Apple Builds Darwin For Intel 342
BluesHarp writes, "Apple's lead Darwin engineer Wilfredo Sanchez announced that he successfully built and has made available all of Darwin 1.0 for both PowerPC and Intel. Does this mean that OS X for Intel would be just a recompile away?"
From Sanchez's Avadgato diary:
Neat stuff.Apparently a lot of people are under the impression that Apple isn't going to help out with reviving the Intel port of Darwin. This is false.Getting everything built fat is a big step, but a lot of work remains. The next thing is to get installation bootstrapped so we can get Darwin onto an Intel system, and then to get the kernel running, since we haven't tested the new kernel on Intel yet, and there is limited driver support for Intel PC devices. I have a high degree of confidence that most of the user-space software will work without problems, particularly since a majority of it comes from the BSD world where Intel is the primary platform, but also because we've seen it work before in Rhapsody.
Re:Advice for Apple (Score:1)
Here's a hint: the x86 architecture is dead. Apple made the giant step of abandoning their crufty old hardware architecture back in the nineties, and now they're kicking ass and taking names in the hardware market as a result. It's clear that Microsoft and Intel are worse off as a result of it; look at all the tricks and workarounds they're coming up with to retain backwards-compatibility with crufty architecture. Look at all the hardware platforms on which the x86 instruction set is a burden rather than a feature: Crusoe, Athlon, and whichever name Intel gives their next-gen platform this week. Ship a processor architecture without that nasty old instruction set, and watch your performance grow as Linux grows. You don't even have to stop making software - Linux users know it doesn't matter what instruction set your processor uses; our superior GPL'ed software can be easily ported regardless.
Above all, stop thinking hardware needs to be tied to the same antiquated architectures as the early/mid '80's technology you got started under.
Re:Darwin is Unacceptable for GNUstep, Spindletop (Score:1)
You sound like a freak with a small brain and a big mouth.
Why it will never happen (Score:1)
Sans doubt, Jobs says no.
Re:AltiVec (Score:1)
Short answer: yes. Remember Iridium?
It's just sad (I wish they'd port it all) (Score:1)
If I didn't have to buy a Mac to run it on, I probably would switch over at least one of my machines to OS X when the client comes out. It looks to me like a Mac is ~30% more expensive than building the equivalent PC. That's just too cost prohibitive for me, and I imagine many others.
You know the really sad part? I'd still buy x86 OS X at twice the price of the normal apple version.. even if it only supported a small subset of peripherals. That $200-$300 would be more than I've payed out for software in my whole life (of course.. it's probably not even a percent of what I've made workplaces buy). Apple would have to be making a profit then.. even though they didn't sell me their fruity flavored hardware.
the marketeers strike back! (Score:1)
Well, I've got one, too, and it's to say that there are markets out there that are bigger and more lucrative than any ever experienced by the average
Computer consumers suck even more, because they are intelligent consumers. Why buy a 20gb ATA33 disk when a 20gb ata66 disk costs more? Don't! Who cares what that extra 33 gets you in the real world? Intelligent consumers do! Doh! And everyone's margin drops because of a perceived benefit that in the real world accounts for less than 5%.
The battles now are the corporate battles. Why? Because that's where the money is! Corporations will pay extra because time is a resource in the corporate world. Hello? Hello? Nobody has time to debug a DLL problem for 6 hours. Nobody has time to rebuild a kernel. Heck, it's amazing that admins have enough time to patch their systems.
Why do AIX systems cost so much? Becuase some poor schmuck comes over in under 2 hours to replace the failed hardware on-site. Compaq too. Amazing...
In the corporate world, time is more important than money. In the consumer world, money is more important than time, until you start making lots of money.
So what the hell does this have to do with Apple? Think about WinNT. Is it stable? Is it easy to administer? Think Novell. Is it stable? Easy to administer? Think about MacOS X. Is it stable? Easy to administer? Who knows?
Apple already has an advantage: all those midrange guys who already know *nix and thinks NT blows chunks. You know they're gonna be looking. Think about all those old NextStep users...they're in the midrange world, and interested in OS X. Yes, I've met a couple.
And take linux. Is it stable? Easy to administer? Well for the latter, it's a Great Step Backwards in the *nix world, because the UI is written by *nix guys, who are notoriously bad UI guys
OS X is a long-term play. Maybe they can get it up on a Power4 box. Maybe they can get it up on x86. Or maybe it'll just push to the workgroup/webfarm/clients. Who knows? But evaluating OSX given the current environment is iffy, because the current market is much more unstable than most people (slashdotters included) realize. Two years ago, NT was the shit in the corporate world. Now, everyone knows it's a piece of shit. w2k is a code abortion waiting to pollute corporate networks. Novell is rising from technical has-been status to a viable solution. Linux is starting to stomp on NT in the critical file/print corporate entrypoint and established *nices in the web area.
The world is changing again, and
MacOS is big-endian, x86 little-endian (Score:1)
Re:darwin is not everything (Score:1)
Apple has two main market shares... one for hardware and one for OS. Apple tried (yes they maybe could have managed it better) letting 3rd parties do hardware but it only resulted in cannibalization of there hardware market share with nominal gains in OS market share. The revenues for hardware are quite large while profits are low (20-35%). Software revenues are small while profits are high (90+%). So to transition from a hardware only company to a software only company takes a very delicate balancing of the two revenue items; don't want to piss off the investors.
The first step Apple may take in bringing MacOS X to Intel (or other platforms) would be... Release Darwin, some GUI (GNOME,etc.) and enough of Cocca on Intel to allow MacOS X applications to run with only a simple recompile (hopefully using fat binaries). This is similar to Yellow Box / OpenStep for Intel today. This would encourage application developers to utilize Cocca to develop applications and increase the number of apps available to the MacOS X platform (were ever it may run). I would imagine, for the short term, that Apple would hold back all of the "cool" OS features to only run on their hardware. In reality this is almost required for some the OS features; it really helps having the Velocity Engine available.
Advice for Apple (Score:1)
Here's a hint: you lost the hardware war. No matter how good MacOS X turns out to be, you will remain stuck in a small niche market as long as you stubbornly try to remain a hardware company. Ship an x86 port of MacOS X and watch your sales grow. Fail to port to x86 and watch your market share slip away as Linux grows. You don't even have to give up on making hardware - convince the x86 buyers to think of the x86 port as a stepping stone to the superior Apple/PPC hardware.
Above all, stop thinking the current market behaves the same as the early-mid '80s market that you thrived under.
