Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
If Apple is open, then why is Mac OS only sold on Apple hardware? If Apple is open, then why were there numerous iPhone firmware updates that did little other than un-Jailbreak the phone?
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You're kidding, right? The nature of jailbreaks, whether on the iPhone or any other digital device, is to exploit an error in coding like a stack overflow. Unfortunately these errors can be exploited both by what we call jailbreak exploits and other more insidious malware (see Windows). When Apple releases updates (I've applied all of them and don't recall any that were superfluous to my iPod touch, I'm not interested in the iPhone per se) it would be irresponsible to not patch the errors that have been uncovered.
The other issue is a business decision that doesn't materially affect anyone who wants to put OSX on any fairly vanilla Intel PC or laptop. Apple tried its hand at supporting an official clone market in the 90's and it eventually sent the company into a tailspin. Near death experiences are known to have strong effects on the victim. So if you want to assemble your own lower price box and put OS X on it you will have to follow the widely available information about how that is done without Apple's help. It has even been known to work on some low price netbooks. Personally I like Apple's hardware so I can only provide second hand information; your results could differ from my acquaintances.
My claim about Apple's open position is that they provide and support comprehensive API's for third party developers. This allows people other than Apple employees to add value to the iPhone and Mac platforms. Can the same be said for the Kindle, Zune or Palm Pre? Apple does have this cryptographic code signing thing going on with the new platform and it seems likely they will need to tweak the app store concept. But I'm willing to be patient. They didn't originally support true third party apps (for the iPhone) and that changed. Heck, for that matter they didn't support third party apps for the Lisa but that changed when the Mac was introduced (yeah, I know, that was 25 years ago).