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Astute readers will notice that this marks the end of my 22-year love affair with Apple. I actually went to the local Apple store this weekend — checkbook in hand — to decide between the new Mac mini, MacBook, and MacBook Pro. I walked out without buying any of them. Bye, Apple.

Mac OS X was “free enough” to keep me using something that was not in my long-term best interest. But as I stood in the Apple store last weekend and drooled over the beautiful, beautiful hardware, all I could think was how much work it would take to twiddle with the default settings, install third-party software, and hide all the commercial tie-ins so I could pretend I was in control of my own computer. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to my eye Apple isn’t beautiful anymore. I’ve worked around it or ignored it for a long time, but eventually the bough breaks.

If your reaction to Pilgrim’s announcement was a snap judgment that he’s lost it, or that he’s being an asshole who’s just looking for attention as the guy who switched away from the Mac just at the time when it (the Mac) seems poised to become more popular than ever, or that he’s an open source fanatic who just can’t be reasoned with or trusted — are you sure that the zealotry at play is his?

Thought experiment: Let’s say that Microsoft puts together a miraculous fourth-quarter comeback and that Windows Vista rocks. Not just rocks compared to the way it currently appears as though Vista is actually going to turn out, but rocks, period. As in looks better than Mac OS X. More elegant than Mac OS X. Noticeably faster and snappier than Mac OS X. (That one’s actually quite likely.) I.e. “better” than Mac OS X, in glaringly obvious ways.

How would this make you feel?

If your answer is that it would depress you, or sicken you, or really in any way dampen your spirits — why? Wouldn’t this be good news for everyone, including Mac users? Either Apple would have to up the ante and improve Mac OS X in similar ways, or, Mac users could just switch. Either way the result is that we’d be able to use something better than what we’re using now.

The first 90% of John Gruber’s And Oranges is excellent. Everyone should read it, and I’m not just saying that because it’s all about me. Unfortunately, the last 10% goes right off the rails, so naturally that’s where I’m going to start.

First of all, I should say that I share every one of Mark’s concerns. In particular, it’s bothered me for years that the Apple apps aren’t Open Source; there are all these irritating little misfeatures and shortcomings that I’d be willing and maybe able to fix, and there are lots more like me. Since the apps are joined at the hip to OS X, there’d be no real downside to Apple.

The real problem, it seems to me (and I think this bothers Mark more than he says), is Apple’s paranoid communication culture: it is forbidden to say anything except what it’s compulsory to say. Apple’s exterior is polished, shiny; and entirely opaque. Personally, I think their success has been about shipping good products, but I think they believe it’s a consequence of the tightness of the lip. I’d rather do business with a company I can talk to.

John Gruber’s essay is very hard to disagree with, but I’d place more weight than either he or Mark did on the increasing excellence of Ubuntu. If you haven’t tried a recent Ubuntu, you really should; the level of polish, and amount of stuff that “Just Works”, is really remarkable. Ubuntu won’t always be the polish-and-quality leader among Linux distros, of course; but for now, it’s set a very high standard.

Bray is right that releasing the source code to these apps would be unlikely to hurt Apple competitively against Windows or Linux, but he overlooks another form of competition: existing versions of Mac OS X. The role these apps play isn’t just to make Mac OS X look good compared to Windows or Linux, but also to help make each new version of Mac OS X look better than the previous one; i.e. to convince Mac users that it’s worth paying for the latest upgrade.

If the source code to these apps were made available, the best features from new versions of these apps could be ported back to previous versions, lessening the incentive for users to upgrade.

Consider iChat. It seems quite possible that one of the features planned for the 10.5 version of iChat might be tabbed chat windows,1 and that this feature would be considered a selling point for the OS. But if iChat were already open sourced today, it’s almost a certainty that someone would have already added tabbed windows to it. Kent Sutherland’s Chax is an input manager hack that adds tabs (and a slew of other features) to iChat. It’s a clever hack, and works as advertised, but to me, it very much feels like a hack. I.e. it doesn’t come close to looking or working the way “tabbed iChat” would look/work if tabbed chat windows were added to iChat by Apple. If Sutherland had access to iChat’s source code, he probably could have added tabs to iChat in a vastly less hacky (if not altogether unhacky) way.

That might be great for iChat users, but it wouldn’t be great for Apple if they were hoping to use tabbed chat windows as a selling point for Mac OS X 10.5. Just take a look at the “new features” marketing for Tiger; about half of it revolves around new features in the apps Bray wants to see open sourced.

Playing on Apple's past "Switch" ad campaign, which was aimed at getting Windows users to migrate to Apple's Mac OS X-based computers, a few longtime Mac and open-source gurus are vocally publicizing their switch away from Apple's platform to more open-source solutions.

I've been a Mac user since 1984, and have a Mac tattooed on my right bicep. I've probably personally owned 50 Macs, and I've purchased several hundred while working as an IT manager over the years. I'm about to make the same switch, for much the same reasons.

but it is particularly galling to realize that if I bought a new Mac, I would be subsidizing the development of an operating system that contains code whose sole purpose is to lock me into a specific hardware platform. I realize that most people don’t look at it that way, but there it is.

I thought about buying a MacBook Pro anyway, since they're nice computers, and they run Ubuntu, but after pricing them out, I realized that I could get a lot more bang for my buck with a Lenovo ThinkPad T60p. If I'm not going to run the MacOS, why spend extra money for Apple hardware? I ordered the machine last weekend, loading it to the max with two 120GB hard drives, 2GB of RAM, and the fastest video card and best screen Lenovo sells: it was still cheaper than a Mac, even though Lenovo makes me pay for a copy of Windows XP that I plan on pitching out along with the styrofoam cutouts and other worthless packaging.

At the time, Jason said, “If I were Apple, I’d be worried about this. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux: first it was Mark Pilgrim and now Cory Doctorow. Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.”

18 months later, Apple has sold 4 million crippled phones, billions of crippled songs, and people are predicting that Mac sales are up 40% year over year. And I wouldn’t bet against their new movie rental venture either (although this chart is amusing).

So after 18 months, I think we can safely say that no, Cory and I were not “canaries in the coal mine.” There are not hordes of fed-up consumers rejecting Apple’s vision of cryptographic lock-in. There are not mass graves where people ceremoniously dump their crippled, non-general-purpose computing devices. Outside of Planet Debian and my own personal echo chamber, nobody gives a shit about Freedom 0.

You knew this, of course, but I just wanted to let you know that I knew, too.