Apple is hiring (Score:1)
http://www.apple.com/jobs/openings/ [apple.com]
Don't you people get it yet? (Score:1)
The obvious reason why Apple doesn't make much money on software is because they don't sell much software. Now if they started selling software, they would make money on it. I figured that if Apple only sold operating systems and no hardware, they would probably have to sell 2-3 times more copies of the OS than they currently sell computers to equal their current profits. However, I honestly think an x86 port of MacOS X would sell in much bigger number than that.
Apple keeps trying to fight the trends in PC hardware industry instead of trying to capitalize on them - it's stupid!
~30% More...help? (Score:1)
Re:darwin is not everything (Score:1)
To me it would be irritating if Apple were to kill the PowerPC platform now after killing the clones because they couldn't take a little competition.
Re:Whats next after Darwin? (Score:1)
Re:GPL? compatible? (Score:1)
Darwin is a BSD variant. More than likely, it will be released under the BSD license (duh.)
Re:It's just sad (I wish they'd port it all) (Score:1)
Blue, Yellow & Pink? (Score:1)
Does anyone remember the Pink (PNK) OS? What about taligent?
Kaleida?
Magic Cap?
Copland?
Newtos
Sad, isn't it.
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
CAN DO, not IS doing... (Score:1)
Hmmm... Every SPEC figure I've found puts the G4 in the high x86 region. The G4 IMO isn't really all that fast without the AltiVec. Right now, any performance difference you get between x86 and Mac is due to a less bloated platform or differences in the application due to porting.
Sustain Gigaflop my butt. That figure was due to the 'reality distortion field', I read that Apple picked their favorite 6 instructions and calculated the performance based on that, the claim was not based on real code that I can tell.
so where is this alleged classification? (Score:1)
Re:what's wrong with this picture. (Score:1)
I know I'm not comparing like with like, but consider the market for Mac monitors. Mac users have a massive choice of monitors from all sorts of third parties, but most probably still choose to buy one from the mothership.
I think if OS X was released for Intel, you'd see more or less the same situation. As long as Apple keeps turning out top-quality hardware (and they do, by the way), most Mac fans will choose the box stamped with the big crystal apple. Apple covers the price ranges pretty well with its monitors, if it does the same with its boxes, then only those who are trying to meet a specific price/performance ratio need worry about speccing out an Intel solution.
Please disagree with me, but I don't think iMac sales will be wiped out by cheapo Intel boxes running Mac OS X. I would guess that, for comparable performance to an iMac, you'd need a low-end Pentium II/III machine with all the goodies, like Ethernet, Firewire, Modem, software bundle. And it would still look ugly.
The people who would be seriously considering an Intel Mac will be the same people who bought Mac clones when they were available. Publishing types, for example, who know exactly what their machine needs to do, and will look for the most cost-effective way of achieving this.
Re:Ah, disappointment (Score:1)
Also, I didn't say I expect MacOS X to be total worthless crap, so don't get your dander up. It's just lost a lot of its "cool toy" status in my eyes; enough so that I don't think I'm willing to pay for the chance to tinker with it now.
I'll just finish my Slack port and find some nice aqua widget themes to run under X.
Ah, disappointment (Score:1)
Re:AltiVec (Score:1)
Most of what goes on in the core OS isn't going to be significantly advanced by vector processing, though certainly tasks such as copying memory will receive a boost simply due to the increased bandwidth. And remember that Intel and AMD has SIMD, as well, though it's certainly not as high-quality as AltiVec. So, yes, there will be something of a performance drop, but I would wager that it won't be huge.
Quartz (OS X's brand new imaging subsystem) would probably suffer a more noticable performance drop, given the extensive use of transparency.
Re:Fat binary (Score:1)
Fat binaries are pretty cool, but he's referring only to Darwin, which is a pretty vanilla BSD variant, though with some interesting capabilities. It is very unlikely that Apple will be compiling and optimizing Cocoa, Quartz, QuickTime, Carbon, and all the other high-level libraries for x86 given they're not actually selling a product for that platform.
The fat binary capabilities could certainly ease future architecture transition, however.
Re:GPL? compatible? (Score:1)
For their own code, Apple is using their own license, which they call the Apple Public Source License, or APSL for short. It is not a copyleft license, but has been approved as an Open Source license. GPL'd software that they enhance--GCC, for a very notable instance--is, of course, submitted back to the FSF, and folks at Apple are working on reassigning copyright for such software to the FSF. Not, however, the entire operating system, which is APSL. They're playing nice, but probably not nice enough to satisfy many of the ranks Stallman has inexplicably managed to brainwash.
Personally, I think this is a good course of action; I dislike the GPL, and think it especially ill-suited as a license for the basis of a commercial operating system.
The APSL: http://www.publicsource.apple.com/apsl/ [apple.com]
Darwin runs Mach-O (Mach object format) binaries. It is a BSD variant built atop a Mach 3.0 microkernel. I don't expect to see a Linux binary compatability environment spring up, but you never know.
Re:Whats next after Darwin? (Score:1)
Keep in mind that the stories Slashdot posts are quite reactionary. "Apple UNIX cross-compiles to Intel!" You expected this not to show up on Slashdot?
Given that, I believe that we'll see Darwin liven up significantly as OS X becomes available, but I do not expect it to make any strong inroads towards replacing FreeBSD or Linux on x86 systems. I fully agree in that we will not be seeing Mac OS X running on Intel in the near future. One of Apple's most valuable assets is controlling the whole box from the operating system down; it allows them to sell well-integrated systems which, as they ship from the factory, rely upon relatively small range of devices whose coresponding software can be well-tested.
Re:MacOS is big-endian, x86 little-endian (Score:1)
This is a far from insurmountable problem. And, honestly, it isn't as much a problem as you seem to imagine. I would typefy it as a problem solved, and it is not an impediment to brining Darwin up on Intel hardware. Keep in mind that Darwin is the core OS from OpenStep/Mach, which ran on x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC hardware before it was ported to PowerPC when Apple acquired NeXT.
Re:Supply problems for Apple? (Score:1)
This isn't the case. At any rate, this is not a spur-of-the-moment decision to build the OS for x86. The maintainance of the cross-platform portions of the core OS are more common sense than anything; Apple started out with a cross-platform OS and is sparing enough care to keep it that way.
The APSL [apple.com] is incontestably not a copyleft ("free software") license. It has been approved as an Open Source license, however.
