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Apple Builds Darwin For Intel
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:
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.Neat stuff.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.
Yet you'll use MacOS 8.X with it's Pascal kernel? OS9 was the first release that had all of the core OS finally rewritten in C. Mach isn't the fastest, but it's not like you're going to be crawling, and it has the big advantage of fitting in nicely with OpenStep's very dynamic environment. I'd suggest waiting until it's actually released before deciding to write it off, but that's probably a bit much to expect from the condemn-it-before-you-see-it
Heheh
That was a joke... right?
I love it when narrow-minded PC dorks who know nothing about Apple or the Mac perpetuate the same lies from 16 years ago. 1)They make barely enough money to stay in business. I guess that's why they're sitting on billions of dollars in cash. And they're making about 100 million dollars in profit a quarter. And have had something like seven consecutive profitable quarters. 2)Despite the fact that the iMac gave them a small temorary boost, their market share is currently tiny and is slowly dwindling. You don't like reading much do you? Otherwise you would certainly have seen articles estimating that while their market share is still small in comparison it is growing and the iMac alone is responsible for a several point increase in market share. And if it is temporary, it hasn't ended yet. 3)In a booming market they show no signs of growth. Most of the financial world disagrees with you. Apple's stock has gone from ~$13 to nearly $140 since Job's return. Additionally, ~30% of Apples sales are to people that either have never owned a computer before or are converting from Windows (about 15% from each group). 4)The vast majority of computer buyers have written off Apple and are afraid to buy Apple products, no matter how good they are. Why concern yourself with what your neighbor has? Oh, that's right you need to be part of the herd. And when you're not, you get scared. If you are scared fine, you can retreat to the safety of your PC. We certainly wouldn't want people to think for themselves and buy a product based on their needs or show any type of individualism. 5)MacOS X is generating about 1/10 the industry buzz of Linux and isn't even on the average buyer's radar screen. Hmmmm...Let's see. OS X is not released yet and Linux has been around awhile. Apple doesn't hype unreleased products like some some companies, but when it is released I sure the hype will be substantial if not overwhelming. And I suppose Linux is on the average buyer's radar screen. Get real. Linux is not yet for the average user. OS X will give the average user every technical benefit of Linux and put a very easy and friendly interface on it so that IT WILL be on the average buyer's radar screen. (I bet that scares you: just as good as Linux, more software, intuitive interface and higher quality hardware.) But that is beside the point because from a marketing standpoint, the Mac has never been about the average user. It has always been for people that want something above average. Average may be acceptable for Windows and Linux, but not for the Mac. Quit spreading your misguided beliefs. Why would Apple want to change their business practices when they work?!
nah, no one affiliated with us....
So says Stallman. Who died and made him root?
> The last *really* nice Apple hardware, IMO, was the 8500.
I'll assume you never had to install more RAM into that machine...removing the entire motherboard from the back to install RAM wasn't a "*really* nice" feature of the 8500 series.
Maybe I'm confused, but didn't Microsoft buy up a bunch of Apple's stock when they were down a few years back?
Unless Apple is getting outta the hardware business, why give people no reason to buy their hardware?
DM : just because MKLinux was slow doesn't mean OSX will be.
The cloners hardly paid any of Apple's PPC R&D costs. If they could have done that and still turned out better, cheaper hardware even in low volume, maybe Apple isn't fit to be in the hardware business.
That was bad information and needed correction. I couldn't care less whether the author believed what he was writing, just that someone else might.
$1 -> $19.99 is actually an 1899% markup...
Apple does not (will not) disclose its proprietary hardware specs.
PCs are cheaper until you start looking at a ;)
brand name box (as opposed to cheapo whiteboxes
from some store that won't be there in three
months time
I would suggest buying a G4 but waiting for the
UMA-2 G4s to come out, mid-year or some time like
that. OS X should be shipping by then with new
Macs as well...
OBSD 2.4 and 2.5 run on PPC boxes w/Open Firmware.
The OBSD group tried to get 2.6 working on an
iMac but the kernel wouldn't build, or something...
Restricting the OS to their own proprietary hardware is like saying you have to buy coke in special hand-made crystal containers made by coke. Imagine how popular Pepsi would become?
Apple is their own worst enemy for not supporting a processor which has the wide acceptance of Intel/AMD these days.
And just what exactly is this "Darwin" thing anyway? I'm a Linux person so I have no idea. Apple's web site doesn't exactly explain things clearly, either!
I don't know exactly what Apple hopes to achieve by releasing an Intel Darwin--although maintaining it shouldn't be too taxing for themm as they are likely to focus all efforts on services and utilites that run in the upper OSX layers...Maybe they hope to interest more BSD'ers and Linux people and get some outside ideas on refining the internals over time. Outside ideas never hurt.
I sincerely hope this post was not from anyone affiliated with GNUstep or SpindleTop. I can't think of anyone involved in the GNUstep project who is this idiodic, so I can only assume this is just some moron mouthing off...
If your only basis that the x86 chips are moving faster than PowerPCs is clock cycle speed, then you are horribly mistaken.
The G4 can do, on average, calculations in 1/4 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.
Just because Motorola and IBM are focusing on things to make their processors faster at the same speeds does not at all mean that they have dropped the ball.
Sounds nice don't it?
single K7 for the iMac crowd, duelie K7's for the midrange...Alpha multiproc for the video editing, 3d crowd...Happiness at last!
The legality of the GPL has AFAIK not been demonstrated in court yet.
Plus, "It take advantage of some of the great work underway in the NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux communities" was the quote. There is some 'great work' in the Linux community which is not GPL'ed.
Don't you worry about Apple, little one. They're just fine.
fprefect said:
>Besides, it's not practical to switch processors
> like you do underwear. Imagine Sun switching to
> PowerPC
Or like SGI switching to x86, or Apple switching to RISC? I am not saying that it would be easy, or even absolutely in anybody's best interests to make a switch -- just pointing out that it has been done before. Personally, I don't want to see an x86 mac, as the whole intel architecture really does need to die.Where the hell have you been the last two years, may i ask? Playing with your...kernel? They have done exactly that, expand in the consumer space, and their share price reflects it--as well as the expectation that the expansion continues.
Apple Mac:
500MHz G4
1MB L2
256MB SDRAM
27GB Ultra ATA
Zip drive
DVD-RAM/DVD Video
RAGE 128 Pro
10/100BASE-T
*NO MONITOR*
*NO MODEM*
*****************
$3,499.00
Gateway Athlon:
AMD Athlon 1000MHz (1GHz) Processor
128MB RAM
MONITOR: 19" (18.0" viewable area)
32MB nVidia GeForce 256 Graphics with TV out and DVI-D
(FPD1500 Digital LCD Display also available with this video card)
30GB 7200RPM Ultra ATA hard drive
12X DVD-ROM Drive
Boston Acoustics BA735 Digital Speakers w/Subwoofer
56K PCI Voice Modem
******************
$2,999.00
Which is the one that normal human beings can't afford?
Gleaned from:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObject
http://www.gateway.com/prod/hm_sel1000_ProdInfo
P.S.--It's $54 to add 10/100 ethernet to the Gateway.
Darwin is not everything, but if you see what it is, and take a look at what Wilfredo, or Scott Anguish are saying about it you will see that it is MOST of OS X.
ummm...are you at all aware of what they can do in the industry? it would be nontrivial, but not impossible, to place a slightly modified version of altivec on any other processor.
/. moron...
typical
It's not avodgato, or whatever you punk kids are calling it. It's a pun on Avocado and Advocate, the fruit, and is spelt Advogato. You retards!
Assuming it isn't an identity hack, this is "Apple's leah Darwin engineer."
DELL ? DELL ? Tell me you're joking! FYI, biff, Dell parts--cases, mobos, etc--are frequently so non-standard that replacements are available only from Dell. You want to fuck yourself in the most expensive, inconvenient way, just buy a Dell. Fantastic ad campaigns though...
Actually, there was a version of SoftPC (or was it Virtual PC) for NEXTSTEP way back when...
Darwin is very hardware independent and though Apple doesn't want to put a lot of money into right now (because their hardware business is doing quite well) they are still interested in keeping it adamantly hardware independent. They've spent a lot of time working on the CoreOS API's which define things like consistent variable sizes, endian-ness of data, and all sorts of other hardware-influenced code. Even more telling is that they've even sunk a lot of work into revising their C++ based driver model to be as hardware independent as possible and delaying developers from writing Mac OS X drivers for almost half a year which seems downright absurd if Apple was apathetic toward other hardware possibilities. Apple is clearly anticipating the need to free themselves from hardware legacies at some point in the future. As long as the higher levels of Mac OS X (like the Aqua GUI and the Quartz imaging engine) access everything through the hardware-safe methods (the I/OKit, the CoreOS API's, Carbon API's, and Cocoa API's), then moving Apple's software world to different hardware mainly involves moving the Darwin kernel to another platform. It's still not trivial and won't ever happen over night, but they do seem to be keeping such a possibility down to a three to six month window of hard development time.
Apple will never again have to go through the hardware stagnation hell it has already gone through with the classic Mac classic hardware, the Next hardware, and soon to be the PowerPC hardware.
One curious thing is that Apple never openly and unquestionably denounced the cross platform nature of Rhapsody (the predecessor to Darwin and MacOSX). They just spoke about it less and less until finally they stopped talking about it all together. When they unveiled Mac OS X, it was billed as being everything Rhapsody was plus better support for those lazy programmers who weren't ready to abandon the barnacle-laden, "classic" Mac OS API's. At this point they moved their cross-platform message to one of compatibility with their CGI middleware "WebObjects". As hot and heavy as Apple was to kick-start their hardware business, it's suprising that their wasn't an announcement about not pursuing Intel because of the inferiority of the hardware or some such message. Best not to burn that bridge quite yet. Apple's hardware plan right now is one dictated by legacy; they want to appear apathetic about other hardware but it's clear from their actions that they are keeping all hardware avenues as open as possible without compromising their current hardware offerings.
Those who say that Apple is primarily a hardware company are right. The integration between software and hardware is what makes the Macintosh user experience so compelling. MacOS X has already left Apple's old architecture behind. It only runs on a tightly prescibed set of machines.
So, either Apple builds its own Apple-branded x86 box or gets one of the majors to OEM it and installs OS X on it. The OEM gets in on the price premium Apple can demand for superior price and performance and Apple can retain control of the user experience. They both get a foothold in the post-Wintel market.
You want to build a machine of your own that runs MacOS X? You could still buy the parts, but you'd be restricted to a finite number of approved parts by approved vendors. Otherwise, Apple and/or the OEM don't guarantee that your setup will work.
Any arguments?
You can't buy Cocoa for Macintoshes yet. Wait until the product ships -- WebObjects on Intel is a profitable product, and it will eventually require the updated OpenStep/YellowBox/Cocoa layer.
Here is the site with the apple benchmarks.
And here is the site with the intel benchmarks.
As you can see, Apple took intel's own benchmarks and ran them on a G4. The G4 averaged 3.52 times faster than a PIII. Adjusting for MHz from a 500MHz G4 to a 1GHz PIII makes a G4 1.76 times faster.
It's just like porn -- Average Joe Sixpack would rather see big round fake tits than nice real small tits. Megahertz is marketing.
I cut the hell out of my finger on a super sharp NuBus slot hole once. Almost needed stitches Lots of cuts from PC cases, but the worst was from an Apple.
Honestly, Apple cases weren't that great until the G3/G4 type. They seem to have been primarily designed to change shape every couple years and prevent you from doing motherboard upgrades.
I for one can think of several reasons for Apple wanting Darwin on x86 hardware. It's a free server OS with a fullblown capacity and streaming video etc. This will do well with the "Mac" at both ends things they are developing, a special set of services for Mac OS (and soon X) clients that currently is seen on apple.com. An to that MHz comment, it's like compering RPM on a two stroke and four stroke engine.
Nobody has yet mentioned something that makes a full Intel port extemely unlikely- Firmware. Apple has had enough problems with it's own firmware that opening up the market to logic boards and crap from everywhere would be a "Firmware Hell". It's not going to happen. Stop spreading rumors. If you're an Apple supporter, hold back your excitement and shut up because you're not helping Apple at all by spreading rumors. The linux boys are laughing at all of you giddy gossipers!
Hmm, stock price is well over $100 - that sounds like a recovery to me . . .
But then again I don't have my head in the sand...
