From a NY Times Bestseller

[Chris Linstid]

Apple's computers haven't really been proprietary for quite a while  
now.  Even though they used PPC processors, almost everything else  
was third-party off-the-shelf standard parts.  I think they do  
generally choose higher quality parts (for the most part) than most  
regular PC manufacturers, but otherwise they have used more or less  
standard hardware.

As Chris C. says below, it's a combination of the controlled set of  
hardware and software that gives Apple its edge in quality and I  
don't believe that will change with intel chips powering them.   
However, I don't think they will ever win in a "bang for the buck"  
comparison.  That quality comes at quite a hefty price tag.  I'm  
typing this on a 2.16GHz MacBook Pro, so I'm intimately familiar with  
the cost.

	- Chris

On Jul 11, 2006, at 3:05 PM, Christopher Schmidt wrote:

> 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.