Originally Posted By: Garak
Apple and MS have no idea how lucky they are that the pendulum didn't swing far enough to get the OS decoupled from the computer. Well, I hope they do have an idea, but one never knows.
One of Apple's strengths(make what you will of it, but it's a strength none the less) is that they control both the hardware and software.
Part of the stability of OS X(although not all of it) can be attributed to this-by only having to support a limited degree of hardware, they can make sure it works very well with that hardware.
BTW, unlike Windows, OS X installs are pretty much agnostic to what system they are installed-I've cloned or swapped drives from dramatically different hardware with no ill effects provided that the version was fully supported on both systems. As an extreme example-and as a proof of concept for naysayers-I've cloned OS X Leopard(10.5) back and forth between a Titanium Powerbook(c. 2002) and a Macbook(late 2007). It works the same whether I use the retail disk to install on the Powerbook or gray(system specific) disk for the Macbook. By doing that, I'm going between two computers that are drastically different-in fact about the only thing in common is that they're both laptops! Most significantly, they use totally different processor architectures.
Installs of the Mac OS-whether "Classic" versions or OS X-are unbelievably easy. Granted when you get back to System 6 it's really just a matter of copying and pasting the system folder then making sure it's blessed, but still later "classic" versions are simple can often be done with a simple drag/drop/bless operation(and sometimes blessing isn't even necessary depending on what's needed). I did about 5 clean OS 9 installs last Tuesday for a co-worker who's using a G3 to run some very expensive equipment-we spent the day swapping hard drives so that I could do the install from the one in my office and then let him test a "tweak" of the install on his computer(and minimize downtime). With the exception of OS X 10.0, which was a science-fair experiment that Apple had the audacity to charge $130 for, and with "hacked" versions modified to work on computers aren't officially supported(i.e. 10.9 on the Mac Pro 1,1 in my office) I've yet to to find a version of the Mac OS that didn't "just work" and install without trouble and in minimal time. Leopard(10.5) was the worst since it has physically the largest footprint and installs from a DVD, but it takes about 45 minutes. I did a clean install of 10.11(El Capitan) on a friend's Retina Macbook Pro and it took all of about 10 minutes to zip from the USB 3.0 flash drive to the PCIe solid state drive in the computer. Something like Mavericks(10.9), still my favorite, takes 20-30 minutes over USB 2.0 onto a platter drive.
Newer Macs now even let you do a clean install over the internet-just launch "Internet Recover" and the computer talks to Apple's servers and reinstalls the OS that shipped.