Apple has always been into the "proprietary" game, and I don't like that. You speak of all of the hacks/tweaks that are needed on the x86 architecture (which actually has a open instruction sets and specs), but not of the problems that will be faced with porting an OS when Apple decides to alter/conceal information pertaining to their proprietary hardware. Regardless of whether BSD or Linux can be made to run on the PPC, would you (or rather the open-source community) be willing to go through a complete hack/tweak episode to get it to work on the "new" Apple-branded processor?
Also, if you haven't noticed the PC hardware platform is capable of outperforming the G4. The fastest AMD Athlon and Pentium III systems are still faster than the fastest G4. For instance, when was the last time you saw a cutting-edge game released for the Mac?
Linux is lacking the following short but critical list of desktop apps:
(This is not an exhaustive list just a summary)
Quicken, Quickbooks by Intuit (or any other integrative financial software to manage investments as well as bank accts.)
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, Premiere, yadda yadda
MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, frontPage, IE, Media Player, etc
Apple Quicktime client (Actually I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't release a binary here sometime after OSX consumer debuts)
GAmes (Linux has a couple of important games, if you have the right hardware, and power-user skills to configure your system to use it--I mean 3dfx cards using DRI, and even before DRI, 3dfx/Glide has generally required skill+patience WAY beyond "desktop users" ) but certainly you can't begin to argue that people with kids interested in games of either the 1stpersonshooter, aircombat/flightsim, adventure, or non-bloody games for kids under 13-14 years could choose Linux as a platform based on its game support. It just isn't there yet, not even by comparison to Mac--change could be coming but I see little evidence of it. No wonder they don't port to Linux: Video and 3dgraphics on X just plain stinks...why get blamed for lack of quality when its not your fault?)
As I say, the list could go on, but this is enough don't you think? Most people live with the Adobe stuff since more consumer oriented/priced photo mainpulation and management programs are out there and sometimes come bundled. We could talk about how great GIMP is, but then I'd have to remind you how retarded its UI is and how most people who aren't strongly motivated to use free software in the first place would just shake their heads and go buy something that works for them. People want to see a good fraction of the names on that list, yeah Those names...any substitutes are going to need to make a good reputation for themselves on one of the 2 already accepted desktop platforms. So netscape is a viable alternative to IE, as long as you don't push it. (no java, and don't expect that pages will always look as nice). StarOffice hasn't made a name for itself on Windows or Mac yet. Linux people would be smart to volunteer a lot of effort to make it better, crappy Sun license notwithstanding--but that's the kind of smarts they're generally known not to possess. Not to mention that printing in Linux is a lost cause. Scanning? O, surely you jest! (Why don't you Linux guys just delete parport modules? It's clear that you don't give a fuck about writing print filters for current model printers, and when there is a filter it generally looks like shit.)
In general, the lack of a centralized direction for the OS (meaning kernel plus everything else) means that complicated stuff stays complicated for Linux users instead of easy, as it's made for users of real operating systems. (Linux is just a kernel remember? It operates, but it ain't no system, as BSD people are fond to point out) Which pretty much disqualifies Linux as a desktop OS since lacking systematization it always falls down on integration and ease of use. If you have something going that allows you to do what you do from your Linux desk quickly and efficiently, it's because you spent time and figured out how to set it up that way for yourself. Good for you; but most people aren't ready to do this and don't particularly care to learn--why sould they?
Sure you can be constantly fiddling with desktop apps for Linux as you claim, I know I do this alot, too--but it's not the same stuff the masses know and want, and the "fiddling" part is not going to appeal to them--if it doesn't install with 3 clicks for default settings w/in 10minutes or so, they are just going to toss it.
This is incorrect. The "Yellow Box", now known as "Cocoa", is a set of frameworks (shared libraries + associated resources) that implement an Object-Oriented application environment, i.e, APIs. The APIs are exposed through both Objective-C and Java, though Java support is still incomplete and suffers from a few problems (such as the expense of crossing the Java-Objective-C "bridge", which is an amazing hack that literally bridges the two runtimes and permits (almost) transparent messaging). It is, therefore, as "native" as it gets, and the Way To Go (TM) for new applications, according to Apple. In fact, Cocoa applications exploit the full (very considerable) power of Mac OS X, and will probably run the fastest of the three environments that OS X supports (Cocoa, Carbon, Classic).
There are an incredible amount of devices out there that OSX will need to know about. XFree seems to be the only reasonable, fast way to get to that end.
OS X will have a device driver abstraction layer called the "IOKit". It provides all sorts of device-driver related services, kernel interfaces, etc., but in particular, it makes writing/porting drivers amazingly easy. It is part of Darwin, and the source is available. IMHO, all the free OSes out there should adopt IOKit, license issues permitting.
$100, $170, $80 -- these prices may be too high...
Gee, I dunno, once you see Aqua and a few well written apps running, you may change your tune. Remember, cool wins over reason every time :-)
As far as yellow box, the superior development tools, etc. -- all I can say is I work with forty developers, and none of us has ever used the mac interface for more than perhaps 5-10 minutes.
Well, Cocoa (nee YB) is not yet available on the mass market Mac OS (9) system, so I'm note sure what your developers thought they were using. It will be part of Mac OS X, and is part of Mac OS X Server right now. Also, I would not think much of any developer who makes up their mind about an entire application environment after "5-10 minutes" of use. Speaking as a ex Win32 hacking, ex straight-C-rulez slinging coder, I can tell you flat out that Cocoa is far beyond anything else in existence, except perhaps some very high-end SmallTalk environments. It is many dimensions removed from the JDK and similar crap (yes, crap).
It takes more than a few minutes to grok the "ness" of Cocoa, but once you get it, you will save many years of work for the same results, and have the warm Zen-like karma of Code Done Right (TM) flow through every particle of your being. I exaggerate only slightly :)
A Pentium III 500MHz's FPU can perform roughly 1.5-2.0 GFlops (now there are 1GHz Athlon and Pentium 3's). Why is it that you Apple freaks think that a performance index of 1GFlop is really that big of a deal. Hell, a PS2 operates at close to 7GFlops. Anyone got a spec on an Alpha?
Why does the Apple site say that the comparison is to the Pentium III 800MHz when the link to the actual benchmark on Intel's site says that its only a P3 400MHz? The numbers are even the same. I suggest you check your facts before so readily obeying Apple's marketing BS.
If Apple is really concerned about visual performance, then where are all of the real display adapters? There are no TNT2, TNT2 Ultra, GeForce256 or GeForce256 DDR AGP4X cards.
He says that he builds all binaries fat . This means that all programms can run on both x86/PPC simultaniously . Maybe Apple will really use x86 in the future ?
The 8086 came before the 8088. The 8086 can address 16-bits of data both internally and externally. The 8088 is like an "8086SX", capable of addressing 16-bits internally and only 8-bits externally.
You heard of SSE or 3DNow!2?
Apple's claims notwithstanding, the G4 has consistently failed to outperform the Pentium III on the SPEC CPU benchmarks. At the same frequency, the G4 is roughly as fast as the Pentium III (integer and floating-point), but it tends to lag in terms of clock speed, hence it tends to be slower overall.
With Intel's huge manufacturing advantage, and spurred on by AMD, the gap between the x86 and Alpha or PA-RISC is rapidly closing too. That isn't to say the RISC architectures aren't better than the x86, only that Intel's advantages in volume, R&D and manufacturing have been more than enough to offset the architectural advantages of RISC.
Doesn't matter. There's nothing that a G4+OSX can do that an 8-way P3 1GHz+BeOS can't do a hundred times faster.
If I could moderate you up, I would!
Widget themes constitute maybe one percent of a UI
Unless we're dealing with a REALLY lousy UI. Which Aqua is far from being. Look through some slashdot postings, or check Apple's sites, and have a look at some of the whitepapers, etc., about the services OS X offers.
For heaven's sake, you can hardly compare OS X, whose native text editing API includes (most famously) drag & drop insertion of graphics, blah blah blah, with Gnome/KDE, which have essentially no drag & drop insertion of anything, and utterly laughable implementations of such basic stuff as a clipboard (which doesn't apply to any non-whatever-DE apps anyway) just too lazy to log in. address righteous indignation to themark at visto dot com
Can you point to any independent results to back up this claim? I can point you to the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (http://www.spec.org), which has published benchmark results indicating a 500MHz G4 is about as fast as a 500MHz Pentium III.
Mind you, I'm not saying all CPUs running at the same frequency are equal, only that the latest Pentium and PowerPC CPUs happen to be. A 500MHz Alpha 21264 is quite a bit faster than either, and a 500MHz PA-RISC 8600 is considerably faster still.
If you would look a little more closely, the benchmarks are in clock cycles. It dosn't matter what PIII you are running it will take the same amount of clock cycles. The speed tells you how many clock cycles are in a second. For instance a 1GHz chip goes through 1 billion clock cycles per second. A 500MHz chip goes through 500 million clock cycles per second. The G4 is on average 3.52 times faster than a PIII according to clock cycles. Since a 500MHz G4's clock cycles take twice as long as a 1GHz PIII you have to half the 3.52 figure and you conclude that the G4 is 1.76 times faster.
RISC instruction set architectures (ISAs) are relatively simple, but modern implementations tend to be very complex, going through all sorts of hoops to present parallel-execution designs as serial ones. This is actually one of the things that motivated Intel's EPIC design. The idea is, rather than working in parallel while pretending to execute each instruction in a serial fashion, you explicitly expose parallelism in the ISA.
I wouldn't believe Apple either if the G4 was not classified by the US Government as a supercomputer (which limits exporting to certian countries). The sole requirement is to be able to sustain a gigaflop.
The 80286 was a 32-bit architecture interally, but only offered a 24-bit address space, and still used a brain-damaged memory access scheme based on 16-bit segments. The 80386 introduced a flat, 32-bit address space and data bus, along with an MMU, which made it possible to run modern operating systems on a PC (e.g. NT, UNIX).
The 68000 was unquestionably better than the 8088 or 8086, though it wasn't a full 32-bit CPU. The internal architecture was 32-bit, but it used a 24-bit address space and a 16-bit data bus. The 68020 introduced a 32-bit address space and data bus, but required a separate MMU, which was added to chip itself with the 68030.
The 80386 and 68030 were the CPUs that really brought minicomputer power to micros.
Erm, Windows has much better hardware support than Linux and XFree86.
What?? Are you sane? I dont think so. Maybe you are just confused. There is a difference between sustaining a gigaflop and theoretical peak gigaflops. I believe that you are referring to theoretical peak gigaflops. The G4 is the only, let me say that again, only desktop computer that can sustain a gigaflop. No not alphas P3s or athlons.
Go here for more info.
I'm wondering how many people currently buy a Mac because of the OS. When I bought my first Mac/512K [aka Fat Mac] the OS mattered. But the impression I get today is people are buying Macs because of the "cute" machines more then anything else. Outside of the special niche groups that have always used Macs for special tasks how many people are buying the systems for the OS? Does the OS really get your average computer user to buy Macs? Or is it the fashionable colours?
Why would Apple want to abandon Darwin for Linux? FreeBSD remains technologically ahead of Linux in virtually every area except SMP, and Apple's use of a Mach-based kernel gives it a huge head start in that area.
Quite honestly, the only think Linux has going for it is hype. From a technical perspective, it's a dog.
A particular device is about half as likely to have *BSD drivers as Linux drivers. And what's *BSD's realtime story?
RISC now relies on complicated pipelined logic, and CISC can now use the same optimizations and needs less instruction bandwidth.
x86 is sure prevalent for a "dead" architecture. In fact, I've never seen a screwdriver shop that sells anything else. When I can drive across town and buy PPC (or Alpha, or UltraSPARC, or whatever) chips and boards from two honest independent manufacturers (after backstabbing the cloners, breaking their Yellow Box for Intel promise, and breaking their OSX on NuBus promise, Apple certainly doesn't qualify) with better bang/buck that use commodity peripherals, I'll consider it.
Discounting the software won't help; just about everyone who can run it already has it. The rest of us are not about to go buy another computer just to try it out- I don't even have space for another computer! They have to either discount the hardware or stop treating it as a dongle and port their OS (since its interface is the real value they offer) to boxes people actually have.
Why is the old, and tired cut-n-paste thing always coming up? Lets look at a few scenarios (gnome specific, don't have a recent KDE to play with).
URL in my email (mutt, so it's running in a Gnome Terminal). Clicky-Click on the URL and up pops a Netscape window.
URL in an X-Chat session. Clicky-Click, up pops a Netscape window.
URL in a GnomeICU message. And so on..
