but sometime you say silly things. How incredibly misinformed is your latest assertion: “The only reason OS/X is at all relevant right now has nothing to do with software- it has to do with the little white things in millions of people’s ears“. Sure, iPods did contribute hugely to the Apple brand current buzz but its newfound desktop relevance has little to do with the white earbuds.

I mean let’s face it, many desktops nowadays (including Gnome) are modeling their ease of use, UI guidelines mantra after what the Apple crews devised twenty years ago.
Many applications on Windows and Linux are trying to be as useful and easy to use as iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie HD, Garage Band and iDVD but also NetNewsWire, QuickSilver, Omnigraffle.

So much that in fact, a lot of the open source and Gnome developers I have had a chance to meet in the last few years are closet Mac OS X users (I won’t out them. Hi Dave). Not only that but most will testify that they get their wife an iBook, their mother an iMac. Go to O’Reilly’s OSCON and you’ll see that more than half of the audience is sporting Powerbooks. And while the funniest thing a SuSE engineer said to me was: “You know you can install SLES 9 on your powerbook” (Why in hell would I do that, so it stops working properly ?), none of those people (nor I) are running Gnome (or KDE for that matter) on their shiny Apple hardware.

So, while the iPod is a great vector for Apple’s adoption, its relevance is due to hardware and software working together, applications being easy to install, working well and being simple.

What’s amazing is that even though Cocoa/Objective C has become somewhat irrelevant as a development platform, Apple is able to churn out amazingly useful and well targeted applications not only at the low end but also mid-range (Pages, Keynote, Final Cut Express, Logic Express) and high-end (Motion, Shake, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro and Aperture). Independent Mac OS X and open source developers do the same and hopefully they’ll adopt Mono to do so, some of them already are today.

But I am losing focus and starting to sound like a zealot. I’ll tell you though, if I were to think along your lines, I’d blindly declare: “The only reason Linux is at all relevant right now has nothing to do with the desktop but with all those J2EE & PHP applications deployed worldwide on Linux servers“. And while that might not be the truth sitting down at Flaptop’s Johny, it certainly is in the world’s homes and corporations.

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