At the university I teach at (Michigan Tech), we have selected Verilog design for our Altera FPGAs, and have been using it for 5+ years. I used Verilog in private industry before I started teaching and it *seemed* to be more common at that time. When I did some time at IBM back around 1998, they were using VHDL. One of the companies that hires a lot of our grads uses VHDL, and I keep having to tell students, "Look, if you know Verilog, all you need to get a handle on is the syntax of VHDL. Tell them that!"

Knowing both, I find students struggle enough with the concepts of logic design and simulation when they have a familiar kind of syntax (the C-based syntax of Verilog), let alone adding the complexity of VHDL's strange ADA-based syntax. I suggest Verilog.

Apple may set their own standards, but then the standards get opened up. Firewire-- Apple standard, opened up as IEE 1394. Rendezvous-- Apple standard, open-sourced. The Darwin kernel is open. They encourage open-source developers to help with Darwin and other Unix tools. Heck, that BSD guy is actually working for Apple now. The Cocoa API is a direct descendant of stuff at NeXT. All of the classes still have NS* monikers (NSObject, NSString... etc.).

Yes, a lot of the source is closed. Yes, Apple makes the OS and the hardware. But they're not afraid to open their knowledge up to the world.