And as for Gnome and KDE, they may be different projects, but they are definitely working together on a lot of things (like Window Manager hints as an example), so expect to see some standard.
score -1, flamebait
Um Curtis, why would anyone on a Mac care at all about using apps that are based on Xwindows?
Seriously, name me -=ONE=- app they should give a fuck about, please. I'm very interested to hear what you think those poor deluded buggers are all missing out on. Gnome and KDE may be looking better but that doesn't mean they're looking good. Please answer that question, despite what I'm about to tell you (I wonder could you be the last man in North America to have heard this?)
Anyone who just has to have Xwindows on Mac will be able to have it courtesy of John Carmack. Whether he is to be thanked, or committed for observation, is a debate for philosophers to chew on years hence--but not the fact of Xwindows on Mac. It is a fait accompli.
So you were saying something about all those wonderful (snort) X-based apps ?
>Apple on Intel would kill the ``magic''. ...true >Apple on Intel would kill the myth. ...true APPLE ON INTEL WOULD RESURRECT THE MONEY MAKING MACHINE!!! ===>Also true!
And the idea of a billion MacOS users is ludicrous. MacOS's share of the market is well under 10%, and I'd be amazed if there were a billion users of all the platforms put together.
The school board removed evolution from the curriculum. In Kansas, citizens can now be considered "educated" without even a vague familiarity (which need not correspond to belief) with conventional genetics and archæology.
In other words, Yellow Box (AFAICT Cocoa is just Yellow Box dumbed down enough to be usable with Java instead of requiring ObjC) technically exists but nobody can afford to get it.
gimme a G4 anyday
I Like the MacOS. I am very very comfortable with it, you might say I have "Skilz" with it. It is the most productive platform for me in that I can use it to get the most work done with it quickly. It's my right hand.
I see good and bad in MacOSX, and I am plaining on being a slow adopter, simply because blue box or no, Pre-emptive whatever or no, 2Ghz hardware or just 500mhz, it is not the classic MacOS that currently enables me to do so much.
The last *really* nice Apple hardware, IMO, was the 8500. Have you ever tryed to install more ram. Major pain everywere. Otherwize nice and cozy.
PS: There's also the advantage that a lot of open source work is done on PC's. If Darwin's available for PC's, then one could hope that more work will be done for it, if it's also available on PC's.
Hey, since all we're really talking about here is the future then lets talk about motorola's next processor (the G4e) against Intels next. the G4 already has better proformace clock for clock than intel/AMD (without AltiVec) and the G4e has more than twice the proformace of the G4 (without AltiVec) how much better than the PIII is intels next? Intels has never had that big of a jump has it? and what about when they're compared to the G4e with altivec? Intels next will have to have like 100GHz to compare to all of the G4e with AltiVec.
And given that BSD is the base of Mac OS X, it looks like browser_war_pow thinks BSD is 2-3 years ahead of Linux.
YEs, but you *WILL* be running BSD on it...in the form of Mac OS X.
Now that's quite stupid. Do you feel that a smaller market share means they are dying? Come on. Yes, they have a smaller market share, and that's fine. Apple has not focused on dominating the PC market, they have been focusing on recovering from almost going out of business, and they've been doing quite a good job.
Hey, remember 5 years ago when no one had heard of Linux and it had a tiny market share? Did that mean that windows clinched the market? Linux still has a very small market share in overall computing. THere's plenty of room out there, and no reason why there can't be more than one platform on the market. MacOS may always have a small market share, but as long as they are profitable and sales figures are good, who really cares?
Apple has already lost the platform war. The "whole computer" business model (closed hardware and software tied together) died years ago. No matter how good MacOS X is, it won't be a big seller as long as it is only available on Apple hardware. Sure, MacOS X will probably generate enough temporary excitement to bump up Apple's market share a couple percent for a year or two like the iMac did. But that still doesn't change the fact that Apple's business model will keep them on a long term downward trend. In terms of market share, Linux is likely to grow far more rapidly than OS X and push OS X further and further into a niche market. IMHO, the only thing Apple can do to avoid a long, slow decline is to release OS X for x86. At this point, I don't even think opening up the PPC hardware market will help much.
And isn't the core of OS X based on NextStep, which was available for (and from what I understand quite stable and very nice on) x86?? Seems to me that the leap of OS X from PPC to x86 wouldn't be all that difficult. I know I'd at least install it and see how it ran...
you're an idiot
When are you Apple zealots going to realize you are the only market for Apple products that will be left in a couple years unless Apple changes. Apple needs to expand their market share to survive, which means they need to sell to people with different attitudes than yours; people who base their decisions on objectivity rather than platform zealotry. Do you want Apple to be confined to a tiny niche market composed of people like yourself, or do you want to see Apple change their business model and grow?
What are the moderators thinking? The scores they assign to these posts appear to be randomly generated. MODERATE THIS POST UP!!!
They don't have to support all the thousands of legacy devices. They could bundle their OS with well-built well-tested Apple branded hardware and support only devices they are already supporting on the PPC side. They would not sell the OS by itself but bundled with their hardware, whether PPC or X86 based. I think that could be a winning business model for them.
Compiling Darwin for x86 is not a big step! For fuck's sake, Mach was ported to x86 eons ago. OpenStep was running on x86 a long time ago as well. OS X Server (and thus an earlier version of Darwin) was running on x86 last year. So this announcement is hardly groundbreaking. Besides, all he did was compile Darwin. He didn't even try to run it, much lest test it. Finally, Darwin isn't an OS - it's just a kernel. It probably makes up only a percent or two of the total OS X code base.
Its things like this that make me relize how stupid most "users" are. Check apple's stock history, check their holdings history, AMD and Intel have had worse times then apple has. I'm not bashing anybody here, I run Mac Os, Windows 98 SE, Windows 2000, and RHLinux. Just because you think you have a clue doesn't mean that you do. =+)
everything linux does? thats a blanket statement that is hard to qualify. i think normal humans will be confused by it. i've used it, apple has been giving me development copies for close to a year now. Its good, definitely better than the old 20 year old operating system it was running on. I didn't know linux was lacking desktop software. I can't find enough free time to install and play with all the stuff I'd like to. when people universally are willing to pay twice as much for having less choice, then OS X will win. I won't be crossing my fingers. I don't know why everyone's all competetive and stuff. everyone wants to declare "my os kicks ass and its better than yours" there's room for all of them in this market, and for specific needs people will choose their specific operating system. I use MacOS, win2k, Linux, and FreeBSD on my systems. I'd like to play with BeOS and OS X some more, but as a technologist its dangerous (and really stupid) of me to lay all my eggs in one basket. I would be bored if I didn't have 3-4 OS's to play with.
If OS X ran on x86, hoards of programmers would recompile every open source app they could think of to run on it.
If you're recompiling, the CPU doesn't really matter.
Then Apple could use the huge application base as a marketing gem.
And they would sacrifice the ability to run current Mac software at a decent speed.
Finally they sell bazillions of copies of their easy-to-use OS with all the power and stability of BSD and Linux.
The CPU doesn't have much to do with the stability of the operating system. OS X will be BSD based, so the stability should be there anyway.
So, having a full MacOS run on x86 (meaning Intel, AMD and Crusoe)
If Apple wanted to run on Crusoe, I'm sure they could convince Transmeta to emulate the PPC instead of the x86.
IMHO, would give Apple a pretty huge oppertunity to make a ton of money from all the people who already have a computer but are fed up with Windows and don't have the know how to install Linux or just want somthing new.
For this to work, you would need:
-An open source software library written completely in x86 assembly and offering superior equivalents of every Mac program.
-Someone who doesn't like Windows, doesn't know how to install Linux, and somehow knows about the above hypothetical library.
Quality and style are two different things.
Personally, I wouldn't pay an extra $1 for a cool looking case. To me, functionality is the only thing that matters in computer hardware. Many of the more reputable x86 vendors (e.g. Dell) provide cases that are as high quality and as thoughfully designed as Apple's. So IMHO, when people talk of Apple's superiority in design, I interpret it to mean a superiority in style. I can understand that style is important to some people - but a 30% premium is way to much to pay for style.
Where I'm from, each machine is affordable to the average person, unless you work at McDonald's or something.
Apple announced that they would not be making OS X for Intel. They did not announce that YellowBox for Intel is dead.
If you buy a copy of WebObjects for NT, you get Yellow Box for Intel. It's not dead yet.
They said they would be releasing it for Intel when they get rid of the dependancy on Display Postscript, because they want to release it free of royalties. They've got Quarts on OS X now, but I don't know what they will do for Win95/NT.
Hahaha, i'm guessing you haven't seen the Keynotes... Becuase of the money they have invested and other various things... They have made more money off of streaming media... than ANY of the other companies...
What is your reference for these points?
Awwww. Diddums.
*beats head against keyboard* has NOONE here heard of DriverKit/IOKit? you write your drivers in ObjC using generic classes they have already written, and just extend off of those classes with your own, and apparently drivers can be designed/written in relatively little time with very few people involved (good driver/system coders of which Im sure Apple has many.) Even though there are a ton of different types of hardware for peecee's, DriverKit drivers could (if people had the interest) come out very quickly and frequntly
Also, they dont own Mach (last *I* checked anyway) and Mach has existed on x86 much longer than it has for PowerPC, so getting Darwin and even all of OSX on x86 is a non-issue, assuming Apple would release it
"There is no spoon"-Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!"-The Tick, The Tick
Sorry, I'm maybe not following this to closely, but I wonder if It is goning to be GPL'ed and if it is going to run Linux binarys like FreeBSD etc.
While it doesn't initially appear to work into Apple's plan, I think that Mac OS X/Intel is the next logical direction. I'll explain that as well as I can here.
Recently, as most people here I'm sure already know, Apple has been having major problems getting G4 chips that run at a reasonable speed; the 500 MHz G4s, which were supposed to be around in August, only arrived recently, while the 550 MHz and 600 MHz G4s we were supposed to have by now Motorola is now saying are impossible with the current design. If Motorola continues to have problems with this, it's in Apple's best interest to ensure that Mac OS X can run on a variety of platforms. Since Mac OS X can go wherever Darwin can go (you can actually swap different versions of Darwin right out from under Mac OS X, if you had need, for instance, of a file system that Mac OS X didn't support). So by porting Darwin to Intel, the biggest platform at the moment, Apple is making sure they're ready if they have to switch platforms soon.
As part of this step, Apple may well decide to release Mac OS X for Intel. While Mac OS X is definitely going to be a big thing, a good amount of that big thing is the backwards compatibility that Mac OS X provides via Classic and Carbon -- things you don't get on the Intel side. Intel users would only have Cocoa applications, and, at the moment, there just aren't that many. That, however, could play in favor of Apple. With few initial applications, Apple could release Mac OS X for Intel without worrying about it cutting into their hardware sales in the near future. It would be a way to test the waters without causing major problems. If people really seem to like Mac OS X for Intel, Apple could quickly begin turning Mac OS X/Intel into a major product in preparation to bail out of the PowerPC platform.
I have no idea if this is actually what's going through the minds at Cupertino, but I can certainly believe that it would be, and if it is then we're very likely to see Mac OS X/Intel in July as well as Mac OS X/PPC.
To anybody at Slashdot who will listen,
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.
Please don't try to tell other people what they should do. Almost everything you've said about the APSL is *wrong*, and the Spindletop icons have absolutely *nothing* to do with the APSL.
You sound like a freak with a small brain and a big mouth.
Sans doubt, Jobs says no.
> Is Motorola incompetent?
Short answer: yes. Remember Iridium?
OS X is the only operating system I can say that I'd actually go out and buy. It actually looks like a quality OS for both users and developers. I can't say that about BeOS due to the lack of available software.. most importantly Office & either IE or Netscape.
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.
Funny whenever there's a thread on Apple everyone jumps in to play marketeer. Who knew technical folks had this much marketing knowledge and background? Incredible. Maybe it's time to revise that old saw: "Marketing opinions are like geeks: everyone has one."
/. reader. Joe Schmo PC user? Nobody cares about him. He's dust, history. If he buys, that's great. If he doesn't, who cares? He's a sucker. Consumers suck, and Joe's no different.
/., being a bunch of basically reactionary folks (geeks), will be the last to know.
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 and MacOS applications would have a hard time working on x86 hardware because of endianess (byte-ordering) problems. On x86, a 4-byte word is ordered little-to-big, on 68K it was big-to-little. The PPC can run in either mode, but MacOS uses it in big-endian mode. It's true that careful programming can make software bi-endian, but trust me, nobody bothers with this. Converting the software, especially an operating system, for different byte orientation, would be a major piece of work.
