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Comment by p_ing | Hacker News Reader

> The cold and harsh truth is that literally nobody but a few nerds like us care about this, and even then the level of care we display is minute.

The author says this, but oh boy you should see how many individuals on /r/macos hinge on "It's good cus UNIX!", not that they understand what a UNIX is or where to find one.

The certification isn't useful. Apple doesn't sell to the types of organizations/governments that would care. And macOS is so limiting in what you can do with it in comparison to not-UNIXes, branding it UNIX is a waste of time.

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At one point in the 2000's Apple was leaning heavily on its UNIX brand. They sold big clusters of Xserves to universities for research projects. It was all over their keynotes and website copy.

They made a big deal about cancer researchers using OSX. Then like always with Steve Jobs when he didn't feel the love back ($$$) he dumped it and never even thought about it again.

"Sends other UNIX boxes to /dev/null" is one of the best Apple ads from that era: https://brainmapping.org/MarkCohen/UNIXad.pdf

What is with the spacing there? "UNIX........boxes". Very un-Apple.

But damn I miss this era of Apple. Great ad.

That ad was a two-page spread in printed magazines. The extra spacing was to account for the binding not laying flat.

I still know a bunch of cancer researchers who use OSX/MacOS. Do they care about formal Unix certification? Not in the least.

In case it bears mentioning, the rationale behind this was that the migration from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X was complex, and needed to be justified. Establishing OS X as more stable than Mac OS 9 was an important argument for that push.

"Mac OS X is more stable!"

"How stable is it?"

"Well, it's built on top of an established workhorse or something you've never heard of!"

"Gosh! Take my $129!"

They absolutely do sell to those organizations and governments. Otherwise they wouldn't bother maintaining a conforming, byzantine test suite. It's a checkbox that's useful for business purposes rather than technical ones, just like FIPS.

Correct. I used to work alongside folks who did research and operations at places like JPL and JHU’s APL. They very much cared about things like UNIX. (They also really enjoyed having computers that ran Mac, Windows, and Linux back when that was much more a given for someone to do.)

There’s this idea floating out there, and it’s been out there for a long time, that serious academic/research work isn’t to be found on the Mac, or that you can’t run whatever software you want (you absolutely can). These ideas do not track reality.

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