Apple only licenses under the APSL code which is theirs. For example, their GCC code is, of course, licensed under the GPL, and they're working in good faith on narrowing the gap between Apple GCC and GNU GCC by bringing Apple's most well-conceived changes up in mainstream GCC and reassigning copyright to the FSF.
Amusing, but real address (Score:1)
Only Apple is on that street, so "1 Infinite Loop" is the only address there, IIRC. It's right at freeway 280 at the DeAnza Blvd exit in Cupertino, if you're ever in the area and want to check it out -- easy to find.
By now Silicon Valley has a number of geek-named streets and such, but Apple's address is still the best of the bunch. (e.g. Downtown San Jose has a Woz Way, which is cool in its own way, but not humorous.)
Re:Apple's Diversification (Score:1)
Re:AltiVec (Score:1)
Right on the money, I think. If you go back and look at the arstechnica stories on OS X, one of them mentions that OS performance took a huge hit when going from a G4 to a G3, even though the machines were comparably equipped (the G3 may have even been faster- don't recall.) Presumably (and ars may have mentioned this) it was because of Altivec and Quartz.
~luge
Wrong, wrong, wrong (Score:1)
~luge
P.S. Graphics drivers won't be easy to write, but don't be surprised if the hypercompetitive graphics card companies wouldn't jump at the chance to at least help Apple- in such a tight market, an additional 4-5% in market share would mean a huge jump for many of those companies.
Hello? Anybody home? (Score:1)
~luge
MHz matters (Score:1)
~tieguy
Re:Whats next after Darwin? (Score:1)
>the amount of clock cycles that a PentiumIII
>takes. This makes a 500MHz G4 around twice
>as fast as a 1GHz P3, and thats not even using
>the velocity engine which is capable of
>sustaining a gigaflop.
That's nice, but what's the price comparison? The fastest processor in the universe is useless to expand a company's mainstream market if it's too expensive for Joe Web-Mail-Spreadsheet-and-Games.
Re:Of course not. (Score:1)
Someone moderate this up. It's the first post I've seen that makes sense.
Re:Apples Situation (Score:1)
More like 800MHz G4+,
But, hopefully not only mac but also for the POP guys.
-- kolla
Re:MacOS is big-endian, x86 little-endian (Score:1)
-- kola
Re:A little sanity check (Score:1)
Supposedly it ran fairly well on the x500 Macs too, and probably would have run fine on CHRP boxes... if they'd ever sold any. Actually, you can still find patch sets for those OS's that Sun will release that also contain PPC support. As for whether 7/8 are on PPC, well anyone with this info, please mail me, I've been dying to find a copy for years (hell, if you have 2.5.1 | 2.6 even).
If Sun would put it on the Sun Store, I know a whole group of people that would buy copies, as well as whatever supported hardware was needed.
Re:Apple's profit margin (Score:2)
New XFMail home page [slappy.org]
/bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.
Re:Apple's profit margin (Score:2)
There was a time I would have agreed with you, perhaps, but that time has long passed.
Modern Apple hardware is not all that hot. Look at the quality of the components in the iMac, G3, G4. Nothing all that different than the stuff that gets put into most PCs. But still a bit more expensive (although less so than previously). The last *really* nice Apple hardware, IMO, was the 8500.
Apple made a business decision (and probably a wise one) to get more competitive price-wise with PCs, by becoming much more like a PC maker.
And as for people like me who build their boxes, there's still no comparison to what I can do with commodity PC parts. An SMP machine for less than $1000. Beat that with Apple hardware.
Heck, even most Sun hardware ain't what it used to be. Too bad.
New XFMail home page [slappy.org]
/bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.
Yeah, but... (Score:2)
Although, you never can tell what would happen now with the anti-trust trial and everything...
New XFMail home page [slappy.org]
/bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.
Re:darwin is not everything (Score:2)
Just because there isn't a 1:1 correspondence... (Score:2)
I fully believe that a G4 will beat an Athlon clock-for-clock in a lot of applications. How much faster is it, though? I don't know...perhaps 30% on some apps. So clock for clock, the G4 might be 30% faster. Granted 2x clock != 2x performance, but that still that doesn't come close to making up for the 2x clock advantage that the x86 chips currently have.
Don't believe the marketing hype about G3's being twice as fast as PIII's. That figure might be theoretically true in very contrived cases. In contrived cases, the Athlon may be twice as fast as the PIII as well. Benchmarks are a wicked game.
Quite a lot of a processor's performance is dependent on its architecture. However, the G4 isn't very different architecturally than the Athlon and PIII. The Altivec unit is the main departure. x86 chips have SIMD media units, but they are less advanced. But, at the moment, using *any* of these multimedia extensions involves hand-coding at the ASM level, so these extensions won't get much use for a while. There is a fair amount of work going into vectorizing compilers, but it is a *very* hairy problem.
The point of this all is that Motorolla has let the G4 fall embarassingly far behind the x86 chips. Its a darn good thing for Apple that Jobs has drawn people's attention away from system performance and moved it toward case-aesthetics.
One drawn to conspiracy theories might even infer a causal relationship there.
--Lenny
Its already been done. Its called FreeBSD. (Score:2)
Darwin is based on CMU's Mach microkernel, and FreeBSD. So, in "releasing" Darwin, Apple is pretty much releasing the changes they made to existing open projects. Mach already ran on x86, and FreeBSD, like Linux, started out on i386, so it shouldn't have been very difficult to build Darwin on i386.
Building an OSOS around Darwin would pretty much be reinventing the wheel. Just tweak FreeBSD to make it do what you need.
--Lenny
Re:Darwin is Unacceptable for GNUstep, Spindletop (Score:2)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:Apple's Diversification (Score:2)
Apple's marketshare, growth, etc. have all actually gone up in the last 2 years as well. All of the major players have commented on this, and raised their ratings in the process.
Take a look here and tell me Apple hasn't recovered. Even if you don't believe the charts, read the newsitems at the bottom and tell me Apple hasn't recovered. At worst you can state that Apple isn't going to take over Microsoft's position (for that, I'd probably agree).
http://biz.yahoo.com/n/a/aapl.html
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:Who hosts these modifications? (Score:2)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:Yeah, but... (Score:2)
That said, Microsoft has said in the past that they make more money per Mac than per PC, so it might be in their best interests to see Apple sell in the X86 product space. Really, what is Windows but a platform to get people to buy Office?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:Whats next after Darwin? (Score:2)
Now, the 80286 was a 24-bit processor. Yes, you read that right, it could address up to 16M of RAM.