We sure do see IBM dominating the PC industry today don't we! Sure is a good thing IBM let 3rd parties into the market. It helped launch the industry but successfully cut them out of most of it.
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.
To anybody at Apple who will listen,
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.
http://www.apple.com/jobs/openings/
Unlike in the 1980s when Apple was in its heyday, software is now where the real money is being made.
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!
I usually just buy stuff without paying too much attention to cost (hey, the economy is movin'). You can get a G4/64MB/10 GB/DVD with firewire, usb, agp graphics, wireless attenae(sp?), etc. for $1,600. How much would a decent intel box with similar specs cost? I don't want some no name cheap box with crappy components but something with on-site 1 year hardware warranty, etc. like the mac plus a decent firewire implementation, dual usb powered busses, plus it has to have a bit of style. What is a guy lookin' at for a quality Intel box? Looking at Dell, Compaq, etc. the Mac only seems at most 5% more but has more style and tighter, better working hardware. Am I crazy? I just want a reasonable answer...I don't think 30% is anywhere near the truth. An equivalent PIII >750 mhz seems to be in the $2,500 range with firewire, etc. Could the mac be cheaper? I might actually want to buy a Mac and chuck my Compaq...
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.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I guess MacOS X has to move to X86 because of the physical laws of the universe that dictate that the standard be the worst possible instruction set in existance. I suspect we'll still be stuck with it (or some ungodly VLIW/x86 kludge) until someone comes up with a chip for interpreting intercal bytecode.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I thought it was from the Blue Yellow & Pink cards ;)
:(
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,
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
>The G4 can do, on average, calculations in 1/4 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.
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.
I have never seen any link to any government document classifying a single 'G4' based system to be un-exportable.
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.
God no. Pay attention. I said I'm recompiling Slackware on it. :)
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.
I was rather looking forward to snagging a copy of MacOS X Client when it becomes available and playing with it on mojo (my iMac). "Cool," thought I, "FreeBSD with shiny widgets. That should be fun to toy with on mojo, when it's not busy recompiling Slackware." Then I started paying attention a little more and found out it's based on Mach. Yes-- what I really want, guys, is to take a perfectly good operating system (BSD) and kick its ass into slow mode by running it on top of Mach. Why does Jobs keep pushing that damned kernel on people? Unless I further read that Mach has recently become blazingly (nay, transparently) fast (perhaps due to a recent discovery of some alien microkernel technology) I think I'll not even bother with MacOS X.
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.
- Mali
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.
- Mali
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 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.
- Mali
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.)
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
I'm sure you wouldn't have any trouble convincing anyone who was smart enough to buy AAPL at 13 bucks a share...
Quartz (OS X's brand new imaging subsystem) would probably suffer a more noticable performance drop, given the extensive use of transparency.
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
IAAL,BIANLY
You forget that Darwin/OS X are built on a BSD core. All they have to do is use the BSD drivers- which are free, well tested, and available for a huge number of platforms. Now, graphics drivers will be a different issue (since OS X doesn't use Xfree) but motherboards, HDs, etc., so on, so forth, have all already been done for Apple. That's one of the beauties (for them) of basing things on a BSD platform. Don't be surprised if that has been in the works all along.
~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.
IAAL,BIANLY
Darwin (and therefore OS X)is BSD on PPC, with some additional stuff thrown on top. Recompiling Mac Classic apps may not be possible (depending on how abstracted the Classic emulation layer is) but recompiling OS X apps should be the equivalent of "./configure, make all, make install" which is all it takes to recompile well-written Unix apps on other Unices, including Darwin, Be, Next, Linux, and BSD. Geez... get a clue.
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
You may know that a 500 MHz G4 is faster than a 1 GHz PIII but the vast majority of computer buyers don't have a clue. Until that changes, Apple has to want (and Motorola had damn well better start supplying) faster chips, because it is going to continue to be difficult to sell Apples otherwise.
~tieguy
IAAL,BIANLY
>The G4 can do, on average, calculations in 1/4
>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.
Someone moderate this up. It's the first post I've seen that makes sense.
More like 800MHz G4+,
But, hopefully not only mac but also for the POP guys.
-- kolla
Just a note on your Sun switching to PowerPC thing. They did actually, there WAS a full port of Solaris 2.x (.6 was the last one I saw shreds of outside of Sun) to the PowerPC processor.
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.
Somewhat amusing incident:
Purchased the high end G3 workstation with SCSI. Good, right? Wrong. Stupid ass SCSI card caused jaz drive to corrupt data half way through copying, and refused to work with a nice US$10,000 scanner. Had to swap the card with a spare one sitting around. It wasn't just a bad card either, their was a known problem with the card working with many popular devices.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Look at Linux and Windows 2000. They both support almost every bit of PC hardware under the sun, but yet you still hear people bitching about how they can't get their Winmodem working, or their crappy label printer or business card scanner doesn't work.
Apple would be foolish to try to support Wintel hardware -- "Wah! my GeForce doesn't work!", "Wah! ATA-66 doesn't work", "Wah! It doesn't support my overclocked Taiwanico motherboard!" People even bitched about OpenStep's hardware support and it was an extremely nitch market system that was only sold to people that presumably knew what they were doing.
So, Apple could make their own x86 boxes, or they could pay Gateway to do it for them. But if you could only run MacOS on a small number of Apple certified boxes, what's the f-ing point?
99% of iMac buyers could care less what CPU is inside of their magic box. And most G4 buyers only care that it's faster than the G3, not that it's faster than the Pentium III or that it's slower than the DEC Alpha
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The built-in SCSI in even later Macintoshes like the 8600 was only Fast SCSI-2 at 10MB/s. That's the same as what shipped with the Mac IIfx eight years eariler. Pretty sad -- if you wanted real SCSI performance you needed to buy an upgrade card anyway.
Shipping ATA/USB/1394 is a better solution for the average consumer. For those who still need SCSI, Apple ships an Adaptec U2W card.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Remember, three-quarters of Apple's current models of computers (iMac, iBook, PowerBook) use G3s, which don't have AltiVec. Only the high-end G4 desktops have it, so they're going to be losing the AltiVec boost even on their own hardware. Clearly it's something that's cool and helpful but not necessary for X.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Continous Speech Voice Rec.
IBM's ViaVoice.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
OpenStep (the precursor to MacOS X) was available both on NeXT boxes running 68000-series processors and on Intel boxes. For the most part, getting software to run on both was just a matter of a simple recompile! The only reason your software wouldn't recompile and work the first time across multiple platforms is if the writers are lazy or brain-dead. The only significant issue in this case (since the OSes are identical) is endianness, and that is not terribly difficult to solve. Most free Linux software works with just a recompile on a LinuxPPC system, and the reasons that commercial Linux software isn't on other platforms may include malice or stupidity, but certainly not difficulty.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
IBM is right in this case. I have tried ViaVoice, and it is indeed continuous. It has difficulty with accuracy, but that supposedly gets better over time. There's no need to..talk..like..this, you can just blab away and it goes right along with you.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
The latest news from the LinuxPPC camps suggests that Altivec helps a lot. Numbers in their press releases suggest 150 to 300 percent on average with peaks of 10 times faster than unoptimized code. Since this is not coming from Apple I suggest that it is fairly credible and the numbers are accurate. Is it so hard to believe that Darwin would benefit from Altivec optimization too?
I will be extremely interested in performance numbers released with OS X ships. Since a G3 and G4 differ primarily in Altivec inclusion, gains should be easy to see if there is a benefit. Personally I expect to be quite impressed and maybe even a little shocked.
As for the performance of X86 compatible processors in comparison to PPC chips, I don't see it really coming down to the Altivec core making up for megahertz. I also don't see it as being necessary. FWIW the Specmarks for Int and FP on a 500 mhz G4 isn't so far off those of a 1 ghz Athalon (which is arguably faster than a PIII). It is easier to go from 500 to 800 mhz than it is to go from 1 to 1.3 ghz.
-jon
The truth will set you free.
The 8500 case sucked rocks. Ever try to do a "quick" upgrade only to find out that the entire logic board needed to be removed first. Lining that thing up again was a pain to say the least. Finally whoever designed the case with it's dorky slide forward shell should be shot. The little tabs at the bottom of the case would easily get stuck and mangled by the top half of the case when sliding it into place.
In contrast my G3 and G4 systems are a marvel of engineering. It is easy to access almost every component of the computer and for the not so faint of heart while the machine is running even. It's not the first time I've said this, and I'm sure it won't be the last time, however I find it difficult to believe Apple will be able to eclipse this current case design.
If and when they do however, I will be standing in line for my new Mac. I've just had enough with companies that make crap and expect people to by it because of the name. I used to count on Sony to deliver quality products, and now I can find dozens of serious faults and flaws with every item they make. Apparently quality control and assurance in addition to customer feedback is no longer practiced. Unfortunately most companies are in the same boat, sacrificing quality and design for one more nickel here or a few pennies there. Currently Apple and a few other companies are like a breath of fresh air in a world were people have been duped into expecting crap, and have even (it seems) come to like it.
If you are really interested in an impressive case, I suggest the Quadra 605 and or any machine based on the IIcx form factor. They look utilitarian, but they are functional, and I have yet to slice myself open on a plastic case...
-jon
The truth will set you free.
So what?
As long as any GPL code is self-contained and (re)released under its own license, IT DOESN'T MATTER whether the GPL, APSL, BSD, or YAFSL are compatible!
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
I bought the Mac for The graphics, my wife has the Mac for the music. You should see her producers G4 based studio. I run Linuxppc for the hell of it.
I was going to buy a windows machine but they looked so cheaply made, the interface was ugly and angular. I studied both Apple, and MS, and I liked the culture of the Apple community more than MS. The Mac os seemed to be for the creative arts, whereas Windows seemed to be for bean counters. I went to Linux when it appeared Gates was going to give the death blow to Apple. Been dual booting since then. I use Windows at work and hate it intensley.
photosMy Photostream
There is also Crusoe. Apple handhelds, iBooks or even powerbooks would be just fine for that chip. OSX is the holy grail, a user friendly UNIX distro. You know that when it hits the street, you guys will head for CompUSA to see what it does. You won't be able to resist it. All those UNIX/Linux/BSD apps are just a compile away under OSX. Does W2000 come with Apache? Let's see, what OS's are left out there that are not based on a Nix?
photosMy Photostream
Darwin is simply the Mach kernel, renamed. This kernel has been available on x86 processors for some time now (OpenStep/NeXT, OS X's ancestor, used the Mach kernel).
... although this is just my uneducated opinion :)).
I actually have a Rhapsody for x86 dev release lying around somewhere, and from my experience it was simply OpenStep recompiled with a Mac-like widget set. And from what I've read about OS X, it is still quite similar to Rhapsody, except for the upper software layers which have been redesigned. So it would not surprise me a great deal if Apple one day ported its OS X software to x86 (especially since Mac and PC architecture seem so similar nowadays
If I may be allowed to read this back to you:
"I'm always surprised at how little you people seem to know the issues involved"
"If Apple ever did switch processors, it surely would not be to Intel. They might decide to go with AMD"
"Intel is far too tightly intertwined with Microsoft to be viable."
You mean the other non-x86 processors that AMD is working on? I know I'm nitpicking at your otherwise fine posting.
The party's over
Exactly!
An Apple machine running an x86 proc does not an x86 compatible system make. The mobo in such a mythical beast could even run a lot of the hardware that exists in a typical x86 system and still not be x86 compatible. Black Box, if you will forgive the pun.
Apple could easily start production of an AMD-based machine and still maintain control. They'd simply have to make sure that such systems aren't sold piecemeal, that I couldn't just go down to Computerstop and buy a $300 mobo and move all of my hardware into it.
Remember, the G3 and G4 procs are used in Apples, but they are not Apple processors. It sounds like things have not and may not be too rosy with IBM and Motorola. I think they're still miffed that the only customer [so far] for the chips is Apple.
I'm a die-hard x86 user, but I'd be first in line for such a machine.
The party's over
"The people who read/respond here are mostly *NOT* users of windows. "
That's kind of an assinine thing to say. I'd say there's probably a large segment of us that run MacOS and Linux, or Windows and Linux; people too cynical to run only one OS.
I don't believe everything my employer says
The party's over
You're sure nostalgic for the golden age of hardware. Do you miss your Commodore 64? :-)
Commodity hardware has always sucked. Personally, I think Apple hardware still sucks a bit less than PC hardware.
