OS Cross-pollination - What makes sense?

"Can you post your point of view on:
1) OSX on vanilla Intel and
2) Windows on Macintel?
Specifically, which should/will be possible/embraced by Apple/Dell/Microsoft. Which is useful, which is just an exercise?"

Happy to, but first, a bit of background for the uninitiated.

In many ways, Apple migrating to Intel hardware is the final step in that company's journey to non-proprietary hardware. They began life with almost completely proprietary and/or rarified parts - SCSI drives, homemade motherboards, different CPUs, funky RAM - and have gradually migrated to industry-standard stuff. This has made it ever easier for offshoots of Linux to run on Mac hardware, and for third-party manufacturers to consider the Apple hardware a target market. Ditching the PPC and its firmware and motherboards looked to be the final step to complete hardware agnosticism, allowing all sorts of cross-installs and VMware to run any permutation of Windows, Linux, or OS X. But it would seem that both Apple and MS are taking steps to make sure that doesn't happen.

At first blush, this seems odd. MS has never been opposed to running Windows on Mac hardware via Virtual PC - indeed, after they bought VPC they still sold it and promised updates to make it compatible with the latest Mac models. And why not? Every Windows license sold (assuming no VPC pirates out there) is money in MS's pocket, no questions asked, doesn't matter what the platform is. This is still their attitude, which they'd be stupid to change since Windows is by far their biggest cash cow. Apple, however, has thrown a spanner into the works by going with EFI instead of the old-school BIOS, and it's starting to look like they did it for a reason.

The thing about Apple is that they've always been much more caught up in the overall computing experience than Microsoft. By controlling the hardware and the software they've been able to guarantee an end-to-end process that is seamless for the user and results in far fewer driver hiccups and strange behaviors that Windows sees because of the huge variety of hardware it can run on. Apple has famously stuck to their guns about this and steadfastly refused to license their OS, with the exception of brief period when they did license it and the resulting hardware was pretty crummy. Jobs rescinded that right quick, and Apple maintained their miniscule market-share and amazing "it just works" usability experience. So it's not surprising that when they switched to the Core Solo/Duo systems, they:

1. deliberately crippled OS X so that it won't run on standard PCs easily, and
2. used EFI in the hardware to ensure that running existing versions of Windows would be equally difficult (and, as it turns out, darn near impossible with XP)

Apparently the management has all still drunk the "end-to-end experience" Kool-Aid that Jobs is serving, and is loathe to see OS X on non-Apple boxen.

So where do I come down? I have a hard time, from a business-model perspective, understanding why Apple holds on so tightly to the non-licensing of OS X. They could win over oodles of users and probably sell more Macs if they allowed it to run on Dells or Alienware, because in my experience even fairly hardened anti-Mac people are won over by the OS if they just use the damn thing for a week. That said, however, as a loyal user the "it just works" experience is a not-insignificant part of why I became a Mac fan in the first place. I don't want to spend my precious time fighting drivers and figuring out which hardware interrupts are conflicting - I just want to use the tool to make stuff, write blogs, and play games. Putting OS X on non-Apple hardware would open up Apple to all kinds of development headaches that they probably don't have the manpower for and certainly don't want the bad PR about. The core of the OS X marketing is that it's user-friendly and intuitive, and without insane micromanagement that's seriously in danger once you migrate away from making the hardware yourself. Not to mention that all the style of the OS X interface would seem a bit incongruous next to the vanilla design of a budget PC. Seems silly, but it's all part of the experience.

I'm all for Windows on Mac hardware, however, primarily because hardware is a big profit driver for Apple and the hardware itself is just damn good stuff. If somebody is smart enough to want an Apple box and then for some reason wants to install Windows onto it, I say go for it! This would probably be the minority of Mac buyers anyhow, though in the long run perhaps it wouldn't be. My only fear is that without OS X licensing to go along with this "open platform" policy, Apple will trend toward being a hardware developer (they could live on the iPod alone!) and support for OS X development will die off. That would suck a LOT.

So no surprises there, I think, although I'm still on the fence about OS X being un-crippled and available for PCs. I like the suggestion I saw in this Cringely column where he says

Apple won't offer versions of OS X for generic Intel hardware because the drivers and the support obligation would be too huge. But just as you can buy a shrink-wrapped copy of 10.4 for your iMac, they'll gladly sell you a shrink-wrapped Intel version intended for an Intel Mac, but of course YOU CAN PUT IT ON ANY MACHINE YOU LIKE. The key here is to offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned on the kind you get for most Open Source packages -- a web site, forums, download section. and a wiki. Apple will help users help themselves. With two to three engineers and some outreach to hackers and hardware makers, Apple could put together an unofficial program that could easily attract two to three million Windows users per year to migrate their old machines to the new OS. Imagine the profit margins of three engineers effectively generating $300-plus million per year in sales.

I think this would be very, very smart of Apple to do, and I can only hope it comes to pass. It's a nice straddle between holding it back entirely and having to support all the hardware headaches.