As GP said, and OS and board firmware are not the same thing, and equivalences are silly. > In both cases it is software which is specific to hardware sold by

As GP said, and OS and board firmware are not the same thing, and equivalences are silly. > In both cases it is software which is specific to hardware sold by the same entity which made the software. The only thing that makes OSX Apple hardware-specific is that Apple put a check to try to prevent it from being installed on hardware they didn't produce. I can install OSX on non-Apple hardware just fine via hacks. I can also install OSX 10.9 on any Intel Mac that has the horsepower to support it. Firmware is specific to a set of revisions of a specific board. I can't use N40L mainboard firmware on an N54L and vice versa. I may not even be able to use the same firmware on every board inside those lines. > the software is necessary for the hardware to operate correctly OSX is absolutely not required for Apple hardware to function correctly. I can install Linux and Windows on any Intel Mac, and Linux on any PPC Mac. > Of course, no analogy is perfect, but those are the commonalities I see. The analogy is shit. I can find commonalities in blue whales and elephants, but they are very different creatures. Firmware is a set of instructions for a special-purpose controller in a specific circuit. Software is a set of instructions for a general-purpose computer of a certain architecture.