Leopard Already Hacked To Run On PC Hardware 568
PoliTech passed us a PC World link, noting that the newest version of OS X, Leopard, has already been adapted to run on a PC. "The OSx86 Scene forum has released details of how Windows users can migrate to Apple's new OS, without investing in new hardware -- even though installing Leopard on an PC may be counter to Apple's terms and conditions. The forum is offering full instructions on how to install the system, including screenshots of the installation process. Not all the features of Leopard function with the patch -- Wi-Fi support, for example, is reportedly inoperable. Historically, Apple's likely next move will be to track down and act against those behind the hack."
Shame... (Score:5, Interesting)
Question (Score:4, Interesting)
However, in the same way that the iPod won over a lot of users to the Mac, what if they offered OS X for PC users with LIMITED support- meaning they only support specific hardware, and they will only sell OS X stand alone, not pre-installed through Dell or someone else. That would give people a taste of the OS, and for anyone other than the hobbiests, push them towards the hardware...
Re:Why do it at all?? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why do it at all?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why do it at all?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Put it this way: my Hackintosh in it's original incarnation had a 2.6ghz Celeron, 1GB of RAM, 160GB of Hard Drive space, a DVD Burner, and a Geforce 7300LE. Now, this was kind of a toss up between a bare-bones Mac Mini at the time. The mini had it in processor speed, but the $599 machine had less ram, less hard drive space (and a slower hard drive), and a slower video card. That and it wasn't really upgradeable. The hardware for my Hackintosh costed $250. I actually did buy a copy of OS X Tiger (though just one for my G4, but I don't use the G4 99% of the time), but that was only $100. So for $350 total, I've got a machine I like more than Apple's $600 machine. Later on for another $250 I've traded up to a Core 2 Duo 1.8Ghz in that machine, a 7900GS, and 2GB of RAM - now I'm still $100 cheaper and it's FAR better than the Mac Mini, especially for playing WoW. And even then, I still had the original CPU and video card left over which went to live in my Linux machine.
Bottom line is my Hackintosh does more than Apple's hardware for less money, and if it ever gets behind I get whip it back into shape with nothing more than a few dollars and a screwdriver.
Re:Question (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm more than willing to give every OS I see a try periodically (one of these days I'll even get to Vista. Pity me)
However, I do *not* want to buy one of those overpriced machines to try out their OS. I can build a better quality machine for the same or less money, including the price of a new copy of OS X.
Now, I'm not saying this is a large crowd, but I know I'm not the only one (or this hack wouldn't have been created). It is a crowd that Apple should look into.
That being said, one thing Apple does fairly well is the support. I've had some bad experiences with their support, but overall they are a lot better than most hardware manufacturers (I'll take most individual parts makers over Apple, but the only pre-built I've liked better was Dell, and then only for corporate support).
Re:Question (Score:2, Interesting)
"Oh, look, they make this neat, popular, easy to use electronic device, and do a good job as far as I'm concerned. Why not try one of their computers next time I upgrade?"
This is just a hypothesis, but I think the iPod sold the Macs because it brought Apple back into the public conciousness with a positive light.
it's all psychology (Score:5, Interesting)
Think about it. Right now, to actually use OS X, you have to really hate Windows and Linux enough to pay a lot of money for a new Mac, set up the hardware, and switch. That's a big commitment, and cognitive dissonance will probably keep you from disliking it. Furthermore, you'll become a vocal advocate for OS X, both because you really hated Windows and Linux in the first place, and because you really like OS X now.
If it were easy to switch, a lot of people who are only mildly unhappy with Windows and Linux would buy OS X and stick it into their beige box. Many of them would likely conclude that the hassle of switching wasn't worth the improvement (if any) for them and just go back to what they were using before. And they'd tell others about their experience, destroying some of the aura of quality and mystery surrounding the Mac.
So, the reason you can't get OS X for your PC is likely that it is in Apple's interest to keep the cost of switching pretty high: it means they won't get a huge market share, but they skim off the best customers and the ones that are the most vocal advocates for their products.
Re:Freedom (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, as in the the first counter-move by Microsoft would be to drop Office support for Mac.
