This is a harder topic. Apple by-and-large do not sell to “the enterprise” and their computers do not virtualize that easily. The Apple,A1184 End User License Agreement (EULA) makes you agree not to install the software on any non-Apple machine (except in countries where such a restriction is illegal). I think Australia is the most notable “except in” country – which means (I think) I am allowed to install the software on a non-Apple, A1189 battery,machine. [Third line forcing rules in our antitrust legislation would make it a criminal offense for Apple to enforce their license terms...] Anyway I set up Snow Leopard on Virtual Box– and to tell you the truth – installing it the first time was a first-order pain. However copying it would be easy. [After all – it is virtual and I can copy it very quickly – it is just hardware,A1185 apple, independent software...] I am going to close it and give my snow-leopard disc as an upgrade to a friend because – frankly – now I run Ubuntu a Mac is simply not that attractive.
Apple,A1175 battery don’t sell much to “the enterprise” and their model is to sell the software cheap (the system cost me about a tenth of a Microsoft system) and make money on retail sales of hardware. If they can get Apple into big business they win – and they are not savaging their own hardware sales. Apple,A1057, might get to sell some of their (outrageously expensive) server products to companies that might virtualize. And the given you only need to buy the seat once – and the young customers love their Macs (for good reason) it might actually be the sensible way to run. They might also sell virtual macs through the cloud – at a rental fee.
I suspect however there is another game here. Hardware independence is a truly wonderful thing for mirroring. When I take my Windows hard drive out of my Lenovo and put in the (crappy) Dell it does not work. But my linux disk does. I can set up a mirror for my laptop,A1080, to a desktop at work (as the same information will work in both places) – so I do not need to cart the laptop with me to and from the office. Given how fast computer processing is getting small and powerful there is a reasonable chance I should be able to clone a whole computer into a mobile phone – and keep it in my pocket – but have it securely running on the desktop as well. Apple,M8244 apple, could win at this – and I do not want to speculate as to where they are going.