Apple helped to turn itself into a developer darling with OS X in the late 90s. Now, can the SteamBox be a viable alternative.
A scenario started playing through my head the other day. In the late 1990s, Apple looked dead. Then they released OS X, plus very cool shiny hardware. That put Apple back in the game and gave them the life they needed to bring about the iPod, etc. Apple’s revival didn’t come from iPods and iPhones; it came because they made a deep connection to the software developers. In 2000, if you went to a developer conference, everyone was carrying some kind of PC laptop, probably running some version of Windows, possibly Linux. But almost overnight that changed, and it changed completely. By 2003, any self-respecting developer was carrying a MacBook.
