Sure, Apple is fundamentally very solid. However, there's tons of negative hype about Windows 8 going on in various investor forums, specifically regarding Apple, so I do think that's a big factor in the recent runup. (Along with iphone 5 anticipation.)

And some of that is "real"; specifically there's going to be a battle for enterprise tablet adoption between iPad and MS Surface-type hardware, which imo Apple has a very good chance of winning.

It doesn't even require any nefarious motives, MS simply finally woke up and realized their was a huge disparity between their retail prices and the far lower volume prices. If Dell is only paying $30 a copy, why were they even trying to get $300 from joe home builder? It was stupid and they finally figured it out.

Not to mention that Microsoft's old price sheet literally dates back to the 1980s and OS/2. People used to pay $300 for Windows NT Workstation and install it on their $2500 PC, pretty good deal compared to Unix, eh? But it's 2012 now and nobody is paying that kind of money to install an OS on their $400 laptop.

Actually IMO it's more "Only in the last few week, investors realized Windows 8 is going to bomb hard". (Semi regretfully, if I cared about day-trading, predictable money could have been made.)

Naw, its true the the classic Mac GUI completely stagnated after System 7. Most of the additions were simply bolting on various popular freeware/shareware hacks such as 'window shades'. It was pretty clear that nobody had really thought through how various tasks should work; for example there was a toolbar which allowed you to turn off networking with one click, but it took two clicks to switch applications with the menu. Likewise, you had the Apple Menu functioning as a launcher, but adding programs to it was like four step process.

One of the nice things about OS X is that Apple is no longer wedded "how it's always worked" and have actually done quite a great job of filing off the sharp edges of the old Mac experience. For example, Expose. Or that some people actually want "maximized" (full screen) applications. Or that an app with no open windows should automatically quit.

ArsTechnica tried it - it works but Windows' scaling can be janky. They didn't test battery life, but judging by my plain old MBP, it's probably worse.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/windows-and-os-x-boot-camp-running-redmond-at-retina-resolution/

I think you're absolutely correct about that, and Microsoft's strategy here might be more about the support & customer service channels than just the shiny hardware. On slashdot, we may mock the "Genius Bar", but Apple absolutely owns the "Geek Squad" in terms of support experience for the average user. Of course, there's only a handful of Microsoft Stores right now, but that will probably change quickly.

CUA was an IBM/Microsoft thing, so you really are splitting hairs. But I guess to be technically correct, Motif claimed to be based on OS/2 Presentation Manager 1.x, which looked pretty similar to Windows 3.1.

The conspiracy theorist in me believes the Unix vendors wanted Microsoft to design the look&feel to avoid being sued by Apple. (MS had a licence from Apple for GUI technology, and had already beaten them in court.)

Yep, that pastel color scheme may have looked really high-tech during the Reagan administration, but even by the mid-1990s it was seemed like a museum piece.

However it's too bad the source code wasn't released back in the 1990s, people could have modernized the look and possibly avoided much of the KDE versus Gnome nonsense.

> They didn't even pre-load it on their *own* computers. To this day I can't figure out why

Here's why:

I worked at a company which had standardized on DOS/WFW and bought a lot of ThinkPads. One day the ThinkPads show up and surprisingly boot into OS/2. Long-story-short, the company's IT managers flipped out and cancelled all the ThinkPad orders until IBM started shipping them with DOS again.

Oh, and OS/2 was completely worthless on these machines, as unlike WFW, it didn't include any networking software.

This arrangement lasted into the NT era. First real IT job I ever had was in a huge corp which managed PCs on the department level. You could walk around and see one group of people on DOS/Novell, the next group on Macs, the next running X11 Unix apps on Windows, and even some NT 3.5 and Citrix. Total chaos.

Of course, the whole reason I was there was to assist with the IT standardization effort.

I'm sure we spent a few hours giggling at it anyway.

Absolutely. Apple gave my 'inner city' school some free computers, and in return got national press with a picture of some of my classmates in Newsweek. I've since paid them back many times over for that favor.

They're doing the same thing with the iPad right now BTW.

Here's a relevant story:

A long time ago, IBM held a monopoly in large-scale corporate computers. The US Department of Justice figured this out and forced them to sign a consent decree in order to curb their anticompetitive behavior.

After about 10 years microprocessors came along, and Apple, Commodore, Compaq, Radio Shack, etc were selling tens of millions of little computers. Thanks to the consent degree, IBM couldn't stop anyone from cloning their designs and "IBM Compatible" was a big selling point. IBM promptly took these sales figures down to the DOJ and convinced them they should be released from the consent degree. It certainly helped that President Reagan didn't think much of anti-trust laws.

The first thing IBM did after the consent degree was gone was release a fabulous new line of PCs featuring a proprietary bus that required a secret licensing deal to access. It almost worked, and would have if it wasn't for that darned megalomanic Bill Gates. So IBM just snuffed out their mainframe competitors instead, and they still hold a monopoly in that segment until today.

OK, what does this have to do with today? Well Microsoft can point to those 100M iPads and Android tablets and make a reasonable argument they no longer have a "PC" monopoly. Oh, also Ballmer was working the IBM account the whole time the above story happened.

I'd forgotten about the speech synthesizer. Someone had dumped a fully-loaded Model I system on my school, so the 'computer club' quickly dug into to see if there were any good games. We were playing a "Star Trek" style game when all of a sudden a giant ASCII alien appeared and started yelling - everyone jumped out of their seats.

There was also a neat drawing/animation program where you could create blocky movies. However, by the the system seemed so out of date, we spent most of our time trading Apple disks.

To be honest, until Reimer published those figures, I'd always believed Apple's claim of being the "best-selling personal computer", and it still seems to be a widely-held misconception. From where I was sitting (school), it sure looked like it too.