# The x86 Move: Is Apple Doomed? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 16, 2005, 11:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251 "2005-08-16T11:41:06Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Digital\_Stimulus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@Digital\_Stimulus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Digital_Stimulus)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/21 "2005-08-17T02:47:37Z")
Doomed? Come now. Moving to a UNIX OS was an excellent move by Apple, making them a legitimate competitor (gah - I don’t know how people could stand OS9). Moving to x86 is a similarly excellent move, further moving them out of the niche market. It just doesn’t matter how many copies of OSX are pirated; enough will be bought to continue Apple’s rise in profitability. Those who actually buy an Apple system get their legendary “it just works” benefits, with the usual resale value as a kicker. At the same time, they put a dent – most likely a _huge_ dent – in Windows market share, due to all those pirated copies that get passed around. Windows may be steadily improving over time, but the security and usability of OSX is just flat-out better. While there will always be some who can’t (or won’t) change, most anyone who actually takes the time to get used to a Mac wouldn’t go back to a Windows system, especially if they could run it on the same hardware. This coming from a dedicated Linux user who likes neither Apple nor Microsoft. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 4:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/22 "2005-08-17T04:03:03Z")
[tangential hijack] **Digital Stimulus** : > [@](#): > > (gah - I don’t know how people could stand OS9) Well, let’s see… • The operating system was simple enough that you could memorize the essential files and where they go. None of them were invisible or had ownership/permission issues, so to install the OS you just dragged that tiny handful of files to a drive. • It would boot from damn near anything. Internal drive, external drive, master drive, slave drive. Floppy disk, Zip disk, Jaz disk, SyQuest cartridge, Bernoulli cartridge, PCMCIA card flash-ROM drive, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, FireWire device, USB device, SCSI device. Even a freaking Travan backup tape cartridge. • It may have had a primitive multitasking architecture (“cooperative multitasking”) but it was very well implemented nonetheless, and you could run a dozen or more apps simultaneously, usually with still-decent performance in the foreground task. • You could copy formatted text from one app and paste it into pretty much any other and expect it to retain formatting • It didn’t matter where you installed your applications, and you could move them after they were installed. You could attach the hard drive from your old computer as an external disk and run its apps from there without reinstalling them. For that matter, you could mount someone else’s hard drive on your desktop over the network and run Mac apps on a totally different computer, over the network, without ever having to install them on your own machine. • It had excellent plug-and-play hardware-recognizing capabilities without annoying Wizards. • At a time when PC workgroup networking required configuring Primary and Secondary WINS and workgroup or domain and/or subnet and IP and DNS server, AppleTalk was on its 8th year as a self-configuring plug-and-play protocol. Plus it could now piggyback on TCP/IP if you wanted it to. • You could massively customize the stock behavior and appearance, adding features or modifying system-wide parameters. The OS was very extensible, and because of the virtual absence of malware, users trusted freeware and shareware, and it tended to be of excellent quality. • AppleScript and AppleEvents. Anything you could do with a mouse and keyboard you could automate, either with your own AppleScripts or with very powerful/flexible macro utilities like QuicKeys. • The GUI. Only mildly and gradually changed over the years, the MacOS GUI of MacOS 9 was the culmination of all the Mac operating systems that had come before it, and it’s truly excellent and a delight to work in. I still boot into 9 occasionally. There are more and more things it just can’t do, it’s a 20th Century OS not a 21st Century OS and its time has come and gone. And yet, even so, there are _still_ things it does better than OS X, and things it does better than XP. And it’s still a delight to work in when I do. [/hijack] ---
**Author:** ![MAGunter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a87d85/32.png) [@MAGunter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MAGunter)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 8:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/23 "2005-08-17T08:13:17Z")
Courtesy of [Ctrl Alt Del](http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com) , I give you one of the best internet comics ever: [Apple Computers](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v293/Superfuzz75/mac.jpg) ---