Re:minis are $ because they're small (Score:3, Interesting)
Second point: Did you not notice the emphasis I put on upgradeability in my post? That "super duper mini form factor" is one of the most compelling reasons I DON'T want a Mac Mini. It's a negative in a very real way. If they'd make a reasonable tower unit - just a regular fricken computer instead of their current models which are essentially laptops pretending to be a desktop (unless you drop over $2k on the only real desktop Apple makes), then I might consider buying it. As it stands though, they don't do that, and I FAR prefer to actually have a full size upgradeable case over the limited Mini.
Re:Why do it at all?? (Score:3, Interesting)
In addition, I cannot buy a Mac in the specification I want. That doesn't mean that my requirements are wild or unrealistic, but if I already have a monitor then I have only two choices - the Mac Pro (which at the very cheapest is £1,699.00) or the Mac Mini (which at the best specified is £639.00).
Unless I'm missing something, I have a £1060 price gap which cannot be satisfied.
If I want a 750GB hard-drive, reasonably fast processor, 2GB of RAM, use my existing monitor and a good enough graphics card to run bootcamp and some games then I'm SOL unless I plump for the Mac Pro.
I don't care about Apple opening up their operating system, but a few extra choices on the desktop would be nice.
(side note, the cheapest Mac laptop is £699. It may be better specified than a Dell at the same price but the average student can get away with a £399 laptop without a problem. Again, it comes down to a big hole in the choices)
Hey, Apple, help a developer out, ok? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Shame... (Score:3, Interesting)
I could not disagree more. Do you think that OSX is better than Windows? Most people do. How many of these people would be willing to pay a little bit more for OSX than they do for Windows? Again, I bet most of them would. So how long do you think it would take OSX to overtake Windows? My guess would be within 10 years. Combine this with server sales (it is UNIX after all) and maybe even an office product and you have an Apple that is making more than Microsoft and a Jobs that is richer than Gates.
Of course, the Mac business would take a hit, I don't think it would go under and any loss in the hardware business would be more than made up from the OS sales. People will still by Macs the same way they do today. Hell, there are people that buy Macs and install Windows on them. I had a Mac and I ran Yellow Dog Linux on it. Mac hardware can stand on its own. People know that Apple makes quality machines and are willing to pay the premium. Those that don't care much about the quality are sold on the style that oozes from every Apple design. Of course, the iPod sales wouldn't exactly be going away either.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Freedom (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
If they opened OSX up to generic hardware they would need to impliment some type of anti theft setup simply because generic PC users are cheap and would steal OSX till the cows come home. Personally that fact alone makes me glad it only runs on Mac hardware, Its so nice never having to deal with activations, or worse false positives and the machine becomming basicly un-usable.
"trial version" packaged as a VMware guest? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, my comment should properly read "at least 30%" as they tend to quote double the price in many cases (such as $700 vs $350 for 4gb of notebook ram)
Re:Since always (Score:5, Interesting)
Executive Summary
- Regardless of what the media has been harping on for a long time, and regardless of what system attackers have been saying about the "evil TPM protection" Apple uses, Apple is doing no TPM-related evil thing. In fact, Apple is doing no TPM-related cryptographic thing at all in Mac OS X. Yes, I know, there has been much talk of "TPM keys" and such, but there are no TPM keys that Apple is hiding somewhere.
- More specifically, Apple simply does not use the TPM hardware. In Apple computer models that do contain a TPM, the hardware is available for use by the machine's owner. Of course, to use it you need a device driver, which Apple indeed doesn't provide.
- I am releasing an open source TPM driver for Mac OS X, along with Mac OS X versions of popular open source trusted computing software from the Linux world. No reverse engineering was required to write this driver.
- The driver and the software stack together make (a form of) trusted computing possible on Mac OS X, assuming you have a machine with a TPM. This page shows you how to "take ownership" of the TPM and begin using it.
- For crying out loud, Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (a.k.a. LaGrande) does not mean you start putting TPMs "inside the CPU". Apple isn't shipping CPUs with "built-in TPMs."
(emphasis mine).Re:Freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, I see this remark in one form or another all the time, but I don't believe it at all. I'll tell you why.
