Red Hat Diaries/0054

Payola

Nobody is paying me or Syd to be so positive about Apple. If you read these Red Hat Diaries carefully, you will have understood that they honestly started as an experiment with Red Hat Linux - and thereof their name - but that as we investigated the status of PC hardware today, we understood we would have to leave Wintel behind.

And good riddance to it too. But unlike the reporters at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, ZD Net, and all the rest who have come out in uncompromising praise of Apple and its latest incarnation of MacOS, we haven't been given anything and we don't want it either.

I've no doubt that the above mentioned reporters told it like they saw it, but they did get free machines to do their telling with. We did not, and we didn't ask for it either, and we didn't even think of it. Our job is to tell the straight truth and nothing but.

I have enough experience in the field of computing science to blow most programmers off stage; I think I know what I am talking about. I don't understand everything about the underlying code in OS X, but I do understand most of the code in Microsoft Windows and in Unix - and the former sucks, and the latter has nothing OS X - a derivative of BSD - doesn't have; and that's enough in my book to state a qualified opinion.

Apple has 5% of the market, Microsoft a walloping 93%; yet there's something suspiciously wrong when the dominating operating system is the only one based not on Unix, but on Microsoft Windows, one of the leakiest, most poorly designed, and most wobbly operating systems in computer history. And the error in the market is a self-correcting one too: It is far from a reasonable bet that Apple will start to dominate and the tables will be turned, but it is a fairly reasonable bet that something as poor as Windows cannot rule the market for much longer, surrounded as it is by all these high-quality flavours of Unix. Unix rules the world, and one or the other flavour will be on most desktops before too long, and even the bullying of the world's richest and meanest man cannot stop that. Whether it is going to be OS X or KDE on your desktop is up to you. They're all good; they're all infinitely better than Microsoft Windows; all you have to do is pick the one you like.

We think OS X is the best OS for a variety of reasons; we think Apple hardware is the best money can buy. Apple is the one we like.

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