Apple does really good industrial design for a computer/phone company. They make decent software. I worked with the Mach kernel (inserted into BSD) before the Jobs went off and did NeXT. I got to play with those too. Mach is cool.

I understand Apple's closed philosophy, but I don't like it. And I really don't like how the window manager works, so I'd have to change it if I was going to use a Mac. But unlike Linux, you can't. Until Ubuntu 9.04 I never ran the standard window manager (and Ubuntu's is only tolerable after significant tweaking). However I am way too hands on and willing to hack on stuff to be in Apple's target market. There's been plenty of stuff make for people like me and they usuall fail in the market. So its no surprise Apple's not designing for me.