An article deconstructing John C. Dvorak’s recent article speculating that Apple will drop OSX.

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Yes I’m going to open that can of worms. If you’re unfamiliar with what’s going on here. John C. Dvorak posted an article saying how Apple would dump OS X and switch to Windows and proceeded to give a number of arguments for this bold statement. Of course everyone under the sun said “No way! Dvorak is nuts!”

Apple ComputerAnd rightfully so. He really doesn’t make a very compelling arguement. His #1 reason? Adobe is dragging their feet on porting Photoshop. Come on! Photoshop is a huge application and porting it to a universal binary is going to be quite the task. A large part of his justification also has to do with the ’switch’ campaign. It’s not effective, iPod’s aren’t bait enough to switch, etc. It just doesn’t add up and some things are almost unrelated. So what if iPod’s don’t use firewire any more! They obviously see something in USB (like not having to worry about two different connectors for different platforms).
Now. Where do I stand? I’m still firmly in the OS X camp on this. OS X is Apple’s thing. It makes a Mac a Mac. Without it, it’s just a cool looking, high priced PC. And given Apple’s Think Different motto, they aren’t about to go around using the same OS as everyone else.

What I can see happening is Windows being able to be run on the new Macs uninhibited. Currently, Microsoft doesn’t care what other operating systems you run on your computer. Mac OS X shouldn’t either and Apple has said publicly since the Intel conversion started that they won’t prohibit this.

Worst case scenario: The user buys Apple hardware (including OS X), wipes hard drive of OS X, and throws Windows on it. Apple doesn’t care because it’s already made it’s dime. Windows doesn’t care because it looks like any other PC to it. Microsoft should be happy because, hey, that’s another copy of Windows sold.