The wikipedia article on the subject says that the heat produced by the [G5] chip proved an obstacle to deploying it in a laptop computer, which had become the fastest growing segment of the personal computer industry
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- It is however supported by hackers and it’s already being done, and being done rather well: as of a week or so ago, the OSx86 hacker boards are running version 10.4.3, and the “real” Mactels are on 10.4.4. I’d say the hackers are fast on Apple’s trail. …If you can afford to lay out $500 or so for the “ideal” supported hardware, pretty much everything in the OS works the way it’s supposed to–except the update feature. And it runs as fast as the Mac PPC desktop machines that cost, ohhh, , , three or four times as much. If you want to run a laptop I’m not aware of what’s working well, but for desktops, it’s a snap.
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- I think Jobs missed a huge opportunity here, and is only in for headaches from now on. He should have made OSx installable on generic PC hardware, and then offered optional Apple-brand hardware (perhaps even with better support than the “generic” installs). Certainly some diehard Mac fans would have overpaid for the couture PC cases.
…As it stands now–Macs are still second rate, because Jobs locked himself into Intel chips and AMD’s are running faster these days. Apple hid behind the “PPC is slower but more efficient” claim for years, and they won’t have that now.
…And anyone who wants to try using OSx86 can download a hacked version for nothing, and run it on hardware that they don’t need to buy from Apple.
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As others have already mentioned, this has been done for a while - in theory, you can emulate any OS inside any other OS, if you have enough storage space and you’re not worried about performance, but it isn’t anything like dual-booting, where each OS would run natively directly on the hardware.
Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but I think MS is more likely to want to push in the other direction; away from Mac hardware.
DougC: But the advantage of going the Mac route, at least the rational advantage, is that Apple isn’t ‘just’ a software company like Microsoft and it isn’t ‘just’ a hardware company like Dell. Apple makes entire finished systems that ‘Just Work’, ‘Out Of The Box’ (to use two extremely overused catchphrases).
To understand what Apple does you almost have to go back to the mainframe era, when IBM leased (not sold, leased) room-filling computers to large corporations. IBM provided those corporations with hardware, software (although there wasn’t a huge distinction then, as we’ll see), support personnel, support contracts, and a total end-to-end package that would, as a whole, Solve The Problem.
Software wasn’t bought from anyone except IBM, and the software you used generally came with the machine you bought. It was as much a part of the package as the cardpunches, the disk drives, and the core memory. In theory you could buy plug-compatible components from Amdahl or someone else, but IBM’s FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, a term coined by Gene Amdahl to describe what IBM placed in the minds of anyone thinking of buying from him) pretty well kept a lid on that sort of thing.
Apple has been doing for the microcomputer world since 1984 what IBM has done for the mainframe-to-midrange (don’t call them minicomputers ;)) world since the 1950s. They don’t want to change (and lose their hardware margins), their shareholders don’t want to change (and lose their dividends paid by hardware margins), and their customers don’t want to change (and lose the Total Package Support they expect out of Apple). Enabling people to run OS X on generic Dell/Gateway/Compaq/Alienware/Joe Blow’s Komputer Korner/etc. hardware would only make OS X look bad, because it would remove it from the only environment where it really makes sense.
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- I disagree: it made sense for Apple to not do a x86 OS when they were still on PPC, but Apple switched to x86 on their own, and the current Apple OSx86 runs very well on select generic PC hardware with only rather minor modifications to the OS code–in some instances (if you pick the right hardware) the ONLY hack that has to be applied is the boot patch intended to hack the code that keeps the OS from booting on “generic” hardware. Apple is merely throwing away software sales on principle by not supplying a version of their current product that (compared to their normal sales totals) a significant number of people are going to use anyway.
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- I disagree: it made sense for Apple to not do a x86 OS when they were still on PPC, but Apple switched to x86 on their own, and the current Apple OSx86 runs very well on select generic PC hardware with only rather minor modifications to the OS code–in some instances (if you pick the right hardware) the ONLY hack that has to be applied is the boot patch intended to hack the code that keeps the OS from booting on “generic” hardware. Apple is merely throwing away software sales on principle by not supplying a version of their current product that (compared to their normal sales totals) a significant number of people are going to use anyway.
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It would be interesting to correlate:
-The population of people who are geeky enough to build a PC out of the correct generic parts and are interested in running MacOS on it
-Willingness to pay the full licence price for any OS
Given that the OS lists at $129, they may have made the calculation that anyone in the market for a legal copy is also going to be in the market for Apple hardware. Or they may have looked at the strategy MS followed (tolerate rampant piracy in order to build market share and installed base) and decided it makes sense to let the pirates/geeks do their thing.
Or Apple may just have enough bad memories from their previous experiment with opening the platform to dismiss the whole thing out of hand.
We’ll just have to wait a few years for the business case studies to be written and the memos to be leaked before we know what the real reason was.
Check that: ‘Willingness to pay a hugely marked-up retail price for an OS that really isn’t anything new and different, and doesn’t come with cool hardware (anymore).’
MacOS X is a BSD Unix in Mac clothing. The people who are into running obscure and marginal OSes on PC hardware know where to get BSDs for the cost of a few CDs and S&H. Or even less, if they have a good enough connection to download ISO images.
The people who just want a Mac buy a Sooper-PC from Apple and get the Total Package Support I ranted about above. The people who want applications and games buy a Wintel box from Dell and don’t really care about any other OS that could run on the hardware. The people who want a stable OS without all the endless hassle of being on some company’s upgrade treadmill already know where Linux and the open-source BSDs are and how to get them for a hell of a lot less than $129.
So, what market is Apple aiming for by allowing MacOS X to run on conventional PCs?
Another factor is that a port of WINE(WINE Is Not an Emulator) for the new Intel Macs is already in the making; WINE can already run many Window’s apps on Linux at near native speeds, even including high end 3D games. This makes transitioning from Windows to OSX easier.