What does it mean that Apple is using Intel chips in their systems — chips that can also run Windows? There are other components (hard drive, RAM) that come from third party vendors. Is it just a matter of time before someone produces a non-Apple motherboard capable of running a Mac OS? Just a matter of time before someone develops a board that will work with swappable CPUs, more mainstream RAM, etc.?
Why not? Is it because it would take a completely new BIOS and chipset configuration, one that would have to evolve from the ground up in an instant (unlike current BIOS etc., which grew with the PC industry)? Are the Intel chips in Apple machines Intel in brand, but not in an otherwise familiar configuration? I don’t get it, as all naming conventions on the Apple site seem to be the same as I can find on newwegg or mwave. Is there some licensing deal with Intel that will forbid them from supporting/manufacturing supporting hardware that would support this?
Could it have something to do with the OS itself? I really don’t understand that, because if Apple can figure out a way to get WinXP to boot and run graphics, sound, etc., what are the technical difficulties in the reverse?
We need a Mac here in the office (or at least a machine capable of running the Mac version of Photoshop and Quark). But I absolutely loathe being locked in to one supplier for parts, and I’d like to be able to upgrade parts, not the whole machine. I want … well, what I want may not be relevant.
Frustratedly yours,
Rhythm
(I assume this has been done before, but Mac and OS are too short to search for)
Why yes I am incapable of searching the Web. Fortunately, my guardian ad litem showed up and pointed me in the right direction: http://www.osx86project.org/ , for starters.
There were non-Apple Mac computers produced in the mid-1990’s. Apple abandoned that model, at least then, because it was corrupting their faulting market share. A key to their business model is controlling the whole system including hardware to promote consistency. That helps a lot with both the user experience and development. I supposed they could allow third party hardware to run the Mac OS but they already tried and abandoned that model once before.
Macs don’t have a BIOS in the same sense that a Wintel PC does. Apple’s architecture involves something called EFI, or Extensible Firmware Interface. Intel developed EFI a few years ago for servers as the limitations in the legacy BIOS were unacceptable for servers.
So yes, it does take a new firmware configuration, and one that you’re not likely to find on the shelf at CompUSA.
Very few newer PCs support EFI, and no consumer versions of Windows recognize EFI. Vista might support it with the first Service Pack, tentatively expected to be released in first quarter, 2008. It’s a chicken and egg situation - hardware vendors won’t build it until software supports it, and the software people are waiting for the hardware people to start building it.
Why not? Because Apple does not want its operating system running on non-Apple computers. They own it and they are free to license it as they please. It isn’t a technical problem.
If you NEED a Mac in the office, I suggest just buying one. Office implies that its for commercial purposes, and you cannot legally put OS X on anything other than a computer purchased from Apple (I don’t believe).
As mentioned, all Macs can be upgraded with standard parts… I’ve upgraded the RAM and HD on my MacBook, and my G5 at work has gotten a new DVD burner, HD, and more RAM.
You can, however, install OS X on non-Apple-issued hardware, but this uses pirated and altered versions of OS X. These boxes are usually referred to as “hackintosh”, and they do require certain parts, such as video cards, sound cards, and networking cards to operate.
Macs start at $600 for a mini. That’s very reasonable for what you get, and in a commercial, office setting, it’s probably your best bet.
But… but… but Apple doesn’t care about my happiness? Damn
I’m still not clear on how BIOS or no BIOS, you can boot and run WinXP on an Apple, but not the other way around. Or it is not really booting WinXP, so much as booting OSX and then running XP inside it? Kind of like I can run a C=64 here on my desktop, but there’s no way to go the other way around.
In some ways, it sounds like a lot boils down to the “Trusted Platform Module” (TPM) chip – something of a hardware fob.
I wonder if anyone at Apple has done the numbers, and what they came up with. That is, could there be some poor unfortunate soul who has wagered his or her career on a sizable report showing whatever profits under various licensing scenarios, but stopped by institutional direction?
No, you’re really running Windows XP directly on the hardware. Apple uses some kind of backward-compatibility layer to boot it, but once it’s running, it’s no different from a Windows machine, all the way down to the voltages in the processor.
You can run Windows inside OS X using virtualization software like VMWare Fusion or Parallels, but you don’t have to.
No, this has nothing to do with it. The TPM chip is not even in newer Apple computers. The only thing keeping you from installing OS X on an ordinary computer is the EFI issue, and the compatibility of whatever hardware is in your commodity PC.
All Macs have user-replaceable RAM. Mac Pros have user-replaceable RAM, hard drives, optical drives, video cards, etc just like any PC tower. The design of the Mac Pro is really impressive. It’s like a work of art on the inside as well as the outside. Everything slides in and out very easily. Replacing components in one is easier than in most PC towers. About the only thing that is not user-replaceable is the logic board (aka motherboard) and CPUs. They (along with all Macs) use standard components. You don’t need a special “Mac” version of any of these things. Driver support in OS X is not as broad as on Windows, so you’d want to check for sure before replacing an optical drive, but any SATA hard drive, high quality RAM, etc should work. The one exception is video cards. Mac video cards are not the same as their PC counterparts, even with the same model number. There are ways to reflash certain PC-version cards to work in a Mac, but it’s a lot easier to just buy the Mac version from ATI or nVidia. And in any case, you can easily buy video cards for Macs, even though the only models that will take them are the Power Macs and Mac Pros.
If you’re running Photoshop and Quark, you’re going to want a Mac Pro anyway I think. They’re sort of specifically targeted towards the multimedia design (graphics, audio, video, photography, print, etc) market which has traditionally been a core market for Apple.
I just added a new 500 GB HD, off the shelf from MicroCenter, for my 8-core Mac Pro.
Also, I just ordered a new cooling fan for my ATI video card, completely 3rd party as well (the stock fan is waaaaay too noisy).
Mostly all the parts, as crystalcanyons said, are not only replaceable with 3rd party components, but made a ton easier by Apple’s great enclosure design.
The OSX86 project is really interesting, despite any legality issues, but for a machine to be actually used productively in an office, I think it would be a bad choice - there are all sorts of potential pitfalls and unresolved bugs (both now and at any time in the future), plus there’s obviously not going to be any support from Apple.
You’d be much better off buying a second user Mac - Macs typically have a much longer support life than Windows PCs - that is, you can buy a five or ten year old Mac (you might not actually want one that old) and install the current version of the OS on it with few problems and a performance penalty that may actually be tolerable. Attempting to install Vista on a PC of that vintage would just be a recipe for frustrating failure - even XP could be tricky to get running on a PC at the older end of that scale.
I know its possible but i have no clue how to do it. I remember a tv show where they showed you how to do it. They kept reminding the viewers that you were building a G4 compatible pc not a Mac
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