to make it "mobile ready", maybe they could have worked on the actual feature set and performance (awful in both cases against the offering of Microsoft). Ironically, when Apple ported iTunes to Windows, they did a perfect copy paste, going through the trouble of creating their own UI framework specifically for Windows. So, it seems that their requirement/demands only applies to others, never themselves.