I don't deny that they do some things right, or at least set interesting trends. I am still amazed at how bad other companies are at copying apple's style (it does not seem that hard, but the clones are always horrible).
Anyway, I can only speak for Ubuntu, and I think they are really making giant steps towards usability. I am very happy with what is available on Ubuntu - it beats the usability of Windows in many ways, and personally I prefer Windows usability over OS X... One major gripe I have with OS X style is that it requires you to know so many things (like keyboard combinations). Windows and Ubuntu almost always let you find a way with the right mouse button. With OS X I often had to google to find out how to do trivial things (like cut+paste, file renaming, etc).
The latest Mac Book Air is a good example: the gestures on the mousepad might be a nifty feature, but they are something you have to learn somehow. There is nothing about the mousepad that suggests those features to you. Chances are, I personally would never learn them, just as I never learned to write the special letters on my Palm Pilot back in the day. But an OS X super-geek will be able to do wonders with them, perhaps, at least impress some girls at Starbucks.
You could be right that the true secret of Apple is the willingness of users to pay for stuff, hence more pretty shareware for Macs. Interesting!
An excellent choice of words: "Roughly". You and I are in complete agreement.
I find your answer very illuminating. "I don't really trust Apple to do the right thing," you say, and yet of the 21 apps I listed (including DTrace itself), exactly three are Apple products. Another, Photoshop, is a Adobe product, and DTrace is made by Sun. I believe the remainder are all produced by little shareware shops, composed of one to five people, with a sinister "corporate agenda" that consists mainly of "make enough money so that we can keep eating and writing cool software." Or, like Colloquy, they're open source.
(There are interesting exceptions. NetNewsWire now has an exciting new corporate agenda: they are giving away the software and planning to make money by tracking audience numbers for the content that their subscribers read. In other words, they've chosen to become some combination of Google and the Nielsen folks. Is this scary? Perhaps. I'm not completely in love with this new development. But it's not as scary as Google itself, let alone Gmail.)
I would love to run a Linux desktop. Seriously. And, in a world where the market for Linux-based software was healthy, I could do that without regret. But the Mac OS X world is filled with elegant apps which have been honed, over the course of several years, by dedicated one-to-three person design teams. The result is that I can rip a DVD and put it on an iPod in two steps without thinking (Handbrake), or set up a flawless, bootable, automated system backup in two minutes. (SuperDuper -- I can't believe I left this off the original list. And that's not even counting Time Machine. My god, do you have any idea how many hours I wasted trying to get automated, bootable backups of my Linux box? At first I dared to sample the "rough" SuperDuper alternative, Mondo Backup. Gaaaack. After hours of suffering I fell back on rsync + Knoppix + detailed handwritten notes, the tried and true hard-core-geek solution.)
Unfortunately, these polished apps don't seem to exist for Linux. The market doesn't seem to be there.
Why not? I think the biggest reason is that Linux is an amorphous blob: although Ubuntu has done much to improve the situation, it's still the case that every Linux system is different from every other, often in nontrivial ways, and this creates a support nightmare for the one-person software vendor.
But I think there's another reason: if, for example, Agile Web Solutions were to port 1Password to Linux and start selling it for $39.95, significant portions of the Linux community would react by trying to run it out of town. They would denounce the company's sinister corporate agenda, demand that it release the code for free, and promote a bunch of "rough" free alternatives, many of which were produced in one day by a high school student who has already moved on to something else.
The attitude is pervasive. Your response to my snarky post was quite sensible, as these things go, and yet it was completely natural for you to unknowingly group the makers of Audio Hijack -- a $32 piece of software that, among other things, can strip the DRM from any piece of audible content -- with companies like Adobe. As Mac software vendors, they're all potentially "unclean". What in the world is unclean about them? Is it all that filthy money?