Quote:
Originally Posted by kilron
apple is truly both a hardware and software company and for very good reason. if you don't think this has a direct impact on why their computers have the highest user satisfaction of any PC manufacturer, you should definitely take another look.
two quotes come to mind:
first from the computer pioneer Alan Kay that Steve Jobs likes to bring up every once and a while: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. "
secondly, this comes to mind with apple's take on hardware. this is from steve jobs in 1994: "The problem is, in hardware you can't build a computer that's twice as good as anyone else's anymore. Too many people know how to do it. You're lucky if you can do one that's one and a third times better or one and a half times better. And then it's only six months before everybody else catches up. But you can do it in software."
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I think the ultimate irony is that in some ways, they also seem to shun the idea of being too proprietary. They've used OSS projects to build up OS X, WebKit, and have been getting better about giving back as well (their new threadpool libraries called "Grand Central Dispatch" going OSS, working with Kronos on OpenCL, working out their issues with KHTML and eventually merging the two projects). They favor formats like MPEG-4 and HTML5 because if adopted, they reduce vendor lock-in.
There are exceptions of course, but it is interesting that they are proprietary in one way, and then act as an example of how a company can be profitable, produce good products and still built on a non-proprietary base. Sony is starting to learn this lesson as well.