It's not necessarily intuitive, but after reading this blog post called Installing Linux on a MacBook without OS X, I think you have to concede the guy makes a lot of sense:

[To Apple:] Help the Linux people write proper ELI drivers for your machines, if you are serious about this. I understand you don’t want OS X running on normal PC’s. You are using OS X as an argument for buying your hardware. If you sold OS X separately your machines would be cheaper and your upgrades more expensive, and that would probably not be good for business. But making it hard to run OTHER things on Macs doesn’t make any sense. [emph mine]


Sure, there's a good reason for Apple to want you to use OS X as you primary OS that the blogger here chooses to overlook, namely that if you use OS X now, you're more likely to buy OS X again. And sure enough, this guy ends with... "All in all, I can not recommend you to buy MacBooks unless you intend your main OS to be OS X. And I can’t recommend OS X to a developer. Yes, this buy was a mistake."

That's serious overkill, and obviously is coming from a guy who does Linux/OSS development, but it doesn't negate his initial, clever argument. If I am already a Linux-phile and Apple's primarily in the hardware business, which I argue they are, why not make your hardware open to whoever wants to use it? Sure, keep OS X exclusive to Mac hardware, but when you've got guys going out of their way to buy your hardware for Linux, build in at least enough support that it's a painless install, just as you do for a more conventional competitor, Microsoft Windows. I think you can use Boot Camp to install Windows and then blast OS X away.

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