Originally Posted by Mag-Mower
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Actually it may very well be running some form of OS X.
As we all know, the iPods use ARM processors, and have for quite some time (since the second generation I beleive). Apple has never told anyone what OS they are using. The same way apple neglected to tell anyone that they had Mac OS X running on an intel machine in the basement at 1 Infinite Loop until they saw it as absolutely necessary.
Apple is a very very strong proponent of attention to detail, and if you haven't noticed the words OS X and Mac OS X get thrown around a lot. But a lot of people in the tech community beleive that they aren't being used interchangably.
A lot of people beleive that the iPod OS, and now the iPhone OS are derivatives of Mac OS X, called simply OS X.
If apple releases the OS information, building things for it gets a lot easier.
It should also be noted that is OS X is the iPod OS, then there is already third party development for it, in the form of the 5G games.
Let us also note that it might not be such a bad idea to use a different gui and a slightly different OS on a mobile device then the one used on a desktop or laptop computer. A launcher, rather then the finder is a pretty good idea, kind of like opening your applications folder rather then the entire finder. (or, in the case of windows CE, navigating the start menu).
And one more thing. Lets differentiate between the security of mobile OS's used by Microsoft and by Apple.
Apple doesn't care which OS you use on the iPod, it doesn't support running Linux on it, but it doesn't actively hunt people down and kill them for doing it. To them its still a hardware sale and in the end, thats where the cold hard cash comes in.
Microsoft, with the zune, on the other hand, does not let you fuck with the OS. They haven't released the OS at all to outside developers (you can argue that apple didn't either, but when they did release it, it was easy to understand why - they hadn't had any reason to yet.) Microsoft has every reason to. How many zune's have you seen since they were released? I haven't seen one. In a random sampling of college students that we did in my engineering class at University of Pittsburgh, only 2 out of 10 were able to say they didn't like it, the other 8 didn't even know what it was. If I were microsoft I'd be pushing that thing for all its worth.
Microsoft, no matter how big, is not invincible... and that worries me. Because the zune can easily be described as a failure, and because everyone seems to be more then a little - uneasy - with Vista (something that Microsoft has formally admitted they fucked up and that it will not be economically feasible for them to do again). Microsoft's stance in the market can easily slip.