Where?

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.

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