Timing would have been important here, if I recall correctly.

I believe the Apple II was a 6502 chipset, which was common then. They diverged into Moto 68k series, while the rest went towards 8088.

It's debatable, in my mind. Without Apple being unique, they wouldn't hold the niche they do today, but at the same time, had they made their OS Open Source, I suspect they would have had a great deal more Desktop Adoption, since for most, the barrier was/is price.

$1200 Macbook or $400 laptop? *I know the technical differences, but a large portion of the buying public doesnt

For me, I work in Windows a majority of the time, but being a career IT monkey, what I believe is the right tool for the right job, so it's not always Windows. :)

I have old macbook that I use to stay up on the OS, at least as far as it can upgrade. I have a home server, with some windows instances, a couple *nix instances, etc.

> Apple should have open-sourced their OS a long time ago while offering "best" compatibility with their hardware

That would’ve been a horrible idea considering that they make money selling hardware and macOS is one of their main selling points?

> They would have expanded both markets tremendously.

What would they ever gain from this? How does Google benefit from Android? Thankfully Apple is not an Ad company (and therefore their interests are still somewhat aligned to those of their users) like Google. Open sourcing macOS would only incentive them to pivot to user tracking, ads etc.

I'm thinking of it economically.

The broadening of the MacOS market would more than make up for the initial loss in hardware sales. At the end of the day, Apple would be selling more Macs, because at least some of the hardware platforms not from Apple would have more problems than on Apple's hardware.

This is the exact same thing that would have happened back when PowerComputing was making better Apples than Apple was. They were in the middle of expanding the Mac market, but because Apple itself was losing money, the news kept reporting on that, which in turn had the compound effect of affecting all Mac sales. (This was the first case of "fakenews" I had ever experienced, btw... "Why isn't the news reporting on the expanding Mac market instead of the temporarily-contracting Apple market? Ohhhh because bad news gets the eyeballs!!") So Steve Jobs came back, shut the clone program down (which, again, would have succeeded for Apple AND other players in the end, IMHO), and the rest is history.

I discussed the idea with ChatGPT and here's how that went:

https://chat.openai.com/share/db5f1ef7-82ac-4f4a-ac56-390f6b...

> The broadening of the MacOS market would more than make up for the initial loss in hardware sales.

Why? I mean Android has a much bigger market share than iOS yet Google isn’t making any money (after costs) from it if we exclude ad revenue.

> At the end of the day, Apple would be selling more Macs

I really don’t think that would be the case unless Apple significantly reduced its profit margins to remain competitive. They would be making way less money. So again, why?

> So Steve Jobs came back, shut the clone program down (which, again, would have succeeded for Apple AND other players in the end, IMHO), and the rest is history.

Which was one of the smartest things he did (if we’re prioritizing Apple’s longterm financial success). Apple can only charge excessive premiums for its products compared to everyone else because there is no other way to use their software.. which is why they are a multi trillion dollar company it’s that simple.

> I discussed the idea with ChatGPT and here's how that went:

I’m sorry but that discussion seems to be worthless (also what’s wrong with it? Why is it using such a weird style?).

Apple would have to throw away their entire business model to do this which is a massive risk on it’s own. Considering that Apple has been the most successful consumer hardware/software company in history in large part because of their current business model throwing that away to try and do something that many companies (including Apple) have tried and failed would be an extremely bizarre thing to do.

In 100 years from now, there's going to be only 2 ways to run any piece of software:

1) If it was DRM-secured, via a hack, which effectively "opens" at least the compiled binary form of the code.

2) If it was open source, via some Nix-like tool running on some virtualization of the hardware platform of the time.

Everything else will essentially be "lost", including (probably) every piece of iOS software ever (for example). I already have no more access to many games that originally ran on earlier iOS devices, and it's been years since and no one's stepped up to emulate or jailbreak those somehow, probably because it's still too hard. They will ONLY run on my first generation iOS devices (some of which I retained), to this day.

> I really don’t think that would be the case unless Apple significantly reduced its profit margins to remain competitive

I think they'd be able to retain premium branding and sales with only a moderate reduction in such. Look at any other product market that doesn't have "lock-in" with regards to closed ecosystems; there's usually a range of players and price points.

I'll give you that they have been successful with their current model, but remember that they also very nearly died with their current model (1997 with 2008 followup: https://www.wired.com/2008/03/bz-apple-ourbad/) and it was only the introduction of the iPhone that saved them. macOS has basically been having a long slow death for 15 years since. The reason why this model was successful may thus have more to do with market entrance timing and market creation timing and nothing to do with the model characteristics itself.

Qubes OS guy here. Will probably stick to the hypervisor OS/virtualized components desktop computer model. Sure there's a performance hit, but honestly I haven't felt this comfortable and secure that my data at rest WILL STAY AT REST and not sprout wings to flutter away with...