**Author:** ![spectrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9fc29f/32.png) [@spectrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spectrum)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 10:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/24 "2005-08-17T10:18:50Z")
> [@MAGunter](#): > > You might have missed the part where I said the majority of those downloads occured in 2000/2001, back when the law regarding p2p was certainly not as clear as it is today and when much of that trail wasn’t kept. It’s obviously far more dangerous to pirate music today, hence the reason I on longer use p2p for music but instead just burn it from friends when I do pirate. Here’s a thought: stop pirating. You have no right to music you didn’t pay for, you have no “fair use” right to make copies of other people’s music. People like you are the reason those amongst the population who are honest have to put up with DRM. > [@](#): > > But, as you admitted, iTunes (among others) does track the music you use, and beyond that they’re working towards dis-allowing the play of music that’s not in their format (which does irk me regarding the music I did actually buy). Cite? Really: Cite? Where is evidence Apple is working on disallowing the play of music that’s not in AAC or Protected AAC format? Hell, AAC isn’t even Apple’s own format, it’s an open standard. > [@](#): > > And I got all that for ~$1500 including shipping. She’s not only beautiful (all black with blue keyboard, dials), but a blazing fast system. If you’d like to go into the bus speeds, MoBo type, etc. I can do that when I get home a little later but I assure you that this system will blow the Apple away for just about any application, and it’s a TON cheaper to upgrade whenever an individual component become outdated. Does it run Mac OS? If not, it’s crap and useless to me. No Mac OS, no Final Cut, no Safari, no Pages, no NetNewsWire, no iCal, no iPhoto, no iDVD… why the hell would I want such a thing? ---
**Author:** ![nameless](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/779978/32.png) [@nameless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nameless)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 12:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/25 "2005-08-17T12:06:52Z")
> [@MAGunter](#): > > Courtesy of [Ctrl Alt Del](http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com) , I give you one of the best internet comics ever: > > [Apple Computers](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v293/Superfuzz75/mac.jpg) Wait, wait! I got this one too, guys. [Mac Users.](http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php?date=2004-03-12) Seriously, what was the point of that? You hate Macs, we get it. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/26 "2005-08-17T13:09:37Z")
Heres the thing, this talk about “removing an OS module to disable the TPM chip”… it’s just meaningless and bizarre. If you could disable the TPM by changing software, then it wouldn’t **be** TPM. The entire **point** of TPM is that it runs before any code is touched whatsoever, before even the BIOS is touched. This means that if Apple had wanted to tie OSX DS to the P4’s, they could have. The very fact that it could be cracked indicates that they wanted it to be cracked because making an crackable OSX is actually harder than making a non-crackable OSX. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 2:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/27 "2005-08-17T14:02:29Z")
I dunno, had it been posted by anyone but **MAGunter** , I’d’ve assumed it was posted by someone making fun of PC-centric folks who work in computer stores. The Ctrl Alt Del comic strip pretty accurately reflects the attitudes I’ve run into over the years in such places! ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/28 "2005-08-17T14:18:45Z")
> [@Shalmanese](#): > > Heres the thing, this talk about “removing an OS module to disable the TPM chip”… it’s just meaningless and bizarre. If you could disable the TPM by changing software, then it wouldn’t **be** TPM. The entire **point** of TPM is that it runs before any code is touched whatsoever, before even the BIOS is touched. This means that if Apple had wanted to tie OSX DS to the P4’s, they could have. The very fact that it could be cracked indicates that they wanted it to be cracked because making an crackable OSX is actually harder than making a non-crackable OSX. Let’s say you own a standard stock Gateway or Dell box. You switch on the power. There is no TPM chip. The instructions encoded on the BIOS circuit board start doing their thing, and after a moment or two get around to searching in the indicated location(s) for readable media with further instructions on it. These instructions could be MacOS X, Debian, OS/2, Fedora, XP, or whatever. Do you see any point so far where the absence of a TPM would cause problems? The computer finds MacOS X and begins executing the instrux. Here, for the first time, the PC acts upon instructions coded by Apple Computer. Here, for the first time, might exist instructions that say “go verify the presence of a TPM and abort if you can’t find one”. Here is where a hacker would edit or modify a file so as to bypass this instruction, or, alternatively, put a snippet of code in that the Apple TPM-searching routine interprets as “Aha, TPM found, continue booting”. > [@](#): > > The very fact that it could be cracked indicates that they wanted it to be cracked I agree that signs point to them expecting and probably desiring that the code be cracked. If they’d been serious about this they would have put a proprietary board in the hardware that worked differently from the standard/stock PC equivalent, one that the OS would put calls to all the time rather than once early in the boot sequence. ---