The 80386 and up were fully 32-bit. Except for the P6, which was 36 (it could address up to 64G of RAM).
Re:AltiVec (Score:2)
Absolutely correct. The only good benchmark is how fast your app runs on a common data set. But, everyone is wondering why Motorola can't get the G4s up to the speeds the Pentium class chips run at. It seems that a simpler instruction architecture would make it much easier to ramp up the clock speed, unless they have a really deep pipeline or something, but I think Athlon's is deeper. Anyone have an explanation? It does seem IBM can get the G4s up to 1GHz, and put 2 of them on a single chip. Is Motorola incompetent?
Apple IS Profitable (Score:2)
Now that PC Companies are losing a bundle, Apple IS profitable.
PC makers are killing themselves in the windows space.
If PC makers could sell comptuers at a profit without the hassles that windows brings then they probably would. Mac OS X and Linux are the two possibilities. Of that, the MacOS X has a better possibility of being profitable because of the Apple control on the OS, the established App installation, and the Cocoa Application layer.
OS X on PC? (Score:2)
A little sanity check (Score:2)
In addition, I don't know where you saw their "hints about dropping PowerPC", but it was probably some fictional prose you read on MacOS Rumors. Apple is quite devoted to the PowerPC processor -- they helped design it and they have 2 different companies to provide them chips.
Besides, it's not practical to switch processors like you do underwear. Imagine Sun switching to PowerPC -- the hardware and software rewrites would be enormous! Obviously, there will be layers that are much more portable to new platforms (Java/Cocoa), but there are bits that are simply impossible (Classic MacOS emulation).
I'm all for optimism, but let's not spread rumors.
Not so silly (Score:2)
I certainly buy stuff cause of the OS; it's what supports the hardware and software.
So my next PC will be Mac, if only for their firewire support and graphics support. If BeOS were more mature, they would definitely be in the running(mature in market support).
For servers and such, Linux, of course. For games and minor productivity... Windows.
And didn't I read before that over half of the Slashdot community runs windows? Or is that an urban legend?
-AS
Re:Apple is a dying breed (Score:2)
Have you been reading old John Dvorak and Jesse Berst columns over on ZDNet again>
Hmm...lessee... Apple stock at record highs, selling at over twice their top price during their "heyday" in the mid and late 80's when every single PeeCee magazine columnist was stating that they were dead. yeah right.
The iMac line is one of the single most successful selling pieces of computer harware out there.
Most people who buy Macs (like me) do so because they don't want to run Windows! It has nothing to do with Linux or Intel or AMD.
As for having "clinched the market" I'll once again bring up the old sawhorse about market share: Apple has the equivalent marketshare in the computer world that Honda, Acura, BMW and Mercedez-Benz (sorry, not Daimler-Benz, just the Mercedes line), plus a couple of others, have in the auto world. Are you going to tell THEM to give up?
<RANT>Why do you uber-geeks always go on and on about how there should be more "competition" in the world, and then rag on Apple because they don't make the computers YOU want? I like my spiffy new G4 just fine, thank you, and I ain't conna be running Linux on it any time soon
Pope
Re:Blah, blah, blah (Score:2)
And if "Tiny niche markets" can sustain a billion-dollar company, then why the hell not? How many Macs have shipped in the last year compared to, say, Silicon Graphics O2?
I don't worship at the feet of the Steve, and when I started working with Macs I didn't have a clue as to who was the CEO, or what their plans for anything were. I simply saw applications and interfaces that were miles ahead of anything I had used under DOS and Win 3.1. How more objective could I have been?
Pope
Re:Hello? Anybody home? (Score:2)
Not to mention that NetBSD runs on PPC, I think there may be another of the BSD clan that runs on PPC as well, but I don't recall offhand...
Classic support would never work, unless apple also wrote a PC emulation mode into it which ain't gonna happen. Carbon probably would be out as well. Cocoa would be fine, Cocoa apps can already run on Windows, apple just doesn't make the Win32 Cocoa implementation available (although you get most of it with WebObjects). Of course, most Cocoa/OpenStep apps don't really use autoconf, so you would just pop it open in project builder, change the target, and hit build. Of course, since OpenStep supports FAT builds natively, it would be a trivial matter for software developers to just build it fat for intel/ppc and then the user doesn't have to worry about it at all.
Re:Apple Builds Darwin For Intel (Score:2)
True, I'm not overly concerned about the processor speeds. Yet... Sure, AMD and Intel have 1 Ghz chips that you have to buy a dell or compaq server to get. Am I the only one who is a little worried about these chips? I mean, both companies announce they will have gig chips in like 6 months and then suddenly, wham they get into a pissing contest and they are here. Now, did they really bump up their release schedule 6 months without cutting any corners? I dunno... Plus with supply short on the higher speed PIII's, it's not that easy to get a super fast PIII.
Re:Apple's profit margin (Score:2)
If it was all about simplicity, we'd be seeing internal FireWire harddrives or some such loving
My real point is that lately, Apple is only a little better on hardware. They ship IDE for pete's sake, as a default on their most powerful machines. The only reason you don't see a proliferation of IEEE-1394 in the PC market is that Intel has a stick shoved up their ass. USB is common.
The 2 things that an Apple machine get you these days are a G4 processor and a veryvery nice case. These days though, they aren't worth the Apple Premium. And if Jobs decided to hype OS X to the masses, he'll be selling out on the hobbyists and specialists that pride themselves on the Quality of their Macs. Because, no doubt, Jobs will start wanting the Mac to reach out to more and more people, make it cheaper and cheaper. Here's to hoping he won't spoil the power range of Macs.
Re:Apple's profit margin (Score:2)
Your statement here lead me to believe that you have never SEEN a G4 or an 8500.
Here is a RAM install on an 8500...
The 8500 requires 4 screws to be removed... to get the case off. Then you must force the case cover to come off - usually requires placing the unit on the floor betwen your legs, and swinging your arms across the case cover and grabbing it as your arms go by, to try to pry it off from the case. Then slide the case cover about 2 inches from the case, then pull off.
Then you need to disconnect the SCSI cable, power cable, and audio cable to the CD ROM drive.
Then, remove all PCI cards and the CPU daughtercard.
Remove the powerplugs into the motherboard.
Then, remove the screw holding the motherboard to the plastic backing.
Then, extracate the motherboard from the
whoops.. i just realized that your post is FLAMEBAIT because this is the stupidest fucking industrial designed computer that Apple ever made - and everyone knows it. The 8500 was the only Mac ever to cause people to curse 1/4 into the Ram installation process.
