Apple Posts Strong Quarterly Results

Dude1313 said: "And on top of that go ask Dell or HP if they are MS' biggest fans right now. If they wanted to Apple could by Dell if they wanted to which is ironic given Michael Dell's comments of 1997. Dell would kill to have OS X on their PCs to differentiate them from the sea of PCs. " Hahaha!! Yeah sure, they want so much kill to have another OS to differentiate them from the sea of PC... This is the reason why Ubuntu is not an option when buying on the Dell sites... This would be a great Idea... Why Apple don't let OSX run on non Mac PC... This would be great, isn't it? NO! not really because Mac OS is not built to support all existing hardware on the planet... This is why comment like you show is silly because if it would be possible, Dell will drop OSX in a Week because OSX does not run on Dell PC... This is a Hardware Issue ... OSX support only 5% of the hardware on the planet... This is why Microsoft always keep the momentum, They support 99.9% of the hardware outside...

@EricoF3 - I really shouldn't get involved in this conversation as you're clearly not paying attention but what the hell, I'm bored. Microsoft's problem is very simple - they are focused on business sales first and foremost. Just a few years ago it was all so simple if you were starting a new business - Windows Server, Exchange, MS SQL and a raft of PC's running Windows as desktop clients. Now though the back end infrastructure is facing competition from web services and shared solutions (at least for small companies) and while there still isn't (yet) a decent desktop replacement Microsoft has a much larger problem there. Why should businesses upgrade? I'm currently working for a higher education establishment and one of my projects is evaluating Windows 7. Other than the obvious security improvements there's very very little that's compelling as an upgrade. In fact, in many ways, it's a significant problem making the upgrade owing to the new interface which not everyone is used to so there's a significant retraining cost for very little real benefit to our end users. Same story with Office, why should we even think about upgrading to 2010 from 2007? Frankly, we could manage quite happily on Office XP for 99.9% of what we do. Without that revenue MS might find themselves facing a major problem before too much longer. Businesses don't see the need to keep on the upgrade cycle they were following for the 90's and 00's. Home users are starting to look more to other devices (the iPhone and other modern smartphones might be the sign of things to come there, one reason the tablet is so interesting just to see if Apple can make a consumer-orientated OS take off). After all, why does the average home user need Windows these days? A web browser can do the vast majority of tasks that the average user wants to do so why have all that extra functionality they never use and the associated maintenance? Just some food for thought for you. Oh, and to confirm what BladRnr said, OS X is compatible with non-Apple products. Look up Hackintosh for proof, certainly it works very well on the Dell Mini 9 my wife is currently using...