"Apple controls the availability of systems, parts, upgrades, and service."

This incontrovertible truth is one of the greatest points of contention between Apple and its customers. Apple maintains a viselike grip on distribution, pricing, and service, and with the spreading of Apple retail stores, its grip is tightening such that if it chose to, the company could shut down its reseller program entirely and continue to function without a hiccup. The merest whiff of that possibility sent resellers leaping to their fax machines and lawyers.

When challenged persistently on an issue, however, Apple tends to loosen its grip. For years, for example, Apple software would only burn DVDs on Apple-branded internal drives. The software shipped with Macs was limited to burning one hour of video to a DVD. After a lot of yelling that Apple pretended not to hear, and after users hacked a couple of widely used work-arounds, Apple eventually gave in on both issues. It's Apple's nature to try to squeeze its users now and then, and it's Mac users' nature to tell Apple to go screw itself when that's what's called for. It's nice to have people with attitude watching your back.

"Apple's got a smoke-and-mirrors hack that makes Macs run Windows."

Boot Camp is a hack that alters a running copy of OS X so that the user can choose to run Windows instead at boot time. It is a very limited solution, one that Apple branded a beta by. Boot Camp seems intended to prove that, true to its word, Apple did nothing to keep Windows from running on an Intel Mac.