Apple is clearly suicidal under Jobs' control.
Ric Ford, of www.macintouch.com, has this to say:
The recent actions of Apple and Steve Jobs make no sense to us (or to hundreds of Mac enthusiasts who have written us), and they raise serious concerns about the Mac platform's long-term future. Searching for options, neither Windows nor Unix is appealing, but a reader brought up some alternative possibilities:
"There has been a resurgence in the Be OS as an OS for CHRP machines. Be's asking price for licensing is far below Apple's demands, and Be's OS can easily be modified so that it doesn't need some of the logic on the current CHRP specification, further reducing costs of a CHRP PC to even below what Intel machines cost. Factor in Virtual PC for running the full x86 software base, and factor in an alternate, ROM-independent flavor of the "Virtual Mac" project originally developed by fredlabs. Then factor in Mac application developers for whom this OS represents only a re-compile, rather than a re-write as required by Rhapsody. And finally, factor in IBM and Motorola, who couldn't be angrier at Apple right now. You get a PowerPC machine cheaper than the cheapest PC clones, an OS with memory protection that can run popular Mac programs, and the entire PC software base.
There's only one thing that could stop it, and that's Apple coming back to the bargaining table with lower license fees." |