An important point you seem to be missing is this: most people do not have the time, the inclination, or the wherewithal to do the considerable amount of research and self-education necessary to build an SMP box out of parts for less than $1000. Most people don't know what SMP is, and don't really care about it's already severely limited applications anyway. To really take advantage of that SMP box, you need to run a Unix... it doesn't take much awareness to understand that mainstream computer buyers simply don't care about this.
Yes, Apple uses cheaper components than they used to. That's how they brought their prices down. They are still a cut above most major PC vendors when it comes to integration and quality, not to mention that a lot of people are happy to pay $100 extra for the spiffy case. The iBook line, for instance, is really a much better deal in hardware-only terms than any of the Intel-based offerings. This is also pretty easy to see if you can get out of the "Apple is dead" mindset long enough to see it.
Other considerations:
If you want to run MacOS for some reason, Apple is clearly the only choice.
"Market share." A bogus measurement any way you slice it, but Apple is still the only major desktop hardware vendor whose market share is growing. If they suck much, why are they doing so well all of a sudden?
Hey, those must be some good drugs.
"I'll have what he's having."
Let's all take this opportunity to pledge fealty to the One True Software License, the Holiest of Holies, the Gee Pee Ell!
Surely the omnipotent and omniscient Stallman will grant our wishes to see the demise of the infidels, who hold other license above the Gee Pee Ell!
You have no concept of how broad the computer hardware and software market is. Apple does not make "high-end hardware". Not even mid-range, although that could change with Mac OS X.
everything linux does? thats a blanket statement that is hard to qualify.
What's so difficult about it? It's a Unix OS. It'll have an optional BSD command line, and probably an X-Window port as well.
i think normal humans will be confused by it. i've used it, apple has been giving me development copies for close to a year now.
None of which had anything even resembling OS X's final interface until the most recent developer preview. Even that is missing quite a bit. You can hardly judge ease of use from developer previews.
Its good, definitely better than the old 20 year old operating system it was running on. I didn't know linux was lacking desktop software. I can't find enough free time to install and play with all the stuff I'd like to.
Linux most certainly is lacking in desktop software. Anyone who doesn't notice doesn't have very typical needs. Linux currently lacks even such basic things as a decent web browser. And the most important desktop software Linux is missing is, of course, a desktop environment that normal people can use. GNOME and KDE don't cut it yet. You still need to fall back on the CLI.
when people universally are willing to pay twice as much for having less choice, then OS X will win.
This "less choice" thing is a myth. The Mac is not something that restricts choice, it is simply another choice. For many people, it is the right choice.
It also isn't anywhere close to twice as expensive these days. Moreover, the initial cost of hardware or software is almost insignificant as part of the bigger picture, if your time is worth anything (this is one of the reasons the "It's free!" argument for Linux isn't as effective as the "it's reliable!" argument people should be concentrating on).
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You wouldn't have to support all of that hardware, just a subset. In fact, if Apple made Intel boxes itself (or talked, say, Dell into building a box just for OS X), it would be just as easy to deal with as Apple's current PPC hardware. The advantages are:
1) Cheaper hardware (Apple could just buy logicboards rather than designing them, etc.)
2) You could run Windows at full speed in a VM if you needed some Windows program.
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Mac OS X is pretty damned revolutionary.
It'll do everything Linux does. It'll usable by normal humans (more so that Window 98, in fact). It'll have the most powerful OO API the world has ever seen (inherited from NeXT). It'll have a graphics engine that blows everything else out of the water. It'll have QuickTime. It'll have OpenGL.
And on top of all that, it'll have enough software to actually make it a viable desktop OS, which is something Linux still can't say (though things are certainly getting better for it).
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Moreover, Apple doesn't make that much profit on a box. If you take a recent quarter in which Apple had no one time losses, and divide profits (minus one time gains) by boxes sold, you find that Apple can't be making more than about ~$130 per computer, and could be making quite a bit less (since hardware isn't Apple's only source of income). If Apple were to sell Mac OS X for Intel for $200 a copy, it wouldn't matter if it cannibalized a Mac sale. That's $200 profit (since Apple has to developer OS X for its own computers anyway, OS X's development cost isn't a factor here) minus whatever the Intel port costs Apple to maintain (which probably isn't that much; OS X is very portable).
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Most of the people buying higher end systems buy them for the OS. Apple makes most of it's money from high-end hardware sales.
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I'm well aware of the range of the computer market. I am speaking within the context of the personal computer market. Apple doesn't currently have hardware products in any other.
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Incorrect, sir.
Win32 apps will likely NOT run on OS X for Intel, should it ever happen. Do Win32 apps, by default, run on your Linux box? Not without emulation software...
Beyond that, most of the magic of the Mac OS is the tight integration between hardware and software. Personally, I would prefer to keep my Mac *and* the Mac OS.
woof!
Darwin is the BSD layer being used under Mac OS X. You can find out more about Darwin here.
Mac OS X on Intel is financial suicide. Sales of the Mac OS are NOT Apple's main source of revenue. In fact, they don't really make that much profit off of it at all. Their main money maker is hardware. Similarly, Microsoft makes most of their money off of Office and their server products.
While Apple could potentially gain a significant chunk of marketshare for moving to Intel, they would cannibalize 90% of their revenue in doing so. They'd have to capture a significant majority of the market to recover the loss. Due to the network effect and an even more severe lack of Intel Mac apps than PPC Mac apps, it would be a serious bomb in the market. As another person said, Apple should order their corporate coffin after making that move.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
[i]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.[/i]
:)
FINALLY somebody gets it! People in the Linux world sometimes forget that most human beings can't just go off and write their own device drivers.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Once there is an X server out for OS X, which really shouldn't take long, you should be able to get X11 apps compiled for OS X as well.
There is MaX and I believe John carmack ported it too.
You seem to forget that Microsoft owns a great share of Apple's stock now. Therefore, Apple's profit == Microsoft's profit.
Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
Many of the comments here have focused on whether or not Apple will/should release OS X for Intel. However, there are other possibilities, such as this one: How possible (or desirable) would it be for someone to take Darwin for Intel and build another open-source OS around it?
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Err, the problem is that I don't think MacOS-X is built on top of X-Windows, so with an Intel port they'd have to write new video drivers from scratch... not an easy thing.
Ahhh. So how would a EV6 500MHz Alpha Compare against a 500MHz G4. I'd love to see some benchmarks. Peter
www.alphalinux.org
>Apparently, the majority of Apple's profits come from their mildly over-priced hardware.
How is it overpriced? Sure if you take the raw parts it's more expensive a cheapass PC of equivalent power. However your cheapass PC is just that. Apple's box are well built and with a nice design, I don't think they are over priced if you compare them with quality PCs.
Now, what could be regreted is the lack of competition and availability of really cheap (design as well as price) G4 boxes...
SGI didn't switch to x86, they simply developed a separate Pentium NT line along with some fancy LCD monitors to go with them. Now they're dropping the NT boxes like hot potatoes and firesaling the LCD screens. (they have Mac drivers for the PCI cards so they marketed them to that crowd as well.)
If Apple were to make that switch now, just on the verge of releasing OS X, they might as well just order that corporate coffin.
Ummm... you're comparing obsolete PC hardware (AMD doesn't even manufacture 500 MHz chips any more) to the top-of-the-line Apple/Motorola hardware.
That's a pretty sad comparison. Are you awake that you can buy a 700 MHz Athlon for around $250 from any good online store? The 800 MHz Athlon is only $500, and it's available in large quantities.
Multiprocessor Intel motherboards are very easy to find (Asus, Tyan, Supermicro, and Iwill all make very high quality dual BX and GX boards). I'd like to see your 500 MHz G4 supercomputer compete again a quad processor 600 MHz Xeon/2MB cache.
Apple hardware is not that good, nor is it all that fast. Apple uses deceptive benchmarks.
Why do we want Mac OS X running on PC hardware? Its long been known to assembly programers and hardware designers that the PowerPC (and previous Motorola 68000 processors) were far superior to the Intel x86 family from their birth in the early 80's. The 68000 series was designed with 32 bits of memory address (4 gigs of RAM!) in 1980! Intel foolishly left only 16 bits of memory addressing space (64k) causing them to continually change addressing modes to make up for their lack of forsight. Only because intel is unwilling to give up their stranglehold on 32 bit processors have they failed to release a new processor that would "fix" these historical problem.
Granted, all this will be made irrelevant by the release of Motorola and Intel 64-bit processors coming soon to the server market, which are *not* backward compatable, and hence will have none of the inherent historical issues. But for the present, I see absolutly no reason to desire Mac OS X to run on x86 processors, its perfectly happy where it is, as you said, "if its not broken don't fix it."
Spyky
If Apple did move to x86, they would do this:
Create a closed x86 platform of their own, and it would not be able to boot the typical x86 OSes. Of course, there would be some Linuxes that would adapt.
It would be based on the AMD Athlon line because there is a strong AMD-Motorola relationship that would be a solid bridge across to x86.
Overall, I think that Motorola and IBM have been stalled because they are looking to do a big leapfrog with the PowerPC, probably using Copper technology that will be shared with AMD.
Yet, I cannot understand how it could be so hard to get a Risc process up to 1 GHz, since they are relatively simple in design, it just makes no sense.
E C
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
i guess it takes a little more than "just a recompile" to get os x running on intel hardware, but even if not, i don't think this is such a good idea. just look at what has happened to be: they stopped building their own boxes and are now reduced to "another os nobody uses".
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
From what I remember, Apple was more or less resurrected by Jobs by concentrating Apple on four things. Hopefully tangents such as this won't bring a second downfall to a company that's made it so far through so much.
I suspect that Apple will very quietly position Darwin on Intel as a server OS only. MacOSX Server is going away to be replaced with a modified version of client from what I hear. They could try to keep Darwin on Intel as the basis of an Intel based server.
I don't think Apple will be directly supporting Darwin on Intel, but if they let WebObjects run on it they could keep development quietly moving forward.
I doubt anything will happen on Intel until the Cocoa/Yellow Box environment gets more support though. And that's likely 1-2 years away from heavy pushing. Right now Apple wants developers to carbonize their apps, but Cocoa is where the future lies.
People in this forum seem unaware that what has become OS/X (and which started out as NeXTStep) has actually run on Intel hardware from the beginning. (Remember, it was based on NeXTStep, which already ran in Intel machines!)
Quite some time ago (1997 or so) a friend of mine who had been on workterm at Apple came back with a machine running this OS (which at the time sported a very bizzare blend of NeXT and Apple GUI elements!) But it wasn't his PowerMac that was running it - it was an intel box.
(How do I know for sure? Well, admittedly the other OS he *usually* ran on the machine was BeOS, which of course proves nothing. But he had Windows installed on it too, and last I checked windows *didn't* run on PPC hardware!)
I'm not sure whether the future OS X was even able to run on PPC hardware at that time - IIRC, the port was in progress, but was not yet usable. So the answer to the question as to whether OS X will run on Intel is almost certainly yes. Whether they will release it or not is of course another question.
> however they wanted the 32-bit processor for a next generation computer (before the first was out), so intel changed their 8088 and made the 8086 over the course of a weekend
The 8088 and 8086 are NOT a 32 bit cpu.
Intel didn't even HAVE a 32-bit cpu until the 80286 which happened MUCH later.
>> And what is this giberish about no Linux apps?
>> Shush your Mac freak whimpering! Corel will have
>> DRAW and Paint out for Linux soon.
You say that like it's a good thing...
Ever try converting a CorelDraw doc into Illustrator? Not fun. I've played with CorelPaint... Not even close to touching Photoshop. It's airbrush introduces lots of maching. Draw does some interesting things, but I wouldn't risk a clients job on it. Just wait for Adobe to port to Linux. Oh wait, they have to complete those OS-X ports first.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
You're assuming all that software that is missing on BeOS would be ported from MacOS-PPC. The big one, MS Office, would almost certainly *not* be ported, as an x86 MacOS would be directly competing with Windows.
Part of the beauty of MacOS X is that you can insert compatibility layers into it. For example, you can run MacOS 9 in a window, for software not written entirely to Carbon, and can run Carbonized software and take advantage of the memory management and multitasking in MacOS X.
I do not see running existing MacOS apps on Intel (Carbon or otherwise), but I could easily see software written for MacOS X being compiled fat to run on both PowerPC and Intel. Plug in a compatibility layer for Windows (maybe using the SoftWindows code as a start point) and you would be able to run Windows s/w much like the current Mac software runs on MacOS X for PowerPC.
