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anybody remember the OEM macintoshes that apple quickly killed off when the realised that everybody was buying cheaper mac compatible hardware, rather than their own?

That was a decision made by Jobs when he came back, one of many that saved Apple. They did so to retain control of the platform and to try and elliminate consumer confusion. Back then, Apple looked like any other beige box shipper, with a ton of models and no easy way to know what did what. All the OEM builders were doing the same, leading to more confusion. Jobs goal was to simply the product like to consumer laptop, consumer desktop, professional laptop and professional desktop. The first step was the iMac, and had he not done that, the company would not be around to do the next steps.

OS X for Intel, thats another sticky issue. Looking back at Apples sales numbers for 2002 (before the iPod craze), Apple would have to hit a 25% market share in the first year on OS X to make the same amount of profit they did for selling computers to a 2.4% market share. Thats assuming $50 of profit per OS X license, something not likely to happen if they go the Microsoft route and license it to OEMs. Source.