- Proprietary USB standards.
- Heck, non-standard connectors across the board.
- Bastardization of mDNS (they call it Bonjour)
- Bastardization of ePub books (Apple XML Namespace)
- BSD under the hood with all new brand-specific vulnerabilities included.
- You use a shell in OSX? Really?
- OS is hardware locked (for the most part).
- Support at most companies and colleges is "peer" based despite claims that Mac is supported. Try turning in a paper that's not Word compatible.
- How's that OSX Server program working?
- Guess what mail server they use at Cupertino? Hint: it doesn't run on OSX or *nix.
USB non-standard? Seems to work fine with standard USB devices here... The only thing non-standard is charge rate for some devices, but the standard always worked.
Non-standard connectors? Seems like they often are the first to use them, but unsurprisingly they show up on other's designs fairly soon thereafter. Even then, a $4 monoprice price cable always takes care of that nicely.
"bastardization of mDNS"? Bwahahha. A) mDNS is a bastard child anyway, and B) it's kinda stupid to worry about something being "bastardized" that no one bothered to use anyway. The competition likes broadcasts of completely proprietary crap if there isn't a do,Ian controller and pile of goofy non-standard DNS entries to even find the thing on the LAN... At least mDNS served a purpose in Apple's design.
ePub and XML... It's called Extensible for a reason. But even then, what a reach. Only academia even cares. The real world doesn't. The real world uses PDF which is way more god-awful under the hood than, oh... Damn near anything.
Brand specific vulnerabilities... Care to share a few? Let's see how bad they really are. Note: Browsers don't count. Isn't a browser on the planet that isn't a security joke. Let's see what you've got in the core OS. Not applications.
Shell? Absolutely. Why the hell else run Unix?
OS hardware locking... Again, yawn. It's either that or spend hours tracking down retarded bugs in drivers in Linux, while listening to the developers whine that they don't have the specs from manufacturers of hardware because they're saving the world by not signing an NDA. Equal evils.
Word docs at academia, more yawn. A) academics tend to not be all that bright with computers outside of the engineering and CS schools. B) Word is ubiquitous even outside of academia, see " brightness" above. So buy Word.
Or go O365 and slap the whole MSFT suite on the thing for the folks who feel a need to communicate via proprietary document formats. You'll even get a terabyte of free cloud storage to dump useless college papers in so they'll not be taking up disk space once you've escaped the land of computer morons.
OSX Server was dumped, as was the hardware. Not their target market. No one with any brains ran it anyway, Linux could handle the job better. Apple made a valiant effort at making a mouse click server based on standard Unix packages but real server admins hated the limitations, and dolts who needed the GUI found it too complex. Their current stripped down, dumbed down, stuff works fine for what little it does, but won't scale. They know it. It's a whopping $19, and they know it's barely worth that. Maybe for the "LDAP for dummies" that's built in, but they stripped the most useful portion of that -- the AD cross-integration piece. Mostly since it was based on the spastic Samba project, which at the time was a bear to keep up with all their goofy changes they were shoving out, mostly broken, at a horrendous rate back then.
It's Oracle's strange assed thing. Probably to handle multi-site replication and DNS locale routing for travelers, and load balancing. Building a public worldwide mail server farm at that scale is a *****. MSFT took a decade to replace BSD behind the scenes on Hotmail after they bought them, and their current stuff on O365 is also front-ended and slow, and they had to go find a large third party to even get their own exchange back end to play nicely, they don't run it themselves. Mail at that scale is an utter disaster of mixed products at that level and probably always will be.
Anything else actually interesting? 'Cause having to order a couple of cables and a copy of Word doesn't seem too cringe-worthy here.
