Nobody would run a Hackintosh unless they were enthusiastic about Apple's software and Apple in general. Otherwise, why put up with the trouble? I think that most of these people have a long history of buying things from Apple and really are customers. The issue here isn't piracy, but whether Apple is willing to listen to people who use non-Apple hardware. And since Apple's PCs aren't selling all that well, why refuse to consider input from people who love your stuff and can suggest slightly different approaches?

Even people who never bought anything from Apple before are customers by definition the moment they do buy something from Apple. If Apple is trying to make money, it doesn't seem smart to take a dogmatic stance that the money of new customers isn't worth having. Everyone is by definition a possible future customer.

Apple has a long history with tactics like gluing things shut, obfuscating software, enforcing walled gardens, banning the GPL, and an unusual degree of legal aggression toward people trying to interoperate with their products. There seems to be a well-established groupthink among Apple and its fans that this is the only possible future for Apple.

But when Apple is more extreme on these tactics than almost any company that's still in the PC business, yet is not selling all that well, it really proves the viability of softer approaches. Apple can make money, depending on its execution maybe even a lot more money, by leaving this playbook behind. They could end Windows, taking all their existing fans, and adding new ones. But they can't do it until they can learn some humility from their epic steamrolling by the IBM PC clone market in the 80s and 90s. Apple swallowed their pride about PowerPC and started using the "Intel" from "Wintel" so why does it have to keep re-enacting the anticompetitive tactics from the dawn of the personal computer?

If Apple's products really are the best on merit, it shouldn't be necessary for Apple to lock everything down at a technical level or at a licensing level or to use the law aggressively against people who just want to interact with Apple products.

user:	pekk
created:	July 20, 2011
karma:	5.4k