Our household is Mac-centric; we have 3 mini's and a Macbook Pro. There are other machines here, linux and XP, but we generally use the Macs, the linux machine is a web server, not a desktop. We've run into problems with the Mac's wifi, specifically with the sharing of the connection feature. I've taken the time to document the problems, post them on the Mac forums, report them as bugs, but these problems remain unfixed. These are stock Mac machines with stock Mac wifi hardware. My impression is that Apple doesn't care about my complaints, because the configuration here is, apparently, uncommon. Most people use a wifi-capable router to distribute wifi about their premises, while I elected to use the mini's "share" capability to do it. It worked 100% initially, then an OS upgrade broke it, and it's remained broken since March 2007, despite my poking them in various places such as this [apple.com] (this is only one of many examples - there are other threads, and not just from me, either.) These replies on the Apple forums - not from Apple, from users - were the closest I ever got to help.
I'm right with the program when people say that Apple stuff is remarkably stable. However, I think the credit there should go to the engineers who created the system. There's no apparent company-wide effort to see that things "just work." Lots of things don't work, and haven't for years. There's no unified push to get things that are broken "right." They never added unicode to Appleworks, or really even kept up with it, they just let it die. As of 10.4, network shares haven't been able to refresh after changes for years. Memory (mis)management still causes applications to pig out for tens of seconds at a time. Mail still loses sent mail if you try to use more than one email address. The iPod touch works through the Intel mini's WiFi but not the PPC mini's wifi, same settings all around. Apple's response to this was "use the intel mini" which I consider to be inadequate.
Lest you think I'm just generally Apple bashing, I'm not. I spent years trying to work with Microsoft, both as a user and a developer, and it was MUCH worse. Microsoft sucks so hard my vacuum cleaner ran out in the street and threw itself under the wheels of a passing semi in despair. It is the very reliability of Apple's products out the door - not as a "we'll fix what's broken", but as a "we generally don't ship broken stuff" - that makes the Apple experience what it is.
Consequently, I don't buy the whole "we don't want customers to experience broken OSX, so we won't let it run on generic hardware" rationale. Customers experience broken OSX behaviors all the time, and Apple just lets it run on, likely as not.
People have a very strong tendency to speak up in support of products they have purchased, my guess is because they feel a need to justify having spent money and time and reputation on such a thing. I've heard absolutely worthless justifications over and over for everything from Photoshop to Windows to linux that one way or another, seem to only have obvious value as they reflect the investment in time, money or even public remarks people don't want to back down from. Apple is no more and no less subject to this; once someone buys an Apple, it is my very strong impression that they're going to be pretty positive about having done so. Not just because it works pretty well, which it certainly does, but because money was spent, a decision was made, an internal turning point reached (and there can be factors like terminal frustration with another vendor, such as Microsoft... I'm personally familiar with that feeling, in spades.)
There's another
Re:Freedom (Score:4, Interesting)
And Apple markup tends to be a lot higher on these compared with HP or Sony. Whether it's due to the "milk the fanboys" attitude or all the rigoros testing, I will not say.
Re:Shame... (Score:3, Interesting)
I also have a Linux box running VMware. I run an instance of XP in it. I'd love to run OSX in a VM. I also have a Solaris box. I will run xVM on it when it gets into the production version. I might run XP in it. Or Linux in an lx zone.
I usually access these VMs via a laptop running Linux. The OSX system runs VNC, the XP VM runs remote desktop. If I ever need the gnome/kde console, I can run vncserver on the Solaris or Linux box, but X11 works. I'm running gigabit ethernet on all my systems (including laptop) and I don't need faster speed to my screens.
Apple will be left out of virtualized desktops if they don't come up with a MacOSX that will run in a VM. COmpanies are already starting to VM desktops.
Re:Freedom (Score:2, Interesting)
What was the final outcome of Apple's firmware update? Did they actually send out an update that rendered hacked iPhones unusable on purpose? Or was it just an update like any other, but because of the nature of the hack, your iPhone would rendered unusable? Could you choose not to allow Apple to update the phone and still have it remain usable, or would the service not work because your phone wasn't updated? If you reflashed with the original firmware, was your phone usable and updatable again?
Just wondering whether Apple went out of its way to kill unlocked iPhones, or if it was just the hack combined with a normal patch that made the phone unusable. As a developer, it makes sense to create your patches to work with the product you supplied, not adjust them to work with a hacked product. But if they could have done a proper patch and not unlocked phones inoperative, then that's "evil".
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)