Apple has simplified where necesary - IDE vs SCSI, USB vs ADB.. but other than the mouse and keyboards, Apple hardware has only gotten better, stronger, and simpler to work with.
And as for people like me who build their boxes, there's still no comparison to what I can do with commodity PC parts. An SMP machine for less than $1000. Beat that with Apple hardware.
I can't recall a single person on the planet ever disagreeing that if you want to spend hours dinking with crufly little wrist-slashing homebrew PC cases to save a few hundred or to do some insanely odd job like a SMP box (except that SMP daughter cards are now available....) on a $50 budget... then don't buy a Mac.. buy a PC.
its like either BUYING a Honda or making a kit car... if you enjoy making kit cars - that's great. I used to do that and it was fun and ther'es nothing wrong with it. Some of us just want to drive cars even if we don't want to bother to make them. Its all just personal preference.
BTW: to finish... on the G4 - pull case tab, open case, install ram, close case.
Re:Apple is a dying breed (Score:2)
Seems clear that you never read the business page.
Apple is, quite possibly, in the most enviable position in the desktop market. And they have nowhere to go but up.
The implication that all Apple is doing is porting software is patently absurd. Apple is succeeding in making a user-friendly Unix, which a lot of really smart people have worked really hard to do for decades (and failed).
Enjoy your Linux on your AMD box. Give a call next time you need to run, I don't know, Illustrator, a real word processor, games, etc. etc. etc.
Re:what's wrong with this picture. (Score:2)
Geez. Will this myth EVER die? What mission critical apps are missing for Mac OS? I've managed to find an Application for every task I've attempted on the Mac.
Office productivity:
Microsoft Office 98 Mac Edition
-- Believe it or not, this is actually a decent
-- software title.
ClarisWorks / AppleWorks
-- Includes what is actually a pretty kick-ass
-- terminal emulator
Cross Platform database solution:
FileMaker Pro
-- Available for Mac and Windows
Network Servers:
AppleShare IP
-- a networking suite with just about everything
-- under the sun, including both AppleTalk and
-- Windows Networking filesharing, FTP, Web
-- server, and others.
WebStar
-- 3rd Party web hosting solution that supports
-- plugins for both AppleScript and Perl CGIs.
Internet Tools:
*** Web
Netscape 4.7
IE 4.5 (5 due out next week)
iCab
lynx
*** FTP
Network Browser
-- Built into OS, very basic FTP client
Anarchie
-- Kick ass shareware FTP client with built in
-- ping, traceroute, etc
Fetch
The list goes on.
Re:Why it will never happen (Score:2)
...
>Sans doubt, Jobs says no.
You are, of course, referring to Steve Jobs.
- The same Steve Jobs that, when kicked out of Apple, started his own company. A company that built an excellent product with top notch (custom, 68K based) hardware and ahead-of-its-time (custom) software.
- The same company that, years later, gave up on the hardware business. Instead they porting their software from 68K to PPC, Sparc, PA-RISC and, yes, x86.
- The same company that, years later, was bought by Apple for 400M$ and tasked to create the next generation MacOS.
I'm not saying that Apple/Jobs is ready to give up on the hardware business, just remember that Jobs knows how and when to change tactics.
Re:What is Darwin? (Score:2)
Also, in case you haven't been following Darwin, there is some question as to why Apple is doing this. Many are skeptical of Apple's Public Source License [apple.com], because it requires developers to submit modifications to Apple.
Re:AltiVec (Score:2)
Darwin != Mac OS X
Just because OS X is optimized for whatever, or has the other layers, like Aqua, Quartz, and Classic compatibility environment, doesn't mean that Darwin has it too.
However, I would assume that you're right and the Altivec support is there. Since they're just beginning to port this to Intel, it's hard to say whether faster clock speed will more than make up for the lack of Altivec. For the usual real-world *nix applications, there is probably no real loss.
OS X on intel hardware (Score:2)
Correction (Score:2)
Re:Fat binary (Score:2)
But it seems that Apple (read, "The Steve) has decided against Yellow Box for Windows. So I was wondering the other day, why not take advantage of the incredibly flexible format of
It would be stupid to port Mac OS X to x86 (Score:2)
The problem is the device drivers. x86 platforms are notorious for their wild array of devices and drivers. Even with Windows, there are plenty of devices that don't have drivers (especially with NT4) or have drivers that are buggy. But unless you support the overwhelming majority of hardware out there, you can't sell the OS.
So Apple would have to spend millions of dollars writing device drivers for their OS, because we all know that the hardware vendors aren't going to do it. IBM has to write most of the drivers for OS/2, and how many vendors do you know who make and support Linux drivers? I'm always at the number of people who laugh at OS/2 but make the same mistakes that IBM did with OS/2.
And for what? Another 1% market share? Windows dominates with 90%. Most of the rest goes to Linux and OS/2. Mac OS X x86 wouldn't even make a dent in this market.
And what about the applications? Sure, the OS is cool, but when was the last time Apple made anything cool that didn't generate a huge profit? And anyone who thinks that they could just recompile their OS X app for the x86 version is deluded. Remember OS/2 for the PowerPC? Ever wonder why most of the commercial Linux apps aren't available on non-x86 platforms?
I've been hearing talk like this for years. The only people who believe it are those who don't understand the technology and don't understand Apple.
Re:A little sanity check (Score:2)
Apple then re-named Rhapsody to Mac OS X server and broke the WWDC 1997 promise of:
1) The next generation of OS from Apple would run on both PPC and Intel.
2) The next generation of OS from Apple would run on any machine sold by Apple in 1997.
Apple claims Mac OS X isn't Rhapsody, yet if you type in uname -a, the OS thinks it is Rhapsody.
Re:It would be stupid to port Mac OS X to x86 (Score:2)
Compiling many Linux/Unix applications from source code is quite simple. I run apache, bind, sendmail and tons of other application on my FreeBSD box and can do the same by compiling the same exact source code onto a Linux box. And since Darwin is a knock-off largely from FreeBSD 3.2 it should be able to compile those kinds of applications.
As for device support, there is a large base of drivers for BSD and Linux which apple could absorb into the Darwin source tree. And don't forget that many hardware companies are jumping on the bandwagon. Didn't Seagate announce plans to support Linux this year? Western Digital drives are already well supported. And video driver development can be extrapolated from existing xfree86 and MacOS VGA driver code.
And think of what Apple is trying to do overall. There is now a market for servers. I have worked for companies who have moved away from Sun and SGI hardware to cheaper x86 hardware. If companies could reuse that hardware with an easy to use MacOS X Server, they would be happy to do so. Not many people can handle the complex sys admin work needed to maintain Linux or BSD, but MacOS X changes all that. It gives companies the option to get away from NT and Win2000.
Re:Whats next after Darwin? (Score:2)
I'd love to see it.
If I were Steve Jobs... (Score:2)
But, if I were Jobs, realizing that x86 is a lame duck in the long run, I wouldn't bother making the commercial part of the OS x86 compatible. Of course, PPC seems like a good contender to replace x86, but its makers don't look like they're really trying that hard. So I would keep my options open.
Whatever replaces x86 in the long run, there is going to be a lot of work done on making sure that every geek OS out there compiles and runs like a steam engine on that platform. Therefore, it would be in my best interest to make sure that when x86 breathes its last, there is a sizable geek crew using Darwin. These geeks would then contribute a great deal of expertise to making my core OS port nicely, and since the commercial part of my platform compiles on top of Darwin, it would be relatively easy to bring everything else over in a nice timely manner.
This is just what I would do, but it loks kinda familiar to me...
On another topic altogether, all this talk of getting OS X to run on wintel PC's seems (to me, unless I'm really missing something) to be confusing the processor with the whole box. For example, sure the BeOS runs on PPC, but just try to get it to run on an iMac - the problem isn't what processor is in there, but the motherboard, peripherals, BIOS/firmware, etc. More than likely, Apple is making sure that they can switch processors in their still-proprietary hardware (to whatever architecture seems most promising - x86, sparc, crusoe, something else altogether...), should IBM and Motorola continue being unable to keep up with demand for both numbers and new versions.
Re:MacOS is big-endian, x86 little-endian (Score:2)
Anyone who has written an app that has to run on multiple platforms has bothered with it. And the solution is downright trivial. Add a macro or function for swapping when saving/loading a structure to/form disk or to/from something that doesn't use your native format. Its NOT that big of a deal. Sorry, pet peeve. 40 lines of code later you can be endian-safe with a little bit of discipline to use it.
Re:what's wrong with this picture. (Score:2)
Most of the commercial UNIX vendors (Sun, HP, IBM, SGI, etc) make money off hardware.
For a long time I thought Apple should be a software-only company, but now I really doubt that it would be possible for them to survive that way. There is not enough evidence to indicate that licensing the OS would be profitable.
Re:what's wrong with this picture. (Score:2)
Re:What is Darwin? (Score:2)
Darwin is the Apple's OS X "kernel" or better "core OS".
Here is a link [apple.com] to Apple (including some marketing crap).
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
Apple Builds Darwin For Intel (Score:3)
Jobs, being a smart man, wants to have his options open, especially after the latest problems with chip supply. There are certainly a number of people working on X86 at Apple. THAT'S THE POWER OF MACH (beside being able to run 3 layers simultaneously). But X86 is dead and both Intel and AMD know it (look at their roadmaps). PPC isn't. Motorola is not alone - IBM is part of AIM too and they're good at cranking out chips. Apparently IBM's got a dual processor on a single chip running 2 GHz. And Motorola is having fab problem - hence there's talk that they'll liscence from AMD, which has a brand new fab.
Besides this processor speed thing tends to go back and forth like a pendulum. x86 is faster, then ppc, then x86 and so forth. Probably has most to do with development cycles. Besides Intel and AMD are pushing the definition of releasing a chip (anybody gotten any sort of quantity on 1 GHz chips? - anybody expect it any time soon?). I seem to remember hardware makers bitching about Intel not delivering in time for Xmas.
As far as Apple hardware goes, it's not as expensive as at first glance. Remember, you have to throw ethernet and firewire cards into a PC to do a fair comparison (probably around $200 for cards with equivalent chip sets).
Two CPUs (Score:3)
www.xl8.com
You put two G4s on a riser card and then plug that into an xl8 Carrier ZIF 2.0
"Using a multiprocessing ready version of its patent pending CarrierZIF, XLR8 showed a dual ZIF CPU riser concept card that allows its CarrierZIF 2.0 to implement multiprocessing using standard G4 ZIF CPU daughtercards. The XLR8 MP riser is designed to also support multiprocessing ZIF daughtercards in Apple's Power Macintosh G3 and ZIF G4 systems."
Think Transparent Red-Box (Score:3)
If you've ever seen Virtual PC or one of the other PC emulators running on a mac, you can't help but be at least a little bit impressed. Now you run one of those with 128MB of ram for it... and the emulation simply flies.
Now... In some ways you could consider this to be a Red Box (The typical codename used for a mythical pc emulation box on macos's blue code base
Anywho... a Red Box... which is half decent for things you can't get native apps for... such as that silly Access database you've been using since the mid 90's.
Now Apple had a problem with the PowerPC. Namely their OS and ALL apps were written in 68k code! So they implemented a emulator at the lowest level of the system... Later version cached code, dynamically recompiled and all that juicy stuff.... And eventually native apps were released... and speed reigned... Life was good.
Then Apps got bigger. And things broke more often.
A Modern Core was required.
So the Rhapsody project was started...
Take OpenStep 4.2 (I think) which is a BSD based OS with NeXT object extensions running on x86... and port it to the PPC.
Great. But it doesn't run Mac Apps...
So make a Blue Box... its not an emulator as such... well it is... but it doesn't emulate the CPU... it emulates everything else
The point is you get native speed...
And because its running on top of a unix, it gets some nice features, like memory protection & a GOOD virtual memory system (relatively
So you just make the Classic MacOS think its running on a NICE piece of hardware with 1 gig of ram.
Add a few tweaks to the OS, so that when it goes into a delay spin it just sleeps.
And there you go. Working bluebox. But its very separate, just like Virtual PC.
Oh Well.
Enter MacOS X.
I won't go into Carbon... but carbon is cool
Basically means you can run the MacApps OUTSIDE of their little blue box
Its another API to the Unix... You have the Darwin API (BSD), You have the NeXT API (YellowBox/Cocoa) and you have the Carbon API (Cleaned up MacOS)
Cocoa is the nifty one btw.
Anywho... transparent blue box.
Basically you make the finder in the BlueBox (your desktop manager) invisible... so that the mac's windows float in MacOS X... almost like a real macos X app...
even tho they're being 'emulated' (we have to find a better term for that! Is 'Runtime Environment' it?)
Anywho...
This brings me to the next bit
Apple has all the technology required to make emulators and these Runtime Environments...
And in fact... Other companies offer VERY good PC emulators for traditional macos.
I think you would have to be insane to not believe that Connectix was currently working on a Carbonized version of Virtual PC.
And what would be really amazing is if they managed to turn Virtual PC (the Red Box) into a Transparent Red Box which is certainly possible.
This would give you your modern hardware which runs windows/macos/osx/bsd apps.
Of course, you could also run linux apps on their with sufficient development work
Oh yeah, Java too.
In fact, you might actually be able to run LinuxPPC as a separate Mach Process!
BTW, Aqua is even better in person!
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Re:AltiVec (Score:3)
This is not the case. Apple does not currently sell any dual-processor machines, and has not since the days of the PPC 604e-based Power Macintosh 9x00, which ended in late 1997 or so.
The rationale for this is that the current Mac OS takes ill advantage of multiprocessors. It uses assymmetric multiprocessing, and the second processor sits idle for the vast majority of time. (Furthermore, the G3's 3-state cache coherency model is insufficient to support more than dual-processor configurations, although the G4's 5-state model is enough to support it very well.) Mac OS X will fully support symmetric multiprocessing, so expect this picture to change in the next year or so.
Re:Apple's profit margin (Score:3)
I think you've seriously misclassified Wilfredo Sanchez. His job is managing Darwin and Apple's other recent public source projects. He (and now David Zarzycki) are the conduits through which Apple and the open source community communicate. He's quite dedicated, and this is a big step; cross-compiling an entire operating system is far from simply "a [single] bored engineer blowing off steam." This build required that Apple's core OS development team be fairly rigorous in writing and maintaining cross-platform code. (Admittedly, Darwin is itself a port of OpenStep/Mach's core OS to PowerPC from a codebase that ran on x86, SPARC, and PA-RISC, but many, many, many changes have been made.) Not only that, but the build infrastructure is now such that Apple's public and private CVS servers are largely unified for the core OS; we're getting a live view of of Mac OS X's core OS' development.
Meanwhile, the modified GCC which Apple inherited from NeXT has an engineer dedicated to merging the codebase into the mainstream GNU GCC, copyright reassignment and all. There is even serious discussion of bringing together the GNU and Apple Objective C runtimes.
As I've said in other posts, I don't specifically do not believe Mac OS X will be running on Intel at any point in the forseeable future, but it is my opinion that you've sorely misjudged the rest of the situation.
Re:Yes, but none of that matters (Score:3)
If Apple can maintain 5-10%+ marketshare, then they'll be around for some time. If they can hit 15%, then things will be perfect. You don't have to have a monopoly to survive.
(BTW: People have been anticipating Apple's death for 25 years - I would hope that they'd learn by now that it's just not happening)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com [velocinews.com])
Re:i think there is good in this. (Score:3)
There's no point in that really. OSX uses a seperate backend display system to draw everything to the screen, this is really the only thing where most of the work needs to be done to run with a different graphics environment. There is already a yellow box for windows that allows Cocoa apps to run on win, I think you have to buy WebObjects to get it though, apple hasn't really decided what to do with it.
For example, the variations in GUI interface from product to product/release to release -- one has gnome and E, another KDE, and the newer stuff will have sawmill and gnome...these larger companies don't want to drop big changes on the employees whenever some distro changes their desktop functionality. The mac and Win GUIs are far more stable than the free/open systems.
I definately agree. I think the GUI on linux is really going in a bad direction in that there are too many parallel efforts. The desktop environment is really where linux sucks right now. Yeah, I said it. But, consider cut and paste. Cross-application cut and paste is pretty weak in linux. Sure, you've got the middle mouse button, but to paste a url from a terminal to netscape means you
- selected the test in the term
- bring up netscape and click the middle button at the end of the url
- delete the old url
This is not ideal. And what about cut and paste, and universal helper applications? These are things that Gnome and KDE are addressing, but how compatable are we talking? What if I want to run WindowMaker? Will I only get the benefits of gnome's app integration with gnome apps, and kde's with kde, etc?
What we really need, IMHO, is a standard for system wide application integration and communication rather than several competing efforts.
BeOS? It's not being used by enough people to be taken seriously. And the last time I looked at their developer area, I think I saw they lean toward objective C. Regardless of the qualities of the language, PHBs want to see C++ prominently displayed in the developer area, like it or not. They don't want to retrain the less gifted developers.
Well, there is Obj-C++ (shudder)... Obj-C is a great language and I really hope apple can begin to better market it rather than turning to Java. I know a lot of people don't take OpenStep stuff into consideration because of this crazy Obj-C thing, hopefully that will change...
The final issue is the toughest to face -- price. No one will like to hear this, but for OSX to rapidly gain acceptance, Apple will need to sell a $19.99 unsupported version. It's the only way to load the home and corporate desktop with this OS. Even the full version can't sell for $199. That's more than Win2K. And they can't sell it for $99; Linux and BSD will beat it to death as their desktops stabilize. They can't make it by selling it as a server OS for the back office only. That philosophy will lead to nothing.
I think more important is for them to beef up developer support and keep the dev tools free (interface builder and project builder). Interface builder is by far the best RAD GUI develpment app in existance. Project Builder is pretty cool, but supposedly there will be a beefed up version for OSX which will improve some of it's weaknesses. Anyway, I think the key to the success of OSX is getting developers interested in Cocoa and the OpenStep way of doing things. Microsoft got ahead because of great developer support, apple needs to do this now. Not charging for the tools and updating some of the old OpenStep docs will do a lot I think.
I don't think sales cost is really going to be a big deal at all. It will probably be under $100 as past versions were, and hopefully a good upgrade price. I really doubt a super low cost is going to help them make it much more of a success. Attracting developers is going to be the big thing. The more developers they have, the more apps they have, the more people will want to use OSX with advanced new apps, the more computers they sell... People aren't going to want to run out of date apps in the BlueBox forever, and I don't know how long anyone is going to want to maintain carbon apps...
Re:Apple's profit margin (Score:3)
Darwin is an OS. Go check it out. It's not just a kernel. The only major thing missing from it is a windowing system. It includes a kernel, shells, compilers, drivers, servers, editors, etc etc. Please at least look into things before making uninformed statements.
a percent of the code? No, darwin includes most of the lower levels of OSX. The things it doesn't include consist mainly of the window system, Cocoa and it's frameworks, the bluebox, Carbon, and Aqua. Of course John Carmack has devoted himself to porting X to darwin with it already running on OSX Server, so I suspect it won't be long before we have a window system for it.