This would certainly be a direct threat to Windows, and as a result I suspect that Apple's decision to do this or not would largely depend on the outcome of the anti-trust trial.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I think Apple does want to see Darwin run on Intel, but not OS X (for reasons others have mentioned).
The advantage of (only) Darwin running on Intel: They'd continue to share and thus receive input from the BSD world, improving their Darwin base for OS X for free. All behind the scenes software (i.e. non-GUI, server type software) would profit from this.
The advantage for BSD is also to receive improvements (SMP, gcc extentions) to incorporate into their own variants like FreeBSD. Not to run the full OS X (would be nice, but Apple won't allow it).
So it is a normal open source thing for mutual benefit, but only at the (low) Darwin level.
You're right for application software, but system software (i.e. the operating system) tends to become cheap or even free these days.
Even a succesful company like SUN, who are not in a difficult position at all, now give away their OS to support hardware sales (and also applications on that hardware).
Beos is another example. Prices of other OSses have been dropping too (such as Unixware).
Maybe M$ is the only exception to this. They are the only ones that can (still) dictate a high price for the OS.
Moving to being a software company and trying to sell their (excellent) OS X would, IMO, be a disaster to apple. They fully depend and have to depend on their hardware sales.
Were Apple ever to have an OS for x86, it would definitely be in direct competition with Windows and would be yet another OS Microsoft could claim as a "worthy competitor" (Linux included)...
OliverWillis.Com
An Operative with an Agenda
Intel didn't even HAVE a 32-bit cpu until the 80286 which happened MUCH later.
The 80386 was the first 32 bit chip from Intel.
The only way to use it will be to run on Apple hardware.
which is exactly why it will flop. 95% of the market will not buy new machines and move to MacOS X.
Where is the advantage of selling the software?
This would get them out of the rut that they are in. I won't buy a mac today for two reasons: (a) it doesn't run all of the software I need (b) classic MacOS sucks.
If apple released MacOS X for x86, many geeks would buy it. Companies would build fat binaries of MacOS X software... some geeks would eventually find out that they don't need x86 any more (years away...). Eventually, MacOS X would have all the software needed, and support the vast majority of the hardware out there. Those who care would pay 15% more for Apple hardware because it's better (I guarantee you it's more than 5% of the current market that Apple has now).
Check out AbiWord.
Yeah, but the G4 has the Velocity Technology, with a backside BUS of 64 Bits... And this my friend is enough for me to say that Apple his way in front of any x86 CPU's... (I don't know if you've ever tryed a Radial Blur at 100%/Spin/Best under Photoshop, but I've seen it and let me tell you that it's awesome on a G4!!!) But I have to agree with you for Apple with their 3rd party policies....
I think that was sarcasm from one of them witty peecee types dude
Live EVERY week... Like it's Shark Week
As for using BSD drivers, I didn't know that they're cross-platform (I've never heard of BSD on PPC). But I still think it'd be more work than it's worth. And I definitely still think that recompiling all those Mac apps for x86 would not be a smooth transition.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
for those rather clueless people (like myself), what's in kansas?
ie can someone explain that joke to me? (i mean it got a 5 rating, so it's bound to be quite clever or sth)
I think a lot of these comments have the scenario backwards. Suppose Apple can get OS X ported to x86 (or Itanium) hardware. They then build an Apple branded box using x86 hardware & bundle OS X. They only have to write drivers for the hardware they include in the box. The selling point is that you can also install Windows on it if you need/desire to, since Apple would only include components easily found in the compatible-hardware world. They already use IDE drives and ATI cards (3dfx soon to come), sound cards are being ported now. USB and Firewire are cross-platform. In other words it would be completely x86-world hardware, since OS X will be disk-based (no ROMs). Add Windows (not an emulator) if you want to run that legacy software app you must have. Apple would only want NEW hardware sales, and wouldn't need to be backward-compatible with your old x86 iron with the bum---- video card. But you might want to buy new hardware that would give you a chance at a new operating system, while not shutting you out from your old one if needed. So Apple wouldn't lose (and would probably increase) hardware sales, would open up their possibilities for increased operating system market share, wouldn't have to worry about legacy drivers and such, and would bless developers by giving them the chance to develop apps using the old NeXtStep development environment, which is rock-solid, proven, and enhances productivity. Now that's a plan. Hope Apple's listening.
What does this mean for Apple? Lots of Mac users will buy PCs and get MacOS for it. Apple won't be able to sell enough Macs anymore and they'll go bankrut ... ... ...
Why?
... The users will be able to use their beloved MacOS AND all the 80x86 apps (under another OS)
... scary
If you look on the Apple site (i'm not finding it right now.. sorry) you will see the option to have two processors on the server-class machines. Now, I realise that two 500Mhz G4's will cost an insane amount of money.. but we're talking about SERVERS here.
If I remember correctly, two 850Mhz Xeons on a dual proc board with no less than 512 megs ram won't set any less than about 4-5 grand.
It's all in what you want. (I want an SGI machine.. but we don't all get what we want.)
Rami James
Pixel Pusher
Altec Lansing R&D, IL
rJames.org - illustration
Take your argument and reverse it for Microsoft Windows.
How many people do you think bought Intel/AMD boxes for Windows this year?
Rami James
Pixel Pusher
Altec Lansing R&D, IL
rJames.org - illustration
I'm sorry, I was wrong. I scoured the entire site and didn't find a thing. I'm abso-frickin'-lutely sure that I saw that you could order two processors somewhere.
I also read on Arstechnica a while back that Apple was designing new boards for dual/quad processors.. for use with Mac OS X.
I guess I let my imagination take hold of my entire brain. My apologies.
Rami James
Pixel Pusher
Altec Lansing R&D, IL
--
rJames.org - illustration
Dragon - Was going to make a version, and is a no-show. And, accoring to one of the macsurfer linked web sites, the IBM product isn't REALLY continus speech.
IBM however says
Understands simple, natural, continuous speech
And the other player, L&H is a no-show on the mac. The MacTalk people who were going to have a product like a year ago, to the best of my knowledge have not shipped.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
YellowBox was ALSO the name for the next-generation programming environment. This environment is now ALSO called Cocca.
Can you buy Cocca for Intel?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
This question on /. is kinda meaningless.
The people who read/respond here are mostly *NOT* users of windows.
And if you want a SPECIFIC application, say a vertical market package, or Dragon's speech, or a telephony app, you end up getting Windows as part of the bargin, because there are no BSD (Apple PPC or Intel) versions. You look for the application you want....the OS is not a consideration
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
And I forgot the other promise....YellowBox for Intel
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Continous Speech Voice Rec.
Updated OCR
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
darwin is the 'opensource' component of macos; ie, what apple doesn't think is worth keeping under wraps. I concur that this will no bring about a complete faceover to bring macx to the pc. Its not in apple's best interest a this point. Endi
Right. People need to remember that the 'X' in 'MacOS X' is not an X as in X Windowing system. It's just a funky latin way to state a version number./p>
It's confusing too, and needlessly so. From now on I'm writing it OS 10.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Please try to comprehend what people write before you criticize them.
He didn't say the Spindletop case involved the APSL, he said if Spindletop had based their project on Darwin instead of GNU/Linux Apple could have just yanked their license.
You sound like a freak with a small brain and a big mouth.
Right back at you, anonymous coward.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I don't know what you were running, but my friends dell dimension xps 300 was a standard atx all around good case as far as I could tell. We had replaced half the shit in there before we built him a new computer in an addtronics 6890a case. I never did try to replace the mobo though, maybe that was proprietary. Only thing I did not like was the heatsink on the cpu, but that is easy enough to replace if he ever wants to.
--Have a Johsonville brat.
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.
I hear about sharp cases all the time, but I have yet to have a problem. Between my three computers (a gateway 486, a mom'n'popshop k6, and my new elan vital t-10ab) and my friends two (a dell xps 300, and an addtronics 6890a) I have yet to cut or even scrape skin. Good pc cases are not hard to find.
--Have a Johsonville brat.
This statement is wholly inconsistent with a conversation I had with Adam a while ago about how we might share code in the future.
Given that we recently started opening up code (the CoreFoundation container classes) which is directly of interest to GNUStep, it would be unfortunate if the GNUStep project members actually feel as you do about Apple, since I think that GNUStep will progress much faster if we play nice (we do know a thing or two about OpenStep at Apple). Since I don't know who you are, I won't assume that you speak for the project.
My impression was that GNUStep started on GNU/Linux because it's the closest thing to GNU available. Given that Darwin didn't exist when GNUStep started, is still in high flux, doesn't (quite) yet support X Windows, and favors BSD tools to GNU tools, it really doesn't surprise me that GNUStep didn't start on Darwin. I'm OK with that.
The Kansas board of education decided a few months ago that the biblical theory (Adam and Eve and stuff like that) should be teached as truth. :)
Even though someone (the governour?) quickly overturned that decision it got them quite a bad reputaion.
If you have really missed that, you must have lived behind the moon for some six months, just like the Kansas ppl have for 500 years
Does this mean that Apple is considering jumping ship for x86? They certainly would have a good reason since Motorola has been way to slow to release 550-700mhz PPCs. You can't explain to clueless newbies that a 500mhz PPC is a lot faster than a 500mhz Athlon or P3 so maybe Apple is contemplating this kind of move. BTW didn't Stallman say that the Darwin license doesn't qualify as a free software license?
MacOS X is going to be a very good OS and it will be able to draw a lot more people to MacOS. It will take 2-3 years for Linux to be easy enough for any average joes to start using it. Of course then again within 2-3 years internet appliances could quite possibly nix the need for computers in many households.
Can somebody help me out here? What's Darwin?
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
How boring.
Consider this: What if Dell and Compaq started bundling a version of OSX for Intel (or one of the other chips)?
Most of your arguments would be irrelevant.
I'm not technically competent to comment on the practicality of moving OSX to Intel. But the specultations I've seen on this and other lists about Apple's supposed business plans just don't hold water.
People seem to assume that Apple's only option is to make money by selling boxes. Funny, I seem to have heard of a company in Redmond, WA, that made a few bucks selling an operating system. No hardware sales.
The business model Apple is possibly emulating is right in front of your noses. Don't you suppose that Steve Jobs would like to go for the big enchilada and beat Bill at his own game? He's got the ace up his sleeve -- OSX -- to do just that.
I see Darwin as something else than the MacOS X being ported. Darwin is the kernel. And most of MacOS X would probably also run on the FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD kernel.
No, the interesting part here is, that Apple is getting a BSD personality to run on top of the Mach 3 kernel on multiple platforms. The Mach kernel gives us, among other things, the option of running multiple OS's on the the same machine in a way not possible with current emulators. So how about a dual-boot FreeBSD/Linux box, that actually dual-boots (yeah, boots both OS' at the same time )!
I am a many year mac user, and AIX, Linux, A/UX, *BSD, DOS, Windows 2.x -> 2000. And I can say, that the OS down below is not what makes a good platform. It is mainly a few other things like: Consistent user interface (you know the left 3 menus are the same, shortcuts for copy/paste, copy paste in a common clipboard format so the receiving app must not have a filter etc.), and then of course software availability means something. Most users are just using an office package today, and could run anything.
I don't think apple could port the Mac as we know it over to pc hardware even if they wanted to. The Macintosh advantage in areas like ease of use, and plug and play are directly tied to the fact that Apple has such a firm control on the hardware that runs their OS. The pc hardware world is a huge swirl of products and drivers and confusion that has to be a complete nightmare for an OS.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Actually, from what I read on ArsTechnica a while back the G4 and Athlon aren't that different at all. If I remember rightly the main architectural diferences were due to the fact that AMD's engineers had to fully support the x86 instruction set while the G4 engineers had the luxury of doing their own thing. Here's the link if you'd like to read the article.
Maybe some school districts should start teaching correct English. :-)
Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
Apps is right. Supporting Darwin on Intel requires Cocoa - the former "Yellow Box" which at one point was going to be implemented on Intel under NT using DLLs. That particular approach went away, but since lots of folks have Intel iron lying around, applications written in Java or Objective C++ to run on top of Darwin should be portable.
-Dave
You wouldn't know that from my department. Since I became IT manager here a couple of years ago, we've gone from basically 1:1 Mac/PC ratio (with a dollop of Suns to keep me sane) to a 2:1 ration. It wasn't my fault, honest! It's those damn iMacs ... they just keep rolling in the door.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
From what I've heard, people using the developers' preview releases of OS X have had little trouble compiling standard GNU apps (If I recall rightly, ash & tcsh were mentioned). Among the development tools being used are a variation (recently GPL'ed) of gcc and tools like make, etc.
