I have had a love-hate relationship with Apple for a long time. I was a system administrator for years in the government and academic worlds. For a single dedicated user, the Mac was just fine, but when I had public-access Macs that were used by many people on a daily basis, it was a *horrible mess*! I had to figure out where people had dragged files, what extensions had been installed or uninstalled, and why all the settings would change all the time. I pretty much had to reinstall the OS every couple weeks on those things…
When Apple brought out OS X, I was very happy! Finally, a *real* OS underneath the Mac GUI! I'm an old FreeBSD guy anyway, so my loyalties ran pretty deep. Especially when I got an intel-based Macbook and started running Windows XP under Parallels, I had the best of all worlds!
Now, in the last couple years it seems that the Apple focus has been on the various hand held devices. Rightly so, judging by market share and capitalization, but it's almost as if Apple believes the Mac and OS X are purely a development environment for those devices. It's similar to what has happened to all the major DAW platforms. They all seem to be owned by larger entities that acquired them purely because they needed to check off some box on a list of corporate offerings. The DAW products don't seem to have a life of their own any more… (Reaper anyone?)
The question remains for me, do I develop for the market leader? If that was the case, I would have been a Windows guy all those years ago. Do I go for the underdog? Funny how Apple *used* to be the underdog. Now, however, I can't help but think that Steve Jobs is the big brother from the 1984 Mac ad…