**Author:** ![Digital\_Stimulus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@Digital\_Stimulus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Digital_Stimulus)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 2:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/29 "2005-08-17T14:24:47Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > I still boot into 9 occasionally. There are more and more things it just can’t do, it’s a 20th Century OS not a 21st Century OS and its time has come and gone. And yet, even so, there are _still_ things it does better than OS X, and things it does better than XP. And it’s still a delight to work in when I do. Interesting. I’d expected a few pro-Windows responses, but I really didn’t expect anyone to defend OS9. It seems as though most of your list is based on Windows vs. Mac criteria (and historical at that). You’ll get little argument from me. What I can say about OS9 is that the few times I had to use it, it crashed mercilessly. I’ll have to trust that it was non-typical behavior, as I’ve been told repeatedly by Mac faithful that, effectively, it couldn’t have happened and that I must be mistaken. At which point I end the discussion. Now, here’s a question that is a little more in line with the OP, as it might provide support for my assertion that people that get used to a Mac would not go back to Windows (to reinforce the point that pirating would serve to decrease the MicroSoft lock on the OS market and improve Apple’s position). How much (and how robustly) of what you list has made it into OSX? ---
**Author:** ![Loopydude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e56c9b/32.png) [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/30 "2005-08-17T14:35:57Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > I agree that signs point to them expecting and probably desiring that the code be cracked. If they’d been serious about this they would have put a proprietary board in the hardware that worked differently from the standard/stock PC equivalent, one that the OS would put calls to all the time rather than once early in the boot sequence. Cripes. For crying out loud, people. The Apple boxes out now are NOT the MacTel boxes that will be sold. Trying to deduce anything about Apple’s intentions for the hardware (except that Macs will sport Intel Processors instead of IBM’s or FreeScale’s) using the extant developer machines as a model is pointless and absurd. The MacTel OS is also, presently, NOT the final OS that will run on the consumer MacTel machines. You need to look at Intel’s hardware roadmap, and their future plans for technologies. What’s around today really doesn’t count for much of anything. It’s like tyring to figure out the configuration of the Xbox2 using a dual G5 Mac tower as a guide. Obviously, besides having some number of POWER4 cores greater than one on the mobo, there’s not a whole hell of a lot of resemblance. Yet the aforementioned Mac towers are being used to develop Xbox2 titles. They’re _developer boxes_; they’re NOT the consumer product. There’s a DIFFERENCE. Final point: Anyone who thinks Apple deliberately wants you to crack their OS is on crack himself. That is so contrary to the proprietary nature of the vertical Apple business model as to be a laughable hypothesis. Trust me, in the consumer boxes, Apple and Intel will do everything in their power to make the MacOS crack-proof and completely tied to Apple hardware. Apple’s money is from hardware, not software. They let anybody install OSX anywhere, they go out of business. Period. Maybe ten years from now that might change, but, like I’ve said before, ten years from now is so unpredictable it’s not worth the effort to speculate. ---
**Author:** ![Finagle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/b19c9b/32.png) [@Finagle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Finagle)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/31 "2005-08-17T16:27:20Z")
> [@DougC](#): > > - > - One thing that I find interesting is that generally people are finding that _a mid-level (and much-less-expensive) Intel P-4 with the same amount of memory will run the OSX considerably faster than even the fastest Mac hardware will_–but the copies of OSX being copied around now aren’t complete, and it is not known how much slower a fully-functional copy would run. The other thing that’s interesting is that it is possible to build a PC that can run the x86 OSX with full SSE3 extentions, for only $200 or so (see the bottom of the first post in that link above). I sort of see their point, but also they seem to be pointing out that Apple is making the right move by moving to a platform where the components are such commodities that the actual cost of the hardware is almost negligible. Suppose Apple decides they want to keep their almost 30% margins on hardware and let’s assume that their bulk pricing is sort of the same as the bargain-basement $200.00 machine referenced above. So for that extra $60.00, who the hell is going to bother cobbling a machine together themselves? Heck, even if Apple wants to maintain the same absolute profit on each machine, say $400.00 – I think the Mac Mini has pretty much demonstrated that most folks would be willing to pay $600.00 or so for a no-brainer plug-it-in solution. So essentially, Apple can deliver machines at half the price, maintain their profit margins, and eliminate at least some of the kvetching about “Macs are soooooo expensive.”. Obviously, the actual financials are going to be much different – I’m not factoring in retail overhead, product design and testing, or any of a thousand other things. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 5:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/32 "2005-08-17T17:46:47Z")
**Digital Stimulus** : > [@](#): > > Now, here’s a question that is a little more in line with the OP, as it might provide support for my assertion that people that get used to a Mac would not go back to Windows (to reinforce the point that pirating would serve to decrease the MicroSoft lock on the OS market and improve Apple’s position). How much (and how robustly) of what you list has made it into OSX? A good many, but not all; and also a good many of the things that make WindowsNT and its successors nice operating systems in ways that MacOS 9 was not, so it’s a hybrid of what was best from here and what was best from there. ## From my MacOS 9 advantages list: > [@](#): > > • The operating system was simple enough that you could memorize the essential files and where they go. None of them were invisible or had ownership/permission issues, so to install the OS you just dragged that tiny handful of files to a drive Not even close. MacOS X is as daunting and complex as any other Unix, or as much so as XP. No way in hell you’re going to install OS X with anything other than the installer, aside from restoring from a bootable backup. Hundreds of thousands of files in a sprawling hierarchy of folders, many of them invisible, with ownership and permissions issues that get bollixed up if you simply do a finder copy. > [@](#): > > • It would boot from damn near anything. Internal drive, external drive, master drive, slave drive. Floppy disk, Zip disk, Jaz disk, SyQuest cartridge, Bernoulli cartridge, PCMCIA card flash-ROM drive, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, FireWire device, USB device, SCSI device. Even a freaking Travan backup tape cartridge. Switching Startup Device is a simple matter of opening the System PrefsPane and picking a different system (including under some circumstances a different operating system on the _same_ volume). Also hotkeys that will let you bypass the currently designated startup device and look for one elsewhere. So it’s still simpler than editing the BIOS at least for the average user. Perhaps not _quite_ as versatile as MacOS 9 for booting from practically anything. I can boot my PowerBook in OS 9 from a drive inserted into the expansion bay where the battery would otherwise go, but it won’t boot OS X from there. Yet I can take my hard drive out, put it in an external FireWire enclosure, take it to a completely different Mac, select it as the bootup volume, and it works. > [@](#): > > • It may have had a primitive multitasking architecture (“cooperative multitasking”) but it was very well implemented nonetheless, and you could run a dozen or more apps simultaneously, usually with still-decent performance in the foreground task. OS X has industrial-strength fully-armored preemptive multitasking and memory protection. It’s more like the NT family than OS 9 in how it multitasks. You can run a zillion apps and not crash the computer but you may slow it down to the point of unresponsiveness — the OS won’t unduly privilege the foreground app as OS 9 would, which sometimes makes it more sluggish as 20 background apps get their CPU attention while the app you’re trying to work in pauses. If you throw in enough CPU (especially dual processors!) and RAM (OS X loves RAM), OS X is a great multitasker, but on any hardware that can actually run OS 9 as well as X, OS 9 is far more nimble and responsive for the same number of open apps, at least for the foreground app. > [@](#): > > • You could copy formatted text from one app and paste it into pretty much any other and expect it to retain formatting Yes, the Macintosh clipboard still rules. Excellent drag-and-drop of selected text or other items from one app to another, too. Or directly to the desktop. > [@](#): > > • It didn’t matter where you installed your applications, and you could move them after they were installed. You could attach the hard drive from your old computer as an external disk and run its apps from there without reinstalling them. For that matter, you could mount someone else’s hard drive on your desktop over the network and run Mac apps on a totally different computer, over the network, without ever having to install them on your own machine. Surprisingly enough, yes, this is still _mostly_ true. Apple would have you believe every application must be in /Applications but it just ain’t so. If the application is an Apple branded application such as iTunes or QuickTime Player, the built-in Software Update won’t update it if you move it, but aside from that you can pretty much put your apps wherever you want. Or move them after you’ve installed them. And yes, you can still run applications that are not on your computer at all, but are instead installed on another computer that you’ve connected to and mounted its volume on your computer’s Desktop. > [@](#): > > • It had excellent plug-and-play hardware-recognizing capabilities without annoying Wizards. OS X is actually even better at it than OS 9 was. Plug in a PCI SCSI card, attach an old SCSI SyQuest drive, boot, and insert a SyQuest cartridge and it’s icon is there on the Desktop alongside of your hard drive, no installation of drivers or configuring of setting necessary. Plug in a brand new digital camera and your favorite photo editor (iPhoto by default, I’ve got mine set to GraphicConverter) pops up and asks you where to put the pix. Or take an old relic like my PowerBook, insert a CardBus FireWire card (because it’s too old to have built-in FireWire), hook a DVD burner to it, launch Toast, and without installing any new software I can burn a DVD-ROM. Borrow a PC user’s NTFS-formatted hard disk and stick it in an external ATA-to-FireWire cradle and it mounts on the Desktop for me to pull Word and Outlook files off for salvage before they reformat and reinstall the OS to get rid of a bad case of the nasties, again w/o having to install any drivers. Etc. > [@](#): > > • At a time when PC workgroup networking required configuring Primary and Secondary WINS and workgroup or domain and/or subnet and IP and DNS server, AppleTalk was on its 8th year as a self-configuring plug-and-play protocol. Plus it could now piggyback on TCP/IP if you wanted it to. OS X has (regrettably) abandoned old-fashioned classic non-IP-dependent AppleTalk. But it came out with Rendezvous (now renamed Bonjour, I believe), an auto-negotiating self-configuring means of handling TCP/IP. Of course Windows has come a long long way towards auto-configuration on a network, too, I believe. But yeah, OS X still does a good job of it as long as you’re on a modern network and not trying to network with your 1991-vintage System 6 Macintosh using classic AppleTalk. Unlike MacOS 9, OS X does native Windows networking (SMB, Active Directory) and can do FTP serving for another approach to easy file sharing. Also NFS, and robust web serving via Apache. > [@](#): > > • You could massively customize the stock behavior and appearance, adding features or modifying system-wide parameters. The OS was very extensible, and because of the virtual absence of malware, users trusted freeware and shareware, and it tended to be of excellent quality. MacOS X is harder to extend/patch/modify than OS 9, but the Mac user community demands it (we were used to it) and the shareware vendors have mostly come through. And even less malware than OS 9 was subject to. > [@](#): > > • AppleScript and AppleEvents. Anything you could do with a mouse and keyboard you could automate, either with your own AppleScripts or with very powerful/flexible macro utilities like QuicKeys. OS X in its latest incarnation eclipses even OS 9, due to Automator, a means of making damn near anything you can do AppleScript-recordable. You can automate the downloading of files, opening of them in Photoshop, convertion from RGB to CMYK, resize to specified parameters, save to location on remote server, creation of a Quark document, importing of those images into picture boxes 1-4, saving of Quark document to a calculated location by a calculated name, print result to thumbnail-sized PDF, create outbound email document, attach PDFs, and send. You could do that kind of stuff in OS 9 if you were good with AppleScript and QuicKeys but in OS X 10.4.x you can do that kind of stuff without having the vaguest notion of how AppleScript is written, and without owning QuicKeys. > [@](#): > > • The GUI. Only mildly and gradually changed over the years, the MacOS GUI of MacOS 9 was the culmination of all the Mac operating systems that had come before it, and it’s truly excellent and a delight to work in. ## IMHO Apple screwed up the GUI, I strongly prefer the OS 9 GUI and have therefore skinned MacOS X to look like MacOS 9 (and to exhibit much of its Finder and dialogs behavior). Other folks would vehemently disagree (no accounting for taste) and claim that OS X has the best GUI. ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/33 "2005-08-17T19:52:24Z")
Opting to ignore the irrational hatred some folks have for Apple’s stuff, I’ll just say that I find the “Classic” Mac GUI and the “Aqua” Mac GUI to be roughly comparable. In some areas Aqua is worse, and in others it’s better. The improvements in the fundamental infrastructure and the transition to a BSD UNIX base, on the other hand, are obvious. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2005, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/34 "2005-08-17T23:15:45Z")
> [@Loopydude](#): > > Final point: Anyone who thinks Apple deliberately wants you to crack their OS is on crack himself. That is so contrary to the proprietary nature of the vertical Apple business model as to be a laughable hypothesis. Trust me, in the consumer boxes, Apple and Intel will do everything in their power to make the MacOS crack-proof and completely tied to Apple hardware. Apple’s money is from hardware, not software. They let anybody install OSX anywhere, they go out of business. Period. Maybe ten years from now that might change, but, like I’ve said before, ten years from now is so unpredictable it’s not worth the effort to speculate. It’s conceivable that apple might want the DS cracked without wanting the final version to be cracked. After all, nobody is actually going to use DS as their main OS because it’s currently incomplete. However, at least a few people will try out DS and at least a few of them might be tempted to switch to Mac when the final, hardware locked version comes out. ---
**Author:** ![DougC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7feea3/32.png) [@DougC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DougC)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2005, 12:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/35 "2005-08-18T00:40:44Z")
> [@](#): > > …I think the Mac Mini has pretty much demonstrated that most folks would be willing to pay $600.00 or so for a no-brainer plug-it-in solution. So essentially, Apple can deliver machines at half the price, maintain their profit margins, and eliminate at least some of the kvetching about “Macs are soooooo expensive.”… - **Finagle** - - - Yes, but will Apple do this? Especially since they like their style. Ideally they would sell a generic-x86 version for two or three times whatever the competing Windows OS is priced at (XP Home OEM is ~$85 right now) but this is the part I doubt they’ll do. I’d bet that they will try to lock the OS to their own slightly-customized hardware, and in the end they’ll see a few purhasers and a lot of piraters. * * * - The $200 Celeron setup is really pretty slow, it works completely but not real well (kinda like that Mini with the 4200-RPM drive!). I have priced out a box just for this myself (gasp) and for ~$550 one can assemble a PC with a P-4 630 64-bit CPU @ 3Ghz, and 1 gig of RAM (but no monitor). People who are running similar setups report that they seem significantly faster than the iMacs (that cost $1300-$1800), and compare well with Power Macs (that cost $2000-$2900). There’s _definitely_ a financial incentive to roll your own here. And if I found OSX useless I could still install XP or Linux, or sell the hardare off as a MacTel “ready-to-roll” box and not take too big of a loss. …I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what is missing from the leaked image; perhaps the only thing missing is better anti-crack protections 😃 or maybe there will be additional features added–but if you pick your parts from the “known-good” list, then everything seems to work right. This was my main conern with paying to assemble a PC for this myself–nothing I have on hand will do SSE3. At any rate: the Mini is still an overpriced sluggardly POS I says–but if you were considering buying an upper-level Mac, it would pe prudent to wait a few more months. The prices of the PPC’s is likely to take a dive, and the x86’s will likely run a LOT faster. The only question is what Apple will be charging for them. ~ ---
**Author:** ![MAGunter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a87d85/32.png) [@MAGunter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MAGunter)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2005, 12:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/36 "2005-08-18T00:43:33Z")
> [@spectrum](#): > > Here’s a thought: stop pirating. You have no right to music you didn’t pay for, you have no “fair use” right to make copies of other people’s music. People like you are the reason those amongst the population who are honest have to put up with DRM. I’d prefer not to stop, actually. I just got smarter about it, as we all did. I’ve got a group of friends that run a non-internet server here in town where a large group of people upload/download pirated movies, music, etc. It’s not connected to the internet so it’s largely RIAA clear, and because the files aren’t sold and it’s a pretty well kept secret, the risk of law enforcement poking it’s nose in is slim. BTW, the ‘Family Guy’ movie coming out soon is fantastic. I highly recommend it if you’re into the show. It’s quite often that I do actually purchase records that I copy from friends (albeit, I wait until I can get it used @ \<$8), and furthermore I am much more likely to attend shows of the artists-which as we all know, is where the majority of artists make their money. I understand that I’m in no way entitled to the music I pirated, nor am I entitled to the music I could currently pirate and/or would potentially pirate in the future. I understand that the act is illegal. Does that make me feel bad about it? No. Furthermore, it doesn’t make me want to stop watching my ass. > [@](#): > > Cite? Really: Cite? Where is evidence Apple is working on disallowing the play of music that’s not in AAC or Protected AAC format? Hell, AAC isn’t even Apple’s own format, it’s an open standard. I mis-wrote that, I was referring to the tagging of music to allow limited plays of it and/or limited copying of said music. > [@](#): > > Does it run Mac OS? If not, it’s crap and useless to me. No Mac OS, no Final Cut, no Safari, no Pages, no NetNewsWire, no iCal, no iPhoto, no iDVD… why the hell would I want such a thing? Well, you could always run Linux and access many of these programs (or so I understand it, I’m not a Linux man myself) or you could use their PC counterparts. It’s fine that you like your Mac. I just want you to admit that you’re getting price gouged for a lesser (spec wise) system that is far more expensive than a PC. If you’ll just admit you’re overpaying for the Apple, we’re fine. ---
**Author:** ![nameless](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/779978/32.png) [@nameless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nameless)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2005, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/37 "2005-08-18T01:08:27Z")
> [@MAGunter](#): > > If you’ll just admit you’re overpaying for the Apple, we’re fine. And if you’ll just admit you’re getting what you pay for and using a completely inferior operating system, then we’ll be fine. Actually, I think we’ll be fine whether or not anyone makes any of these ridiculous prompted admissions. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2005, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/38 "2005-08-18T02:33:47Z")
Have you ever noticed how seldom it is that someone says “Why the hell do you eat at that expensive steakhouse? The food at MacDonalds will provide you with the requisite calories and protein much cheaper” Those who disparage the Mac platform for being more expensive had more of a point back when a new Mac would set you back $7000 or more, but as the prices fall it becomes more and more like Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse versus the Happy Meal — disparagers say “But you’re paying more money” and people say “So? I’m not dirt poor, I can afford it”. Me, I’m hoping for a dual-core G4 PowerBook announcment at the Paris show next month, and if it happens I’m finally replacing my vintage-1998 WallStreet with one of them, and I’m prepared to drop as much as $6000 on it to get it and acquire all the accoutrements to trick it out. After all, I’ll be using it until 2010 or 2012 or so! That’s not much money when you look at it like that. I’m thinking maybe a Magma card to give me PCI slots…and 4 gigs of RAM right off the bat… ---
**Author:** ![spectrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9fc29f/32.png) [@spectrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spectrum)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2005, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/39 "2005-08-18T03:42:30Z")
> [@MAGunter](#): > > I’d prefer not to stop, actually. What a quality person. You’re a criminal. It’s pathetic. “People” like you make life harder on those of us who aren’t dishonest and immoral. > [@](#): > > Well, you could always run Linux and access many of these programs (or so I understand it, I’m not a Linux man myself) or you could use their PC counterparts. All PC counterparts are crap, and run on Windows, which is crap. Linux is even worse. Absolute garbage. I hate both of them. It is a staggering pain to use Windows at my office. Like nails on a chalkboard. > [@](#): > > If you’ll just admit you’re overpaying for the Apple, we’re fine. I’m not overpaying. Because of the immense comparative value of the software that comes with the Mac, my Mac is a bargain compared to the run of the mill PC with its junk OS, garbage software and ugly UI. ---
**Author:** ![Ms2001](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ms2001/32/18463_2.png) [@Ms2001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms2001)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2005, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251/40 "2005-08-18T05:56:17Z")
> [@spectrum](#): > > Does it run Mac OS? If not, it’s crap and useless to me. No Mac OS, no Final Cut, no Safari, no Pages, no NetNewsWire, no iCal, no iPhoto, no iDVD… why the hell would I want such a thing? It’s quite likely that such a machine _will_ run Mac OS. If the development preview version of OSx86 can be hacked to run on standard PC hardware, the release version probably will be too, unless Apple decides to throw some meaningful proprietary hardware into the boxes they’re going to sell. If I were a Mac person, I’d be appalled at the idea of paying top dollar for an Intel Mac if it turned out to be nothing more than an Intel PC with a special flag that told MacOS I paid top dollar for it. Hopefully they’ll deviate from typical PC system specs in some way that’s more significant than writing their own BIOS or dropping the floppy drive, so they can at least claim with a straight face that OS X requires this new technology. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-x86-move-is-apple-doomed/317251.md?page=3)