I think you're right about the different expectations of hardware compatibility; much of the ease of integration of MacOS hardware and OS has been simplified by the limited amount of hardware. Is it a feature? Well, in a way...it does make it easier for the average user to get up and running, but it's a little unfair. As far as Apple's open-source honesty, they have made the underlying code (called "Darwin") completely open source; you can compile that up for an Intel box if you want, and it's truly open. XWindows runs on it, and a lot of other popular UNIX software. So that's fair enough to be called "open source" I suppose. Apple does also give away it's fairly robust QuickTime streaming server, including all the source code, which is quite something. It's a great piece of software to release to the open-source movement, naturally in the hope of building market share. In fact, the only parts of MacOSX that are not open source are the parts that Apple bases it's entire business on, namely the Carbon libraries (the updated NEXTSTEP framework), the GUI, and the Classic MacOS environment. It's hard to imagine how they could make those open-source, give them away, and still have a business. So, it's certainly a hybrid open-source setup, but I think that's fair enough, really. You can take Darwin, install it on a box of your choosing, install Apache, QTSServer, MySQL, and you're not too bad off for the cost of the hardware. Sure, you can do the same with Linux. Apple has released enough source code for Darwin though that anyone who wants to port something to Darwin from UNIX can do so. Does that help them make their own bed? ... sure it does. Ken

Hi, The new OSX is actually pretty well done! The BSD-Unix underpinnings are very stable; I haven't been able to bring down the system yet after two months of heavy use. It runs almost all the current Mac software, and a lot of UNIX and XWindows software as well. For web designers, it's a dream. I've got Apache, PHP, and MySQL running in the UNIX background, and I can use all the current MacOS web design software (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc) in the foreground. Now that's a seriously useful situation. The interface is a bit 'gluey' for my taste still; I like the snappy feel of current MacOS or Windows over the liquidy fade-in, fade-out menus etc; but that's my preference. I hear the new version of Windows (is it XP?) is going that same liquidy way, so you'll all get to see what you think about it for yourselves. All in all, I give it a hearty recommendation! ken