[dangel]

Originally Posted by Steve B

I agree with you to some extent dangel, but you're contradicting yourself here. On the one hand you say that they probably wont be up the creek, but on the other you say OSX will never be mass market as long as it's tied to Apple hardware. As soon as its not tied to Apple's hardware, people start building their own machines to run OSX on, and Apple loses money.

Not a contradiction at all - if OSX went mass market then Apple (potentionally) gain a lot of software sales (MS seem to manage to survive on a software-fuelled revenue stream). People would be buying OSX, the service packs, the ipod, the itunes tracks, the iphone (and contract revenue from said) - do you really think they'd be up the creek as a result? Their margin on desktop hardware must be awfully good for that to be the case.
But as I said, it's not their business model - as someone else pointed out: Apple are all about control. They control OSX via hardware tie-in. The iPhone is neatly tied up with contractual revenue obligation and a (very) closed platform (as compared to Symbian or Winmobile).

I do think Apple would struggle to support the vast base of PC hardware than Vista does though - tieing it to limited hardware does give them a lot more control over 'quality' of drivers.