It's hard to say. Apple's strength has always been based on selling the whole widget, engineering the hardware and software precisely. Some of the kit that's in their computers (for example, the accelerometer that parks the disk drive head if your MacBook has just fallen off a desk) doesn't have a counterpart in standard PC hardware. Apple is in a much safer place than they were a decade ago when they had to pull the plug on the clones or die, and the price premium when compared to PCs has narrowed. There are still two very good reasons why the MacOS platform is better off not being the mainstream platform. First, the biggest market gets the most viruses and exploits. MacOS X is fundamentally more resistant to that sort of thing than Windows, but the relatively nastiness-free environment on the Mac also owes a lot to the small market share. Second, what's the big headache for Windows users? Drivers and hardware configurations. Windows users know that they can buy any piece of kit off the shelf and it will probably work... eventually. Or maybe not. Maybe they have to replace the network card that's been working fine because the drivers aren't playing together. Or they have to swap the sound card down to the second slot for no adequately explained reason. MacOS X is born knowing every component of every one of the maybe one dozen model lines it will have to deal with. Once it has to support an infinite number of drivers written by any number of manufacturers to interact with a mature market full of hardware, the seamless 'plug it in, stuff just works' experience gets very strained. Windows' strength (any hardware should work) is also its weakness (there's no guarantee that any of it will actually work together).
It's hard to say. Apple's strength has always been based on selling the whole widget, engineering the hardware and software precisely. Some of the kit that's in their computers (for example, the accelerometer that parks the disk drive head if your MacBook has just fallen off a desk) doesn't have a counterpart in standard PC hardware. Apple is in a much safer place than they were a decade ago when they had to pull the plug on the clones or die, and the price premium when compared to PCs has narrowed. There are still two very good reasons why the MacOS platform is better off not being the mainstream platform. First, the biggest market gets the most viruses and exploits. MacOS X is fundamentally more resistant to that sort of thing than Windows, but the relatively nastiness-free environment on the Mac also owes a lot to the small market share. Second, what's the big headache for Windows users? Drivers and hardware configurations. Windows users know that they can buy any piece of kit off the shelf and it will probably work... eventually. Or maybe not. Maybe they have to replace the network card that's been working fine because the drivers aren't playing together. Or they have to swap the sound card down to the second slot for no adequately explained reason. MacOS X is born knowing every component of every one of the maybe one dozen model lines it will have to deal with. Once it has to support an infinite number of drivers written by any number of manufacturers to interact with a mature market full of hardware, the seamless 'plug it in, stuff just works' experience gets very strained. Windows' strength (any hardware should work) is also its weakness (there's no guarantee that any of it will actually work together).
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