From a NY Times Bestseller

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 02:48:26PM -0400, Christopher Chisholm wrote:
> 
> Fair enough!  All of that makes sense to me.  Do you think that because 
> the processors are now Intel perhaps more hardware will become available 
> and thus damage the positive points that you've mentioned?  Or do you 
> think that they will continue to use very proprietary hardware overall 
> to maintain the same benefits they've always had?  Also, do you feel 
> like cross-platform programming languages/APIs/etc could ever do as good 
> a job at providing developers with an easy to work with solution across 
> hardware and operating systems?

Mac hardware has always won because it's tightly integrated and tested
in the only possible configuration that's possible (for each model of
hardware). No other organization will be able to offer the mix-and-match
style of Linux/Windows, offer the same level of software support, and
get the same capabilities that Apple is able to out of their platform
that they've built, in my opinion, although I've been wrong many times
before.

Cross-platform programming APIs, Languages, etc. all suffer under the
same problem: you're translating from a cross-platform level to a native
level, at some cost. There is no API to say 'make the screen ripple like
water is going over it' in Linux: implementing that at a level across
all platforms such that it can be as simple as some of Apple's APIs have
made similar actions is either hard or impossible.

Apple has built tools (and most importantly, documentation) that allow
for developers to easily access from a high level actions which would
typically be considred to be done manually. Whether it's the graphics
example mentioned above, or networking support, or any other of a number
of things, Apple has done a good job. 

I don't think it will be possible in the near future to compete against
that. The chip doesn't make that big of a difference. The software makes
the difference. 

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer