I have an old Windows computer. What would happen if I were to wipe out the hard drive and install one of the Mac operating systems on it. Would I then have a Macintosh clone, capable of reading and writing Mac files, etc. or would the computer simply give me a disk error when I tried to install that damn hippie operating system?
And if I can install a Mac system, what’s the best way to do it. If I use a standard rescue-type disk to reformat the hard drive, that would be some vestige of DOS, wouldn’t it? Would I have to use a rescue disk that had been prepared on a “real” Mac?
And what would happen with the monitor, sound card and peripherals?
Sorry, it won’t work. The Mac OS is designed for an entirely different kind of chip than the one found in PCs. You could, however, install Linux or Lindows quite easily on that old PC and (at least in the case of Linux) find a performance boost.
The fundamental difference, what makes a Mac a Mac and a PC a PC, is the type of hardware the system runs on. The hardware they use is, at the system level, completely different and totally incompatible. This is the main reason why you cannot run PC applications on a Mac, and vice versa. To get around that, you have to use emulation, in which a program mimics the functions of different hardware. This is how you can play old Nintendo games on your computer. It is also, unfortunately, usually buggy and very slow.
Rumours are Apple may be producing a version of Mac OSX for PCs, or that Apple may be switching to PC hardware for future Macs, thus reducing the distinction to simply the software being run. However, that’s a whole different can of worms.
While you definately can’t run MacOS on a pentium, you can run Windows NT on some macs. NT3.51 and NT4 had support for PPC chips (this got dropped in win2k), and some macs use a PPC chip that those versions of NT can use. IIRC you have to mess around a bit, and there’s not a lot of point in doing it, but it is possible.
Running windows 95/98/XP or win2k on a mac, or macOS on an x86 chip is, however, not possible.
You can run Basilisk on the PC, which is the closest equivalent to Virtual PC on the Mac.
It emulates an older-style Macintosh CPU, the Motorola 68000 family (probably the 68030 instruction set, possibly the '040). You also need a ROM file (which can be obtained from an old Mac like a Quadra or a Macintosh IIci). With this combination you can run System 7 through System 8.1 on a PC, with decent performance on a fast Pentium. You can only run Mac programs that do not require the PowerPC processor, i.e., 68K versions or “FAT” versions that contain both sets of code. And you can’t run later versions of MacOS 8, any versions of MacOS 9, and forget about MacOS X. Basilisk can use your PC floppy drive, your PC dial-up connection that you’ve set up under Windows, and possibly your PC ethernet IP connection. It’s actually a pretty good way to get a sense of the “feel” of working in the Mac environment.
If you just want access to Macintosh data files (not programs), you don’t need the MacOS at all, just software that will let you access HFS and HFS+ formatted media. You’d be able to open most mainstream data files with the PC equivalent programs, and there are translators available for many of the others (e.g., Nisus Writer or MacWrite Pro word processing files can be converted with DataViz Conversions Plus to your favorite PC word processor’s format).
That’s so you can run Windows 98 in a window as a program that runs within Windows XP, if XP is your everyday operating system but you have some programs that don’t run right under XP. Or you can run Red Hat or OS/2 Warp or Windows 3.11, or even all at the same time. You can also run a “test bed” Windows environment to play with buggy or possibly virus-infected files, and if it crashes or gets taken down by a virus, you’ve only hosed a virtual hard drive, not your actual computer.
You could also install Darwin (which is the low level component of Mac OS X). But you’d have basically yet another *nix (Mach/BSD instead of GNU/Linux)
As others have said, Macs use the Motorola chipset while PC OSes (everything made by Microsoft, plus most versions of Linux and BSD) use chipsets that are essentially clones of the Intel architecture. So while there are numerous kinds of PCs (different processors (AMDs, Intels, etc.), different component hardware, etc.), none of them will run Mac code without hardware emulation of some type.
All of that being said, it’s most certainly possible to port OSes between the Motorola and Intel hardware architectures. Linux has been ported to Mac hardware through the Linux 68k project, and the originally-Intel BSD OS was ported to Macs as the Darwin kernel at the heart of MacOS X. This, arguably, produces a new OS, as all of the software has to be recompiled for the new hardware (and certain pieces of hardware-dependent code have to be substantially rewritten), but it’s just a more ambitious version of what goes on every time, say, Linux is migrated to the newest Intel chip.
Somtimes, OSes completely migrate from Motorola to Intel, as BeOS did when Motorola refused to release important techincal specs for its chipset. The famous (well, not really) BeBoxes BeOS originally ran on used Motorola chips, but after the migration BeOS simply ran on plain PC hardware.
Note that both of the OSes with cross-platform presence are open-source projects, not just some private concern’s cash cow. Linux exists on Motorola hardware because Linux geeks decided that marrying Motorola hardware to GNU software was worth the effort of porting everything. Apple used BSD because it was a stable, known platform with no major licensing restrictions attached. Unless Gates smells money (massive, massive amounts of money), you’ll never see a Microsoft OS on Motorola hardware.
This is highly unlikely. If Apple were to switch to an Intel/AMD based architecture, they would be screwed.
Apple is, at its core, a hardware vendor. They only make software so that they can sell their own proprietary systems. To switch to a PC architecture brings them into direct competition with hardware vendors like Dell, Compaq, or IBM and with OS vendors like Microsoft.
As it stands now, Apple can sell its machines for whatever price it wants to because no one else makes Macs. Switching to a PC architecture, and competing with Dell et al, requires them to make up that profit either by selling more machines, or more copies of their OS.
Apple’s ~2.6% (Giga Information Group) market share puts them in a tough bind. If they try to compete with Microsoft on the PC platform, they would be biting off more than they can chew. Notwithstanding the cost of completely re-writing the OS and forcing existing users to buy new copies of their software, I see Microsoft stopping development on Office for Mac. This will immediately put off a lot of potential new Apple OS customers. Apple’s OS goes the way of OS/2 and BeOS within short time if this happens.
That leaves hardware. I doubt Apple has the resources to compete in the crowded PC hardware market and develop an OS. They become a minor player in the PC hardware market within a couple of years.
Steve Jobs knows this and wants to stay with a different architecture. How he’ll do this with Motorola’s semiconductor division hemorrhaging money is anybody’s guess.
Lord Derfel: I disagree that Apple is primarily a hardware vendor. I think Apple is more of an IDEA VENDOR, selling the idea of a computer that you don’t have to know about to operate. A magic box that performs certain functions. The platform the magic box runs is peripheral to the issue. Since OSX is basically just a fancy GUI to a BSD operating system, porting it to x86 hardware would be rather trivial. If Apple switched to PC hardware, the only thing that would change is that the hardware would be less expensive, possibly increasing Apple’s profits.
Now, whether Apple would tolerate giving any yahoo who can dig up a copy of Mac OS the ability to build his own Mac is another issue. More rumours are that Apple may be building a software verification system into the BIOS of new macs, to prevent them from booting any non-MacOS operating systems you might try to run. This would quickly put a damper on Macs running Linux, if true.
Ideas don’t make money. Selling hardware and software does. Convincing users to buy expensive Apple hardware over say, cheaper Dell systems, would be difficult. Why not buy a cheapo PC and slap MacOS on it? Many users won’t bother, but some will. Apple then loses that segment of their hardware market, and the profits that go with it. They could raise the price of their OS to compensate, but that could put people off as well.
Apple makes very good hardware and OSX is wonderful, but would they be able to convince people to stick with them when you can buy cheaper hardware to run the same OS? I’m not so sure.
The point is moot if Microsoft stops development of Office for Mac. Apple dies a quiet death if that happens.
Rumors in the Mac world are a dime a dozen, but there’s [talk that Apple is working with Sun on a port of OpenOffice, which is compatible with Microsoft Office files. (Until Microsoft changes the format in response…)
Lots of rumors are saying that Apple is quietly keeping a x86-compatible version of OS X in development. My guess is they’ll never release it unless they have completely run out of other chip options. Motorola has been worringly slow at developing faster chips (note that all current desktop Macs are dual-processors). But even if they switched to x86:
a) it’s unlikely you could install OS X on any old PC - Apple still likes to control the hardware their OS runs on.
b) every application would still have to be recompiled to run on Intel/AMD hardware. Developers just went through a major change, they won’t like going through another one.