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October 23, 2013 10:06 pm GMT

Apple Crosses Its Hardware Rubicon

macbook-img_0063According to legend, a vision delivered by the gods caused Julius Caesar to commit the ultimate act of insurrection by crossing the Rubicon. Splashing through this minor river dividing Caesars province from Italy proper committed him to an inevitable armed conflict with the Roman Senate. Though Apple hasn’t set about conquering any empires, it has crossed its own Rubicon in one way: It has decided to offer its operating system OS X as a free download for all users and its iLife and iWork suites as free downloads with the purchase of a new iOS or Mac device. Thus, it has erased the boundaries between its hardware and software offerings for the first time in a decade. Apple has offered its operating system free before. Until OS 9, updates were offered for its Macintosh computers as a matter of course. Patches fixed bugs and added features free of cost. When it shipped OS X for the first time, that all changed. Since then it has only offered one free update as a concession to customers who felt OS X 10.0 came out a bit half-baked with regard to the performance of its new Aqua interface. But thats only sort of accurate. Apple actually began offering a free version of OS X in 2007, when it began selling the iPhone. iPhone runs OS X! Why would we want to run such a sophisticated OS on a mobile device? It’s got everything we need, said Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the time. It let us create desktop class applications and networking, not the crippled stuff you find on most phones, these are real desktop applications. Specifically, the original iPhone ran an operating system called “OS X 1.0.” Now, Apple has unified its OS pricing strategy and offers free OS updates on both iOS and Mac hardware. In many ways, this is a culmination of a path that Apple has been trundling down since it first began writing operating system software for its own hardware. Ive joked before that Apple had a hardware + software epiphany in the 70s and that it took other companies like Microsoft decades to come to the same conclusion. Thats a simplification because Microsoft has actually been building hardware for a long time. The big difference is the level of commitment Apple gave to integrating its software with hardware, and the bet that it made in the 70s

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