Once there is an X server out for OS X, which really shouldn't take long, you should be able to get X11 apps compiled for OS X as well.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
It's called MacOS X Server because it is the server version of MacOS X. You can DL an X server that runs on MacOS X Server, so you can run X apps across the network.
You can DL an X server that runs on MacOS X Server
No such file or directory (ENOENT)
Where's the free X11 server for Mac OS 10?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Many are skeptical of Apple's Public Source License, because it requires developers to submit modifications to Apple.
If FooSoft creates and releases diffs that make something in Darwin faster, who pays for space to make them public? Apple or FooSoft?
Why is it "Mac OS X Server" if it doesn't have an X server?Will I retire or break 10K?
It take advantage of some of the great work underway in the NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux communities
Who is this fellow kidding? Linux is under GNU GPL, and APSL is incompatible with GPL.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I have heard many people mention the whole thing about apples biz scheam being centerd on profits from their hardware. Some of us Mac users may recall how bad they started choaking when they let a few cloans into the market. The truth is that apple would probably die if they released their OS even at a signifigant price hike. -- BUT-- It would be easy for them to make a small change or two so that it would only run corectly on a specific chipset after reciveing a signal from the hardware. So they could release a cheep (but slightly overpirced) box that had all company selected hardware (makeing compatibility easyer) and still turn a profit. It would be difficut for anyone who did'nt know what they were doing to copy OSX and use it on thier on x86 box. Seems like a clever plan to me.
After reading a number of posts, it looks like the device driver issues will be a problem for getting OSX on the PC platform, since it doesn't use XFree. Maybe Apple should make a XFree based version of OSX.
I find this story interesting because a lot of companies, including the one I work for, are very resistant to using Linux or any of the BSD variants. The general argument is that they are too unstable as far as the API and features.
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.
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.
If apple ever does get OSX or whatever working on intel/pc boxes, it would satisfy these PHBs. They know the UI will be stable over time. They know a certain level of control is maintained by a central authority. They know they can use cheap PC hardware, a mandate by many corporate companies, and the standard for home use.
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.
Apple needs to look back at what Borland did. Make money through volume sales. MSHAFT has guaranteed volume sales. Just drift the products over time, forcing upgrades. MSHAFT has a guaranteed sales model.
Apple does not have the market share to play this game, so as a newcomer, they will need to sell it like music -- four cd's in a package, with a little sheet of paper telling you how to install the thing. Maybe $1 in manufacturing costs. That's a 2000% markup. With enough sales, it could make them a lot of money, and get them a foothold into the global corporations.
Borland thundered into the developer market with a product that was essentially stolen from europe by Phillipe Kahn, and sold for a fraction of the price of it's competitors.
Apple, this is your chance to do the same thing. Don't blow it. Look what's happening to the console game companies. People just don't want to pay more than $20 or so for a game. It's a magic number; when you drop the price from $50 to $20, the sales dramatically increase. Learn from this!
The various Linux companies should be doing the same thing -- $19.99, four cd's or so, a little sheet of paper. That's it for the unsupported version. Yes, I know you can get the $1.99/4.99 cds on the net. But I'm talking about the street versions of the branded products, on store shelves, not the free download versions. No cardboard box, no printed manual. And somehow, someway, someday, stabilize the damn interface, package managers and apis! The glibc2.0glibc2.1 nightmare must never happen again.
Watching new linux users pick through the bloated, disorganized mess of Linux menu systems is a joke. There oughta be a steering commitee for the minimal Linux interface, and extensions by vendor should be in a separate tree. Don't say there is one, because there probably is, and it's not working.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I think you made some great points, and really added to my post, but the part about price...and the yellow box..I think they are off.
The yellow box, as I understand it, is an emulator. As such, it simply can't run apps as well as the native. And whatever they do, at some point, the OS needs to know how to access the video chipsets...it HAS to know how to do this. There are an incredible amount of devices out there that OSX will need to know about. XFree seems to be the only reasonable, fast way to get to that end.
As far as pricing, this is not the eighties anymore; computers use is exploding in the third world, and it is no longer the "toy of the wealthy". $100, $170, $80 -- these prices may be too high for many people to consider. They will pirate or use Linux/BSD, or just keep using Win95 before paying that. And that hurts Apple. As I said in the post, people are turning away from $50 dollar games, and just don't want to pay more than $20. They would rather do without.
There are also moves on several fronts toward single vendor, corporate-wide solutions.
These trends are hard to ignore. The lion's share of the computer OS market may well go to the lowest cost provider. And this is not a case where two providers of OS are dueling...this is a case where the duel is almost over, and one of the contestants is lying on the ground in a pool of blood, trying to squeeze one last shot off at their opponent. Even worse, the opponent gave them the gun! (Recall MS bought a lot of Apple stock to keep them alive).
As far as yellow box, the superior development tools, etc. -- all I can say is I work with forty developers, and none of us has ever used the mac interface for more than perhaps 5-10 minutes.
I hope that last comment makes you think about the impact that fractional market share is having on Apple. They need to change it, and (at least for a couple revs) literally dump the thing at a fire-sale price to get as many people using it as possible, even if it's just at home.
Having developers use it at home will filter the product into the work environment, and start feeding on itself.
Thanks for the intelligent reply, though. I don't know enough about Apples to comment on the other stuff.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Also, remember who's running Apple and setting directional focus and the "religious" ferver he can create in the Apple-ites. Beginning the move of the MAC OS to Intel, might be even too big a challenge for Jobs to convince his loyal user base that moving to Intel isn't selling out on some level. Compiling to Intel might just be more of a proof of concept, "See, we're portable too!"
Hey folks. Why would Apple release Darwin for anything, much less a PC. The reason is APPS. Ask anyone why they don't use OSX Server, etc. and they will tell you that the apps aren't there. As open source for linux has demonstrated, having a Intel platform gets you apps written. Nuff said?
Today, Apple is a dying breed. Darwin, like Next, is backasswards. No X support! That means no Linux or BSD apps that use X will work.
Apple is not in a good position. M$ is much further along with their next gen OS (You can buy Win2000 now, and it runs most of the win9x apps, including many DX games, it has SMP, it is nearly ported to 64bit arch.)
Meanwhile, Linux has two competing desktops that look better every hour. GNOME has a huge library for app building (Not just the GTK, but lots of modules for XML, Postscript, CORBA, etc.) Linux has Cygnus (now owned by RedHat) porting GCC to every processor known to man, ~150 so far, including the Alpha and Intel's 64 bit copperminefield whatever the hell.
So Apple has to sell overpriced machines for an OS that runs apps specifically for their OS, which is competing with two next gen OSes that are much further along in development and will run on hardware that is still cheaper and certainly much more abundant.
If Apple wants to survive, they need to can OS X and start building embedded systems that use Linux with a ported Mac GUI. The iMac is proof that they have talent in the design department.
And what is this giberish about no Linux apps? Shush your Mac freak whimpering! Corel will have DRAW and Paint out for Linux soon. I've been using DRAW on Win9x for years, and I like it much better then Illustrator. And do you not know that three complete office packages are out for Linux? Today?
Seriously, name me -=ONE=- app they should give a fuck about, please. I'm very interested to hear what you think those poor deluded
Well, you could pay $500 dollars for Framemaker for the Mac, or use the Linux version for free. You could pay $2000 dollars for 3D studio max for the Mac (If there is even a Mac port) or use Blender for free on Linux. Then there's Houdini, which certainly will not run on a Mac. It is ported to NT, IRIX and Linux.
I've given you examples that exist today, but you're talking about what OS X will do in the future. Fine. I'll talk more about the future too.
Linux apps are being developed by many companies today. While KDE and GNOME aren't ready for most people yet, there is no denying that everyday they look better and become more stable.
So now we're both talking about what's to come in the future, basing our assumptions on current trends. You are assuming that Apple will succeed in taming Unix, which is the same battle GNOME and KDE are waging. The difference is Linux is ported to over 150 different processors TODAY, while Mac dweebs are crapping their pants because a small portion of OS X runs on the world's most common instruction set.
But let's forget Linux for a second. How is OS X going to compete with win2000 in the desktop space? There are very few apps that are available for Mac and not win2k. Win2k is really stable. And win2k is available now! And the apps are available now! Even native ones. All for much cheaper hardware. OS X doesn't really exist yet. No native ports for major software packages exist yet either. All the apps that it can run are for the old OS, so where's the advantage? Multiple blue boxes? So what? I've seen a blue box crash that took down the whole machine. So we're looking at a rather large gap of time before OS X is ready for the masses. Where will win2k be then?
The desktop space is going to giveway to devices. Apple is wasting time with OS X when they should just milk OS 9.x to the bone and put most resources on mp3 players, web pads, game consoles and office productivity stations. To make such things you need an OS that will run on these small new chips-- and today Linux and all the development tools plus drivers are already ported. So why do it again? Use Linux, and use the Apple GUI in these systems.
I think it's a safe bet that OS X and GNOME will be ready for general consumption around the same time. But GNOME will have a huge advantage: yeah one more time, it'll run on any platform. From devices to workstations. Neither M$ or Apple can compete with that.
Sure, the hardcore animation or development workstation will not disappear. It will be used for the kind of apps I first mentioned. If Apple wants to battle for that niche, they have to compete with both M$ and Linux. If OS X used X, then Apple would only have to compete with M$, because if OS X used X, porting Linux software to OS X would be much easier.
From what I've been able to tell, Darwin handles all transactions between the OS (ie. what we refer to as OS X, including Aqua, Quartz, etc.) and the hardware. In that case, it seems to me that if Darwin recompiles, than recompiling the rest should be fairly simple (note the "fairly"). But I'm no engineer. I'm merely going by what I've read in every article about the new OS.
--NRagaz
You have to remember this is where Apple made their biggest mistake. Not letting 3rd parties develop hardware for them cost them their share of computing as we know it today. Back in the day there was soo much Apple, but now I rarely see mac's around anymore, even in educational facilities. I'm not a fan of Apple, but I think they better be smarter then they were last time, otherwise they'll be watching intel's IA64 and AMD hand their ass to them. :-)
(just my little opinion)
------- What exactly is real?
"in 1980! Intel foolishly left only 16 bits of memory addressing space (64k) causing them to continually change addressing modes to make up for their lack of forsight." IBM asked both intel and motorola for a 16-bit processor, both companies had 32-bit processors and tried to convince IBM to use 32-bit, however they wanted the 32-bit processor for a next generation computer (before the first was out), so intel changed their 8088 and made the 8086 over the course of a weekend thus getting the contract from IBM. not quite a lack of foresight, but and incredible use of it, keeping them in the lead for almost 20 years. get your facts straight.
if back in the day apple would have ported mac to intel type machines they would rule the world by now
lose != loose
From what I understand, IBM has the technology for faster G4s, but Motorola is slowing them down. Motorola probably wants to milk the "low-powered" G4s for all they're worth before they allow any manufacturing of a faster model. If you recall, at Steve Job's last keynote speach, he re-released the G4-500 even though it was predicted that Apple would go significantly higher in trying to keep up with Intel and AMD. Apple may be upset that Motorola is holding them back and is trying to adapt their technology simply to keep IBM and Motorolla from stalling Mac tech too much.
--The Mighty Willtor
"The knee is the elbow of the leg." -- My wife
I love the snail-mail addy at the bottom of the announcement:
1 Infinite Loop, 302-4K, Cupertino, CA 95014
Typical Apple weenie...
Let's see...for the inflated price of one G4/500, I can buy two P3/~800 and a GeForce...closer floating point performance and much faster everywhere else.
Sure, AltiVec is nice...but if it's just slapped onto an otherwise slow processor, then big deal. SETI@Home scores will be lower, but I'll stick with a machine where I can get decent performance on *every* operation...
What if they are not wanting hardware sales anymore?
If OS X ran on x86, hoards of programmers would recompile every open source app they could think of to run on it.
Then Apple could use the huge application base as a marketing gem.
Finally they sell bazillions of copies of their easy-to-use OS with all the power and stability of BSD and Linux.
So, having a full MacOS run on x86 (meaning Intel, AMD and Crusoe), IMHO, would give Apple a pretty huge oppertunity to make a ton of money from all the people who already have a computer but are fed up with Windows and don't have the know how to install Linux or just want somthing new.
