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mirgro on 23 April 2010
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TheRealMafoo said:
mirgro said:

If it wasn't for Apple we wouldn't have the PC, and Woszniak not Jobs in fact. However they had it all closed down, and we saw how that turned out.

The funny thing is Steve Jobs has always been about open standards, and he still is. Seems odd for a company known to be closed, but its the case.

Steve left Apple, because they wanted to close everything up. When he came back and opened it up again, then thrived again. Examples of open standards with apple:

  • The core of OSX and iPhone is open source (Unix type OS called Darwin). Windows is not.
  • The document format they use is PDF. MS does not.
  • What they are pushing in replace of Flash, is Open standards (HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript). MS pushes Silverlight.
  • Apple's video file format, is MPEG-4. MS uses DVR-MS
  • iBooks uses ePub, and allows free ePub books
  • HTML and the WWW was invented on the NeXT computer (now owned by apple, and the hardware OSX started on).
  • Macs are one of the first computers to use Display Ports, and the EFI boot system. Both open standards.
  • Apple created FireWire, and made it an open standard
  • OSX uses OpenGL for 3D graphics, an open standard. MS uses DirectX
  • OSX uses Display Postscript for it's 2D rendering. Not sure what MS uses, but most likely built in house.
  • Apple uses ACC for audio. An open standard, and better quality then MP3. MS does as well, but also created WAV.
  • Java is part of OSX. MS hates JAVA.
  • OSX comes with X86 window manager, and gcc. MS does not.

On the hardware side, Apple is closed, because they are a hardware company. On the software side however, they are far more open then MS.

What makes Apple seem so bad, is one man gets to call all the shots. Apple owns all parts of the ecco system. If Steve Balmer owned all the PC hardware, along with the OS, could you imagine how much more authoritarian he would be? Miles worse then Steve Jobs.

See now you are talking their brand new PCs. All I have to say about those is that they have no place. They are not as open as Linux, and don't run as much programs as Windows. Basically they have none of the benefits and all of the downfalls that come from being in the middle of the two standards, so as far as OSX comes, it has no real benefits.