I actually feel it just a burden they don’t want to deal with more than anything. Why support 1000’s of pieces of hardware, when they can choose to support less than 20-30 configurations? It makes life A LOT easier for them.
from a business standpoint though, they could really cash in and grab a substantial market share overnight… downside is, they wont be selling as many desktop units as they used to (and like you said, deal with crashes and all kinds of problems that M$ has to deal with in catering to everyone)
boardjnky, check this out. edit: the PPC Kernel is still open source. The Intel is now closed (due to piracy and reverse engineering that has been going on)
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=14663&Page=1&pagePos=8
http://yista.com/2006/05/18/apple-closes-intel-os-x-kernel/