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Well yea they could do that, but dont forget as it is now your paying for the hardware with the OS. If they opened it to everyone, you would see apple profits plummet because you can by the hardware equivalent for much less.

Not necessarily. If they sold many more copies it could result in even higher profits as a result of sheer volume.

They would certainly raise their market share. But I doubt they would surpass windows. But I doubt it would actually help them, they wouldn't be able to sell overpriced Macs and their profits would just go down.
Low software price and high hardware price works perfect for them.

If Apple were to open the OS to any PC hardware, they would have the same support issues that Microsoft currently has with hardware vendors and driver compatibility. It's probably just not in their business model to have to deal with that kind of support when they can lock the OS to particular hardware specifications now.

That's a big if. What they haven't done since the 1980s they won't do it ever. It allows them to survive with a niche market. Plus, Microsoft pwns the enterprise with its end to end management software, server OS, middleware and client so only the consumer market is likely to be "affected".

I've never really had Windows hardware issues. Microsoft has a hardware compatibility lab that tests drivers/hardware for a fee for manufacturers. If you make sure your components are on the HCL you usually don't have an issue. Apple could do the same thing. I'd buy the OS as well, but I don't really want to buy a new computer just for the OS when the one I have is already satisfactory.

No, they'd get too bad rep when it wouldn't run on all but a fraction of the hardware out there. I don't think it'd work. I also don't think that Apple has the resources to one-handedly provide the necessary drivers to be up to par with Microsoft. It took MS a long time to get where they are today with all the vendor support, from having been a minority. And that was also during a time when there was no OS in the market with a strong foothold. I wonder how companies would best compete with MS today in the desktop software market, really.

My dads computer passed the Windows 7 test downloaded from Microsoft but when installed it wouldn't work.

My own laptop I had to track down several drivers.

Always when installing Windows 7 or Vista make sure the PC/Laptop is connected to the internet so that Windows can download drivers

Apple is a hardware company. It would be as impossible for them to set the OSX free as it was impossible to set all the various Unix flavors out there that are made for the specific bread-and-butter hardware - IBM, Sun, HP, etc. Apple is not in business of selling software, and OSX, beyond the pretty UI shell, is still a Unix, and not made to work well across different hardware.

Apple doesn't seem to have much interest in being competitive, though. They like being in a white shinny plastic league of their own.

Who says they want that?

You have to keep in mind that the business model for Apple and Microsoft are quite different. I'm sure Apple can easily predict what would happen if they released OSX to everyone. They didn't make billions of dollars by being stupid.

Not possible, one of the drivers that needed installing was the wifi and I had no ethernet cable handy.

Maybe you did an upgrade. Many times, either drivers or applications are at fault when upgrades don't work. I always recommend doing a clean install.

With your laptop, there is no way Microsoft can pack all the drivers in the world and keep the media size small enough. Things like looking for updated drivers are to be expected if your computer is/was not designed for a particular version of Windows.

Psystar was actually right; however, Apple tried allowing clones once, and nearly went the way of DEC.

DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was literally the next to last of the Big Iron (mainframe) vendors to also sell PCs (the only other one at the time was IBM). Unlike IBM, they didn't turn out *bad* PCs (they had no PCjr in *their* lineup), and they also had the Alpha 21x RISC processor (one of only two RISC processors to ever be able to run Windows NT). What trainwrecked DEC (and nearly killed Apple) was their inability to compete on price.

After Apple managed to force their then-legal clonemakers out, they took great pains to prevent what happened to DEC (and nearly happened to them) from happpening again (hence that rather draconian EULA included with all their software, not just OS X). While Apple is profitable, they took a path to profit that is more that of a non-computer company (in fact, it's more like that of Nintendo); keep margins high! (And the ONLY way they could do that is to keep the product closed.)

it was a clean install due to XP not being a upgrade option.

Actually wasn't the clone market one of the only things they were making a profit on at the time? Had it not been for that the company probably would have gone under because everything else they were doing was garbage.

When Steve Jobs returned he cut out the clone market because that's not the direction he wanted the company to be going in, and he brought along his business skills and all of his assets from NEXT so Apple didn't need to be licensing to clone makers any more.

The clone-makers were profitable; however, Apple itself was not. The iPod literally enabled Apple to survive until it could force the clone-makers to implode. (And the very reason WHY the clone-makers were profitable was because they had lower costs than Apple.)

What happened with IBM and DEC (and nearly happened to Apple) has been repeated since (SGI, Sun, even Cray). Closed-source or niche marketing is how high-margin products (and the companies that make them) survive. Sun certainly wasn't surviving building SPARC boxes (especially since the exact same software was, and is, not only available for garden-variety clones, but cost less in terms of hardware, and nit in terms of training; the dirty little open secret for over a *decade* was that even before Solaris went open-source, it was free for the downloading, legally, from Sun itself, and could run happily bare-metal on any hardware that Linux could run on, or even in a VM).