John Dvorak is predicting it will. The Joy of Tech mocks, but I think the argument makes an awful lot of sense.
Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP and the stodgy Chinese makers.
David
Apple is a smart company and they understand branding. One core concept of branding is having a unique message. People buy a mac because it’s really different, and makes them feel they are different. There is absolutely nothing different about an apple computer that just runs windows. Maybe it would be a little more stylish, but that would hardly be pshychologically satisfying enough for most people that want the “mac” experience. Simple speaking, if they dump the mac os and just start selling windows pc, they become a dell – just a company selling commodity pc’s that people don’t pay a premium for. Therefor it would be a losing proposition to just sell windows stand alone computers, and I think they would be much more likely to just drop their computer sales altogether instead of becoming a commodity dealer as you suggest.
Chris
This “Mac experience” you talk about.. is it the experience that you have of using a computer that does everything a PC does except that it does it at a higher cost?
There was a time that using a Mac was a different “experience”, back when PCs were running DOS.
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