A problem though... (Score:3)
The gcc port for PPC pretty much blows. If you do some benchmark under MacOS vs Windows on Intel, the mac will kick butt for the same processor speed (as it can do more per clock cycle). However, if you do something like run nbench on LinuxPPC vs Linux on Intel, the intel will probalby pull ahead because the compiler doesn't do optimizations very well for PPC. It kinda bums me out that I have this nice fast Mac but there's no real advantage using linux on it because the performance boost from the hardware just isn't there.
Hopefully some of apple's changes being incorperated to gcc will fix this, but I doubt it. The compiler on OSX Server isn't so hot either. Of course, it is based on a really old gcc, so I suppose it's possible that they've been tweaking up a moder and super fast gcc for OSX. one can only hope...
darwin is not everything (Score:3)
it was a cross-compile, not a native build (Score:3)
Darwin was cross-compiled, using a PPC, into binaries for both x86 and PPC.
Apple's profit margin (Score:3)
This foothold is limited to Quicktime and a few other proprietary formats that, while wonderful in their own right, have a limited lifetime (as everything in the computer industry does).
Were apple to suddenly decide that it were to be quite profitable on their part to sell OS X as x86 compiled code, they might get a larger install base of software. However, they would not do this because they may lose business on the hardware front.
Think about it: Apple's OS X is going to be a Big Thing. It is going to be hyped up the arse. The only way to use it will be to run on Apple hardware. Apple sells machines to the unwashed masses so that they can use the over-hyped software (conveniently also provided by Apple.) Apple makes a killing.
Where is the advantage of selling the software? Perhaps if they implemented a licensing scheme like Microsoft, or perhaps a help scheme like RedHat (which would be a terrible idea because Macs are so bloody easy to use).
I'm terribly sorry to say (I love apple, and I would love to see OS X running on my Intel box) but this is just another case of a bored engineer blowing off a little steam.
Rami James
Pixel Pusher
Altec Lansing R&D, IL
--
AltiVec (Score:3)
I took it for granted that Mac OS X would be utilizing Altivec's special capabilities to make some significant speed boosts. When recompiling for x86 compatible machines, wouldn't those speed boosts be lost? And therefore wouldn't the version that runs on Apple hardware be significantly faster?
Just curious; I don't really know that much about Altivec and Apple's coding practices..
Rami James
Pixel Pusher
Altec Lansing R&D, IL
--
Re:AltiVec (Score:3)
In brute processing terms, from the benchmarks that I have personally witnessed, the G4 wins out everytime.
The main performance hindrance for Macs has been the actual Operating System. Hopefully with that out of the way, we will have some serious workstation power within the price range of normal human beings (a 1000Mhz Intel/AMD chip is not within the price range of normal human beings.. more like pod people if you ask me).
Rami James
Pixel Pusher
Altec Lansing R&D, IL
--
Re:Apple's profit margin (Score:3)
Would you rather have a car that gets you where you are going, or one that will get you there looking good? Would you rather wear a pair of 10 dollar sneakers or those nice, cushy ones that you paid 80 dollars for? We live in a society that has an economy that makes it so that we pay more if we want more quality.
Have you ever cut your fingers up while trying to replace a stubborn CD-ROM drive in a poorly designed computer housing? Try doing that in a G4 case.. you'll never want to go back to evil PC cases again.
More quality == more money.
Rami James
Pixel Pusher
Altec Lansing R&D, IL
--
Re:Hello? It IS broken! (Score:3)
I saw a demo of OS X just a few days ago. I must say that I was stunned at it's features. I guess what I quoted above is partially correct. If you listen to everyone talking about Linux, then there will be a lot more people. But how many of them actually get it? Most of them are just going along with it because every one else is. If they saw the capabilities of OS X, they'd be singing a different tune rather quickly.
I have been a PC guy, but after seeing OS X in action, I have to say that it really is a powerful system and should not be overlooked just because you don't like Macs.
John Lavoie
Ithaca College
Whats next after Darwin? (Score:3)
what's wrong with this picture. (Score:3)
last time I checked, software was much more profitable than hardware since it costs so much less to produce and distribute. if you sell s/w that's not tied to a hardware, you sell your stuff to anyone and are not limited by the production limitations found in the h/w business. plus your margins are much higher if you sell enough (after covering development)
think about this, if they sell OSX only for apple h/w owners, and they are the sole providers of apple boxes, then they'll sell as much s/w as they can build boxes, which have a completely different business model (based on low volume, high margins vs. high volume decent margings).
after all microsoft made its money selling software when the internet wasn't even around and computer usage was just a fraction of what it is today, but it took a revolution, new economy, new age, the internet, etc. for cisco to have as much money as they do today sellin hardware.
IMHO: keep selling apple h/w adn s/w turnkey solutions, AND sell OSX for Intel for those who want it. whoever was going to buy an apple box will still probably buy it, the rest of us that would like to give it a shot but would never spend on their hardware (i love my custom built PCs) will probably shell out $50 for their s/w.
one more thing, you have OSX on intel and a very good, reliable, fast win emulator will show up in a week. THEN you really start getting sales in by having the still missing critical mass of s/w apps for your OS.
Of course not. (Score:3)
Re:AltiVec (Score:4)
Re:Whats next after Darwin? (Score:4)
It seems lately those guys have been more interested by the embedded market for the PowerPC line of processor than for the desktop market.
The G4 is still stalling at 500 MHz, that's more than 6 months after its introduction... meanwhile Intel and AMD are delivering over 1 GHz processors.
Maybe Apple is considering switching to x86 processors as a back-up plans if things gets really bad with the PowerPC for the desktop.
For those who think that wouldn't work because People wouldn't buy Apple boxes anymore and just run MacOS X on whatevet cheap PC hardware is available... think again:
a) nothing prevent them to adapt their OS pricing scheme to be profitable from mass OS sales
b) they will still provide the best plug & play experience since they will make sure MacOS X works smoothly with all their hardware
c) all the usual Apple stuff some of us love (Firewire, clean design, nice cases, inexpensive wireless, etc.) will probably keep the mac faithful to buy Apple hardware
Honnestly, those days, beside for the processor and motherboard, the parts are usually the same in a Mac and PC (IDE, USB, PCI, AGP, etc)... and the processor is on a daughtercard...
Janus
What's next after Darwin... (Score:5)