The Operating System
Much as people go on about Microsoft's OS dominance, operating systems don't actually make all that much money. Operating systems require hundreds of programmers. Apple has over 200 programmers for its MacOS alone, with more for the Rhapsody and Newton OS's. Microsoft probably has as many operating system programmers as the combined Apple OS divisions working on each of its Windows operating systems. Programmers are very expensive, and you are looking at cost of millions of dollars per annum in wages alone. The OS development money comes through levering your operating system's popularity into an increased market share for your other products. In the case of Microsoft, these means using Windows to sell other software products such as Office, while for companies such as Apple and Sun, the profitability come through selling hardware.
Apple has stated that they will continue to improve the MacOS for the "foreseeable future", while Rhapsody will be aimed at power users and servers.
To put this into perspective, the MacOS is a very easy to use operating system, with a state of the art user interface. On the other hand, the MacOS is a very old code base, originally written in the early '80's to run on a computer with only 128 kilo bytes of RAM. While it has been extensively patched over the years, a complete rewrite is needed to get it up to standard. Apple has already tried to rewrite the MacOS, and it was a complete disaster (can anyone say "Copland"?). On the other hand, Rhapsody is based on Unix, which was designed to run on the world's most powerful computers, and as such is very fast and very powerful, but it is not user friendly, in fact it is frankly user unfriendly (it is only slightly easier to use than DOS). You need to be a computer expert to get the full benefit
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