I agree completely, and this is the case I've been making for years. If OSX opened up to any hardware configuration, it would be a slow moving animal similar to M$. As it stands, I don't think Steve's vision is complete yet — not enough to open it to the world.

They could just have a list of off-the-shelf components which are fully compatible, pretty much like the OSX86 project has; a good hackintosh with tested components can be as good as the real thing.

It wouldn't be perfect, personally I'd still prefer a real Mac (I like the hardware), but I don't think it'd be a 'wrong' move by Apple to try to open things up a bit.

But then you'd have all these tech articles and blog/forum posts bitching about how Mac OS X sucks because it doesn't support hardware X ... just like you have with Linux.

It's a known fact that people don't look at the hardware compatibility list before buying a X86 machine, not even the more technically inclined ones (I know I don't ... and I'm running Linux ... although I should know better ... somehow I hope that whatever problem I have, it would get solved shortly).

And there's always the issue of having partnerships with the hardware companies to write those drivers for them, because they cannot do it on their own (lack of specifications, resources available). Microsoft couldn't pull it for Vista ... the drivers demanded from hardware manufactures were lately delivered and improperly tested.