Re:How To: Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9 Into the Ultimate OS X N...
by mechanical_fish on Saturday February 21, 2009 @08:43PM
(#490279)
From a marketing standpoint, Linux is priced wrong. It's free, so it attracts people who expect to get something for nothing. A lot of those people walk away disappointed.
Mac users understand that the Mac OS is worth money -- otherwise they'd be Linux users. So they look at a $400 machine running the Mac OS as a huge bargain, and are happy to go through all sorts of pain in exchange for it.
Of course, if the Hackintosh movement catches on there will be a new class of people who -- being too cheap to buy an actual Mac -- will try the Hackintosh route, encounter problems (installation difficulties, subtle bugs that destroy data, apps that don't work, OS upgrades that cause their machines to break) and gripe about it. Which will subtly tarnish Apple's brand. This is why Apple's lawyers are so vicious about this stuff.
Mac users understand that the Mac OS is worth money -- otherwise they'd be Linux users. So they look at a $400 machine running the Mac OS as a huge bargain, and are happy to go through all sorts of pain in exchange for it.
Of course, if the Hackintosh movement catches on there will be a new class of people who -- being too cheap to buy an actual Mac -- will try the Hackintosh route, encounter problems (installation difficulties, subtle bugs that destroy data, apps that don't work, OS upgrades that cause their machines to break) and gripe about it. Which will subtly tarnish Apple's brand. This is why Apple's lawyers are so vicious about this stuff.