Couple of things that I thought of while reading the comments
1. Apple as one stop source of support is what is winning over the new converts. Hardware and Software conflicts are minimal (not non-existent) when you buy a Mac. The Wintel PC industry is much more reliant on pointing the finger at someone else.

2. While it is incredibly easy to add and remove programs on the Mac, the iPhone is restricted to the App Store on iTunes. This is what most folks are talking about when they say it is closed platform. This is the primary reason for jailbraking a phone. The reasons for it are fairly straightforward – it was (and remains) the primary method for exploiting the hardware to do what the _cell phone carriers_ don’t want you to do. It doesn’t hurt that it also means that Apple gets a cut from each app just like the gaming console makers (talk about a closed platform).

3. Owning the whole value chain is what most companies aspire to, but they tend to wait until they are dominant in one part before pursuing the other areas. Jobs’ point of view is that you should make it elegant and people will pay for the quality. The combination of Jobs’ vision and the focus on the whole value chain is what has kept Apple’s market share small. Both are responsible for the higher costs because efficiencies are rarely realized when you go after the whole chain in one sitting and you want to maintain quality.

“Of course that’s just my opinion I could be wrong.”

The Apple influence is a constant challenge for the IT departments I am familiar with. Thing is, Execs want sexy products to show off to their Exec peers. There is constant pressure to provide these gadgets to satisfy this need! They just ain’t appropriate for an enterprise environment (yet?) – true in any case when I remember the IT depts I’ve worked in.

iPhone is a marvel – I want one myself. But the one thing that attracts people to them now is the wide variety of gimmicky apps you can download, such as the spirit level and games. Allowing this in the enterprise creates control issues that most IT managers just won’t tackle right now!

Also, considering apples iphone developer program OUTSHINING every other phone hardware/software vendor….i’d argue again, its pretty damn open.

Now…can we all agree on this point…..No Vendor software will EVER be as open as open source projects. Right. Even with published API’s etc, or whatever, Vendors still do proprietary, hidden things in their own infrastructure and internal software.

No software vendor is printing and giving away copies of their entire application architecture blueprints, and calling themselves an open platform!!!

On winXP we run ACT CRM and MS Office, and two DOS apps. That’s it.

On Mac we run high overhead CS2, and CS3….as well as video editing, photo editing, automated page layout software, run PDF automation, XML conversion to layouts ready for Print. Probably 15+ apps compared to half a dozen on Windows.

I should also mention that for the fist 10 years of my career I was personally and professionally a win user.

Within 6 mo of switching my self to mac, i switched ALL of my family, 65 year old dad to boot, and my IT department except for one user who still uses XP as her primary PC. Our dept, and operations are more reliable than ever.

I’m employed by a publishing company. We do business, we do graphics, we do offline DB apps, we do online DB apps. With 100 employees, we’re almost exactly 50% win 50% mac at the workstation.

We run Redhat Linux ES4, Netware 6.5, Windows Server 2003, and OSX 10.5 server, mac and win workstations.

We are truly a multi-platform shop. I’ll admit. I don’t like Microsoft’s products. I try to stay away from them. They cost too much, and fail WAY too much. (My netware boxes go hundreds of days without reboots….EVERY YEAR , and even then it is for a reason, not a preventative maintenance tactic…..my redhat too. In fact the only ones that don’t are MS boxes!!!)

I’m at a point where i want to phase out Netware mainly because our mac side is growing. But i’m not even considering putting in Active Directory. I’d choose Open Directory on OSX in a second. I might even run NDS if i can!

(PS for you MS’ers….Novell created directory services. and it kicks all the others asses)

My 1 apple server is capable of running ALL of our core server needs, eliminating 3 novell boxes, an 1 win2003 box. We might just do it, and i have NO fear.

MS server products suck. come on. would you really rather run a server OS cause it has a “Suite of products”, from a big name vendor. Or do you want solutions that work?

The comments about OSX on BSD are right on. I’ve taking apps straight up for Unix/Linux and dropped them on OSX no prob.

Most if not all major database vendors offer a version that will run in some way under OSX, even if the DB is built for unix/linux.

to me, OSX is the best of all worlds. The command line power of a “nix” OS, the GUI of a Mac, all the services you could ever want, all in one box. And here is a shocker…i don’t have to pay Apple forever to use what i already bought.

So what exactly about Apple makes it NOT a platform?

In fact i’d argue that MS is a more predatory platform. Their goal is to lock you into using them. Simple as that. You are fooled by the illusion of choice.

I see the best desktop, laptop, and mobile products i’ve ever seen/used coming from apple.

If you do run a “Microsoft Shop”, i feel for you. Trust me, no matter what your license reps say….the grass is GREENER and CHEAPER on the other side…come join us…

It always amazes me that people think OS X is a closed environment. It’s hardly sealed! While the GUI itself is somewhat proprietary, OS X uses some of the most open and standard tools in the industry, and it’s based upon certified UNIX.

Once a year in June, Apple holds a developer conference. You can attend if you pay your dues. They also bundle X Code, their development environment, with every copy of OS X, and with every new Mac. You can choose to load it and try it, or not. It allows you to write applications using virtually all the same tools Apple uses to build theirs.

Yes, we use Macs. I run Windows on a Mac, so I can use Windows apps only when I absolutely have to.

There is a growing distaste among the public at large for all things Microsoft. People are fed up with bloatware, crapware, viruses, trojans, adware, spyware, and system error messages that only a C++ programmer can interpret.

They’ve bought an iPod or two, they’ve at least seen the iPod Touch or the iPhone and think it’s cool, so yes, they’re looking at Macs for their personal — and increasingly business — needs.

More and more people are discovering that you CAN have a single company to blame when things go bump in the night, and that because they make and sell all of the system (hardware, OS, and often software), it either just works, or they can make it work faster than the other guys would.

This trend is viral, and it will continue. When you have a corporate culture based upon clear thinking, elegance, and simplicity, and yes, a tight modicum of control over the range of outcomes, you also produce products that make a lot of sense for their users.

Easy is hard. (Making it easy for the user to use is hard for the programmer to do!) IT departments everywhere hate that, which is why they like Microsoft… They can program apps their own ways, because there are no user interface standards that mean anything! They win, the user loses, and Apple wins the long run race by default, because users finally figure out it’s worth it to pay for a less painful computing experience.

Where does that leave IT? IT decides! Will IT be a TRUE service department, solving all users’ real needs, or will it be a dictatorial island that serves only those in power?

Letting Macs (and Linux boxes) in the door is a good thing. It satisfies picky users, sharpens our skills, and ensures market competition that keeps players as large as Microsoft from being complacent and Microsloppy.

Without competition, there is little incentive to innovate or to refine our techniques.

The iPhone itself is designed to plug in to Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 in the same way that a Windows Mobile device using Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology. In addition, it can be configured to talk to just about any other type of standards based mail services. This will get even better in version 3 of the iPhone OS.

In addition to that, Apple has a very robust set of developer tools for both Mac OS X and the iPhone OS (which is a variant of OS X) that are well documented, well developed, and free to anyone who wants to download them and use them. Beyond that, there is any array of command line languages that can be used like ruby, python, perl, and various other shell languages like bash.

Looking at all of those things, I ask, how is that NOT a platform???