It’s All^H^H^HOnly About the Apps

Rich Siegel on the switching-to-Ubuntu saga:

The problem I see with this line of reasoning is that it conflates the hardware and the OS with the applications that run on them. That’s an easy mistake to make, since those bundled applications are refined to the point that they integrate closely with each other and the OS, and also because they form the basis of the first-run experience for almost every Mac OS X user, new or old.

However, the applications are not the platform.

He also points out that Apple Mail never used mbox for mail storage — it used a very mbox-like format that wasn’t really mbox.

★ Thursday, 6 July 2006