>Although in numbers, techies and entrepreneurs are a minor customer of Apple, they have disproportionate influence and are trend setters. >I remember back in 2

>Although in numbers, techies and entrepreneurs are a minor customer of Apple, they have disproportionate influence and are trend setters. >I remember back in 2001, there was a lot of chatter among techies about OSX. It was all about how it came with a BSD licensed core, good terminal, a standard Unix environment, Perl out of the box, etc. >Thus began the rise of OSX. I can't say I buy it. In the early 2000s I remember the calls of "the year of Linux on the desktop". If techies were so influential, why didn't that happen? Plus this ignores the introduction of the iMac: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/15/business/company-reports-apple-s-first-annual-profit-since-1995.html http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/15/business/company-reports-a... That was a consumer device released in 1998, responsible for Apple's first profit since 1995, the "third-best-selling computer model in the country", and it didn't run on OS X, it didn't even run on OS 9, which wasn't released until 1999. There's a clear pattern of Apple creating devices aimed at a more mass-market appeal, as opposed to trying to generate buzz with techies.