@ring_wraith
You're focusing on two points which you mentioned in the first post – (1) any company could design products as great as Apple's if they charged as much; and (2) if Mac OS X were in the position that Windows is today, Windows would be just as good as Mac OS X and vice versa.
I don't want to debate with you on the second point. It's a an old argument that's been around since forever and there have been countless number of well written articles by experts on both sides of the fence, each one just as convincing as the previous one. You posted links to people saying that if Apple were in the position that Microsoft is in today, their software would be just as unusable (yes, Windows is unusable
for me). I could post several links to articles from several authors who don't agree with that, if I was so inclined.
The fact remains that what you're trying to base your argument on is a hypothetical situation which no one has witnessed. How are you supposed to assume anything about it definitively? Can you say, with the same conviction you seem to have about this issue, that if India hadn't gained freedom in 1947, we would still be under British rule? Can you say yes or no with absolute certainty?
No, you cannot. You cannot make a rule which is based on the unforeseen outcome of a hypothetical situation.
What you can do is look at the facts and base your purchase decision on it. And the fact remains, no matter how many arguments you may put forth and how may scenarios you may try to draw our attention to, that Mac OS X does not have a single virus or spyware or adware or malicious application out in the wild that can harm unsuspecting users.
Not even a single one. The one or two that have cropped in the seven years of its existence have been squashed faster than the time it takes to type the word "virus".
You can visit pornographic and other websites which are known to be repositories of malicious content (not that I'm advising you to) on a Mac without even the firewall turned on (though it is recommended that you do, from a security perspective) and absolutely no security related software installed and you'll remain unscathed. My Windows using friends have now made it a habit to bring potentially infected CDs (purchased from illegal hawkers) to me so that I can verify it for them.
I don't know about you but I quite enjoy this inherent freedom my Mac powers me with. Trying to cautiously sidestep the innumerable potholes and booby traps laid out for Windows users on the Internet and in the real world is now a thing of the past. No need to install and update several resource hungry security applications anymore (which aren't 100% effective anyway). I can fire up any P2P application I want and download any file I want. If it doesn't play, re-download another one and try that out. If it were a Windows PC, that second chance wouldn't have been there for the taking.
I could go on and on but I hope that, finally, you get the point. I give you your point for the sake of argument. Yes, Mac OS X would have been in the same pickle as Windows if the roles were reversed. But what's stopping you from using it now when it's not? Do you have some sort of pity for Windows? Oh, poor Windows, it is unfairly targeted by some many hackers. Let me use it to express solidarity with the platform, while I constantly try to evade all the threats that are associated with it and reinstall it every few months.
I don't get this logic. I don't understand it at all.
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As for point number two: You are point blank wrong.
Yes, quality comes at a price.
No, given the freedom of flexible pricing, not everyone can come up with good quality.
It just does not work that way.
As an example: Give me Adobe Photoshop, a Rs. 40,000 DSLR, take me to the most scenic place on Earth and ask me to come up with a good photograph. Now, give someone like Milind (goobimama) a Rs. 10,000 digicam, some crappy photo editing software and leave him in Goa. I can bet you anything he'll come up with a much decent picture than mine.
That's because he gets the concept of good photography and image editing and I don't – and no amount of money or resources can make me get it. Similarly, no amount of money can make an IBM come up with an iMac or an iPhone. It needs a visionary like Steve Jobs and an industrial designer like Jonathan Ive to come up with that. It needs a company that has good design ingrained in its culture.
For instance, look at Apple's website and compare it to any other company's. Be it Sony, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, Toshiba – any at all. See which one is the best. The website is not a product the company is charging for. How do they manage to come up with the best one then? You can gift someone an iPhone complete with two years of service from AT&T and wrapped in a beautiful origami style gift package with a custom message faster than you can buy a single, bare bones handset from Nokia or Sony Ericsson or Motorola or Samsung.
All these companies sell their products online. Why does Apple have the most streamlined buying experience? Why are they the only company with a highly successful chain of retail stores which are all excellently designed and make money by the truckloads? Why are they the fastest growing company in the tech industry?
Because they are different from the rest and they have perfected this art of differentiation by good design and tight integration between software and hardware. Linux is free and yet the rate of adoption is so slow. Apple's software (if you consider just the software) is the most expensive in the industry because you have to buy the whole computer and yet they are selling them faster than their factories can churn them out.
All of this is because they pay attention to the tiniest of details and make sure that they get the design just right. In the entire industry, whenever they release a new product, reviewers almost always add this line, as cliché as it is, "they've designed it like only Apple can". That's the essence of my whole argument –
only Apple can.
If it were just about the money, dude, every company in the industry would have had a range of premium priced products along with their low end products. This range would have had exquisite design and would be a direct competitor to Apple's products. No company likes to see Apple known as the king of good design and everyone of them would like to have a piece of that pie.
And they would...
if they could.
