Apple will have to fight for that

Post #210,492 by JayMehaffey 6/8/05 2:47:46 PM Reply	Apple will have to fight for that From what I have read, the Intel based Macs are supposed to be able to run Windows, which means that they don't have too much customized hardware under the hood. That implies that getting OS X to run on Intel machines is going to be mostly one of getting your hands on the right drivers and on the OS itself. I expect this to turn into a fight for Apple as they work to block independently developed device drivers. And given that Darwin is open source, it is going to be hard for them to stop. Apple will have to watch the selling of OS X closely also, something they can do much easier. But if it becomes popular, Apple is sure to have grey and black market problems with that also. Apple faces a basic catch-22 here in that part of their popularity is built on their control of the hardware. The more popular they become the harder it is for them to control the hardware. Thus becoming more widespread is going to interfere with one of the things that makes them popular to begin with. Jay
Post #210,493 by pwhysall 6/8/05 2:55:46 PM Reply	On the other hand... ...I'd still buy an Apple MacIntel over anything else. People who buy Apple computers do so because They Just Work (amongst other reasons), and this won't change just because the CPU is no longer made by IBM. Sure, I could perhaps one day hack OS X to run on a Packard Bell, but at the end of the day, it's still a Packard Bell. It'd be like fitting M3 mirrors, a Veilside bodykit and 20" alloys to a Fiat Punto. Sure, it gets you from place to place most of the time, but it looks stupid and breaks down periodically. Peter [link\|http://www.ubuntulinux.org\|Ubuntu Linux] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Home] Use P2P for legitimate purposes!
Post #210,495 by Another Scott 6/8/05 3:03:39 PM Reply	Where? Just curious: Where have you read that the Mac-x86 hardware will be able to run Windows? And even if that's true (and it might be), that doesn't mean that a non-Apple x86 PC will be able to run MacOS X. A boatload of the stuff that makes a Mac a Mac is in the ROM chips on the motherboard. Without the ROMs, a PC won't be able to run the software. (Recall that the Mac 68k emulators that ran on PCs, like [link\|http://www.emulators.com/softmac.htm\|SoftMac], needed a ROM image to do their magic. AFAIK, there isn't a similar PPC ROM image available for x86 - at least not one that is outside of Apple.) There are certainly ways of getting the ROM image out of a PowerMac and into a form that can be used on an x86 machine. However, it's not clear that such work is easy - if it were there would have probably been Mac PPC emulators out there by now. So, I doubt that Apple will stand for non-Apple hardware running MacOS-x86 any time soon. Steve really doesn't like clones. Remember Franklin? Remember that one of the first things he did when he went back to Apple was to kill off the clones. My $0.02. Cheers, Scott.
Post #210,538 by JayMehaffey 6/8/05 6:17:15 PM Reply	Re: Where? [link\|http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2439\|Anandtech] Apple has confirmed that their Intel based Macs should be able to run Windows, but you will not be able to run the x86 version of OS X on any hardware platform that you choose. Obviously with the switch to Intel's architecture, it is going to be much more difficult for Apple to prevent users from circumventing any protection that they may have implemented to run the x86 OS on their own hardware. Even if Apple's protection is cracked, you can expect driver support to be extremely limited for configurations outside of what Apple will be shipping. My personal expectation is that Apple will be able to control the market as long as they remain a nitch player. But if they begin to take a significant percent of the desktop, they won't be able to keep the hardware under their control. People will begin writing drivers for PCI cards that Apple doesn't support, and it will spiral out from there. Jay
Post #210,587 by tuberculosis 6/9/05 4:06:29 AM 8/21/07 6:24:35 AM Reply	ROM's gone long time now Macs no longer have a big chunk of core capability burned into roms. It was making virtual memory management a pain so they simplified and chucked them. OTOH, there's quite likely to be some built-in hardware dongly thing that the OS looks for or dies. "Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" --Mark Twain "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." --Albert Einstein "This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mental losses." --George W. Bush Edited by tuberculosis Aug. 21, 2007, 06:24:35 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #210,594 by Another Scott 6/9/05 7:31:17 AM Reply	Thanks.
Post #210,524 by ubernostrum 6/8/05 5:00:12 PM Reply	Stupid ROM tricks All it takes is some ROM image that Windows will ignore but OS X won't boot without, and you've got a situation where you can install Windows on the Mac but not OS X on any other PC. At least not without more work than most people are willing to do... which is probably what Apple's betting on. --\r\nYou cooin' with my bird? \r\n[link\|http://www.shtuff.us/\|shtuff]

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