Apple Co. should release OSX
How times have changed; we are now in full swing of the revolution begun by Steve Jobs nearly a decade ago. In Q1 of 2015, Apple’s revenue equalled $74.6 billion—a sharp contrast to when it nearly went bankrupt in 1998. This is old news, however. What is interesting, is that the source of revenues have drastically shifted. Today, the iPhone and the iPad account for nearly 80% of Apples total revenues. In 2008 it was less than 1% of total, by by mid 2009, iPhone sales had already equalled Mac computer sales. This was truly the sunset of Steve Jobs: riding away into glory.
Yet what is perhaps most surprising is that Apple’s mentality has not shifted in spite of these remarkable changes.
Given that Macs today account for such a minor percentage of Apple's total revenue, roughly 10%, this is the golden opportunity for Apple to do what previously it was unable to do: release OSX into the public, and allow any computer to install its as its base operating system. (Prior restrictions also included the fact that Apple computers ran on IBM PowerPC chips, which few other computers did, thus an inherent incompatibility between the two.)
It has always been the bane of Apple to have missed enormous market opportunities, principally those of not making their operating systems public. This occurred on both computer platforms and celular platforms with Windows (Microsoft) OS and Android (Google) cell OS. Even though Apple is making a killing, Google’s Android has far outpaced it. The alternative approach certainly has its downsides, in that (in the case of Google) there market is cluttered with a diverse mix of generations, all co-existing at the same time in part because cell company ISPs do not give attention to older devices.
Yet Apple’s niggardly position seems crudely greedy, in that its professional mode computers MacPros now cost more than $3,000 but are internally non-expandable in terms of both storage and functionality. This is no more obvious than in the storage arena, where IBM has released the 750 SSD PCIE card that can read/write at a whopping 2,000 megabytes per second. If Apple had kept the older MacPro model, making these ‘eternally upgradable’, one would be able to use it; but one cannot install such a card in its current ‘black trashcan’ style model.
Apple has little to lose by releasing OSX into the public, and has everything to gain by doing so. Given that it is no longer reliant on the sales of Mac computers, it no longer needs to fear letting go a minor source of income (which is only 10% of total). To repeat, technical issues are no longer contrast. But not only that, as with the Windows model, Apple Co has everything to gain by general release, it that the adoption rate of OSX would likely skyrocket. (From a corporate point of view, this would more than make up for the loss of revenue from computer sales.)
Better yet, we can make an appeal to an old Steve Jobs adage. Apple would be forced to compete with itself. By releasing OSX into the wild, Apple would be forced to compete with other manufacturers strictly on hardware design, which would put an ‘inflationary pressure’ to drastically improve computer internals. Apple would be forced to do what it actually claims to be doing, but has not for a long time: bring a new fresh focus on its computer hardware. Everyone would benefit in the long run.
SOURCES