Mmmmmm.... Well this is my sig.
Having spent much of last year working on NeXT/OS X at a company which used NeXT-based technologies extensively, I have some ideas (hopes, perhaps) as to what Steve Jobs will pull out of his sleeve next.
Before Apple bought it, NeXT was in the business of selling software development tools primarily for NT and Solaris (although it also sold NeXTStep for x86.) After Apple bought it, NeXT was renamed Apple Enterprise and continued to do the same thing.
Apple's WebObjects is a little bit of web development tool over the complete NeXT development platform, including the badly named Enterprise Object Framework (EOF), a very mature OO database access tool. The NT version also lets you write NT apps that are (or were, at least in the last version) 100% source compatible with their NeXT/ MacOS X counterparts.
What I was using this technology for was to build things on a desktop (OS X or NT) and then compile them for Solaris (without the GUI). I suspect that once MacOS X has gotten a hold in the marketplace, Apple will start to push its cross-platform development tools.
I don't think Mac-on-Intel is going to show up any time soon from Apple, since it likes being able to set the hardware rules ("you WILL use USB") but I do think they want to give PC software vendors no excuse to not port to the Mac. Their solution: use Apple's object classes and put Java or fat-binaries on your CD-ROM.
>And what about the applications? ... >And anyone who thinks that they could just recompile their OS X app for the x86 version is deluded. Three years ago, we ported a complex database OPENSTEP application from NeXT to OPENSTEP for Windows; that's not just another processor, but a substantially different sw platform too. It took us three days to do it completely, and that's because we didn't closely follow the OPENSTEP guidelines (today's Cocoa); otherwise it would take mere hours. You have to develop under OPENSTEP or Cocoa before you understand why this is possible, unlike any other platform. Even device driver development is different (the IOKit is object oriented; you only have to make a subclass or use an existing open source driver as a template), so writing a MacOS X driver is not the same as writing a Linux driver.
Tuff that Smatters.
All that's needed here is a spec that would have to be met to run MacOS X on x86--a set of supported and/or required chipsets. That way Apple could license a "Works with MacOS X" moniker for supported boxes, and work with Dell, Gateway, etc. to be sure the hardware is up to standard. Use of MacOS X on a non-spec'd machine would be possible, but unsupported. And if the spec was unpublished and NDA'd then they also wouldn't have every schmo trying to make a cheapass PC to run MacOS X instead of buying thier hardware. (Hell, even if it WAS published, they would sell more of their software, without having to back it up with support for unlicensed machines!)
I see it as doable. They just need to pick their friends.
Topher
Got Freedom?
If this exists, then the Red Box would not require additional hardware when run on MacOS X for x86, and the Blue Box could be supported with a G3 processor on a PCI card. The Yellow Box, of course, is already written to x86, so that would be available, too.
So, then it would be matter of do you want to:
A) Run on better hardware, with supported but slower Win32 support, OR
B) Run on the x86 hardware that would be cheaper and support Blue apps with additional hardware if you need them?
Either choice would leave you with full-speed Yellow apps. Although the superior archetecture of the PowerPPC would yield better results, you could settle for x86 if you wanted to.
Off topic trivia:
The colours (Blue, Yellow, Red) come from a brainstorming session the MacOS software team had years ago, where they wrote ideas they had for MacOS development on little cards. They wrote things that could be done soon on blue cards, stuff that was tough to do on red cards, and the middle-ground stuff on yellow cards. Rhapsody/MacOS X stuff is from the yellow. Makes you wonder what is written on the rest of the red cards, doesn't it?
Topher
Got Freedom?
At the GNUstep project, we've chosen to use GNU/Linux as the groundwork for GNUstep simply because Darwin is governed by the flawed and perverse APSL license. Building an open-source ANYTHING atop Darwin is still governed by Apple's "revocation" clause, and they can take Darwin from you or forbid you from using it at anytime by claiming that you're infringing on their intellectual property.
Non-skeptical supporters of Apple would have you believe that the "new" Apple would NEVER do such a thing like this. Once again, they're blinded by the simple fact that Apple is using "open-sourcing" loosely as a marketing technique, not as a philosophy. The people who are volunteering for Darwin are wasting their efforts, simply because Apple annexes and appropriates the code to sell as if it were their own. Like it or not, under the APSL, the intellectual property issue with Darwin is a one-way door: they can keep theirs, you can't have yours.
Spindletop recently has already gotten into trouble with Apple over intellectual property for pledging to make a distribution of GNUstep that uses compatible technology with Mac OS X. In this case, it was because Apple didn't like how some developers for GNUstep modified old NeXT icons, and threatened to sue Spindletop for having "Apple intellectual property" on their website. Fortunately, they're committed to building GNUstep upon GNU/Linux and the GPL, not to Darwin, as their rights to use it could be revoked in an instant and could take months, up to a year to get it back through the legal system (if ever).
Yet another victory for GNU/Linux and the power of GPL.
Don't trust Darwin, don't use it, don't even touch it. Most of all, don't distribute it or support it. If you like the technology involved, support the GNUStep Project, support Spindletop, and support the GNUstep developers.
:)
Well, I have been a Long time Mac Advocate. I finaly gave into the Darkside when my Friend showed me Starcraft. But thats another Story.. I dont know if this is a Good thing or a Bad thing, because Apple makes alot of money on there over priced (but very nice) hardware. Would Apple Jump Ship on the PPC platform? A while back when BeOS was only on PPC. Apple Introduced the G3 and this caused BeOS to no longer be used on the new G3s, so they had to move to x86 hardware... Is Apple doing the Same thing? are they going to abandon it? I hear a 600 MHz G3 coming out, but that kinda sounds dated to me, compared to a 1 GHz K7
-Its like Deja Vu all over again!-
G4 500MHz w/ Altivec? or K7 1GHz w/out? You make the call
-Its like Deja Vu all over again!-
Im just Using the K7 1GHz as an Example. I know it is Insanely over priced, but any G4 is going to be expensive also (not nearly as expensive, but still way more than a x86 of the same clock speed). On other think to think of it a Dual Procesor Configuration. For the Price of a 500 G4 you could Probably get 2 x86s for the same price. I dont know if the Mac OS will suport this (if its going to be run for servers It should) but It would be worth looking into.
-Its like Deja Vu all over again!-
And yet sun did just that...announcement was here
The trouble was they did it for the PReP powerpc reference platform which was suplanted by the CHRP platform which was delayed forever and sun hasn't ported it to anything else powerpcish (that i'm aware of ).
The whole point of the powerpc port was to show they could change processors/architecture w/o overly enormous costs, kind of a big point of unix too eh?
Yes, he wants Darwin in the BSD family, not Mac on Intel. From his avogato diary:
Though Darwin's role in the world is as the guts of Mac OS X, it is shaping up to be a viable BSD platform on its own. It take advantage of some of the great work underway in the NetBSD, FreeBSD, and Linux communities, as well as several of the neat things we're working on at Apple.
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
look here
The John Fred Sanchez refers to is none other than Mr. Id himself, John Carmack. very cool stuff.
I'm always surprised at how little you people seem to know the issues involved. Apple has to do almost nothing to run OS X on Intel. They've been spending all of their time porting to the PowerPC. Although Apple hasn't committed to an Intel version of OS X, they have maintained all along that the Intel version continues to compile cleanly.
Apple has also been hinting that they may drop the PowerPC if the alliance doesn't pull it together. Remember as well that there were rumors about using the Transmeta processor in future laptops or handhelds. This is another area where an Intel port would be critical for Apple.
If Apple ever did switch processors, it surely would not be to Intel. They might decide to go with AMD, perhaps, or use Transmeta's processors for portables. Intel is far too tightly intertwined with Microsoft to be viable, and Apple wouldn't ship generic boxes. They would use the same boards that they are using now.
A note about Carbon: the carbon API replaces traditional Mac OS calls with OS X "plumbing." While carbon apps are not cocoa apps, there isn't any reason why they wouldn't run on an Intel version of OS X.
Your comments are absolutely correct. It might also be interesting to point out that Intel has recently hired away practically the entire G3/G4 team away from Motorola after some internal Motorola political nonsense. Intel has even set up an entire design center around this team down in Austin where they plan to hire 1000 design engineers over the coming years. Apple is very aware of this and is planning ahead in case the "B" team at MOT can't keep up. As for IBM, they've pretty muched closed up shop with respect to consumer processors and have concentrated on their "server" processors like their "Gigachip" that run AIX and will soon run Linux. tc
An Intel port does indeed depend upon firmware issues. But contrary to AC's assertion, it is entirely plausible to imagine x86 firmware that fits into a rational business model for Apple. The firmware used on PowerPC motherboards is called OpenFirware. OpenFirmware (based on Sun technology) is a really elegant & very powerful bootime environment for what is called BIOS in Inteland. It actually runs its own, full-fledged OS-independent interpreter (in Forth, which is a stack-based language ideally suited for creating device-drivers). Indeed, just to show the power of OpenFirmware, some guy hacked up a version of the game PONG which runs entirely in the OpenFirware console! (ie no "OS" is loaded). Try getting the measely, brittle Intel BIOS to be a programmable environment!! Anyways, "all" that is required for an Intel-based product (not just a "port") from Apple is to create x86 bindings for OpenFirware (along with re-bindings for the standard Apple control logic chipset, aka UMA). Because OpenFirmware isolates hardware dependencies, Apple could -if it wanted to- have its own Intel motherboard without being dragged down into the mire of supporting all the low-quality motherboards which proliferate in Inteland. Moreover, it could chose to license this motherboard implementation to AMD (who is emerging a key, stealth partner in manfacturing G4's). As to the ability of a UMA/x86 motherboard to boot an "alternate" OS (eg native Windows instead of Darwin), it would be just be a business model decision - not a technical decsion- as to whether UMA/x86 drivers for Windoze would be created ... which gives Apple some interesting leverage with Microsoft in the post-DOJ world ;) Since OpenFirware *per se* is not proprietary (just the bindings, ie implementation, to particular chipsets), it is entirely conceivable that other charter OpenFirmware OEM's (ie SUN & IBM) may also decide that OpenFirmware/x86 might be a controlled way of supporting/differentiating OpenSource on x86. And because Darwin is based on a modern microkernel, it can support other (unix) personalities besides BSD ... yup, that means Linux. So OpenFirware/x86 kills two birds with one stone - it offers tremendous OEM finesse in the business model. In conslusion: firware is not an "obstacle" for Darwin; it is an opportunity for Apple.
New XFMail home page
/bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.
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
/bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.
Although, you never can tell what would happen now with the anti-trust trial and everything...
New XFMail home page
/bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.
Yes it does. It is illegal to link to GPL code anything that is not GPL compliant. If this were not the case, we wouldn't have need for the LGPL.
...between MHz on different platforms doesn't mean that useful comparisons can't be made.
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
How possible (or desirable) would it be for someone to take Darwin for Intel and build another open-source OS around it?
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
The 8088 had a 16-bit memory addressing unit but only an 8-bit bus. The 8086 was exactly like the 8088 except it ran on a 16-bit bus. But, there were really 20 bits of address space on both of them, they were just divided into a psychadelic 4 + 16 with some overlap.
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).
It isn't fair to compare clock rates.
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?
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Apple was unprofitable when PC companies were making a killing.
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.
Darwin will be ported, as for the rest of OS X? I doubt it. As many other have pointed out there is a driver problem. Apple would need to spend beaucoup cash writing at least generic drivers for the plethora of PC hardware lying around. Sure there is alot of non-Apple hardware you can stick in a Power Mac but then again, Apple doesn't write drivers for these things. I'm not even really sure anyone would use OS X on an x86 system. I also don't think Apple had portability in mind when they decided to use the Mach kernel for OS X, rather they chose a Unix kernel they owned that was stable and powerful.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Apple is NOT maintaining a version of "MacOS X" on Intel. The last system to run on Intel was "MacOS X Server" (can you say NextStep?). Darwin is the only thing that has been ported to Intel, and it's just the lowest layers of the new MacOS.
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.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
It's not a silly question at all.
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
-AS
*Pikachu*
Dying? :)
:P </RANT>
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
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Actually, IMNSHO, Apple really shot themselves one good when they dropped SCSI as the standard in every computer. Looking back as far as the late Performa series, IDE harddrives and SCSI cdroms. Today, it's IDE all over the place. IDE has a place in the iMac for certain, but not in the G4's. You're already paying the slight Apple Premium, you may as well get a decent harddrive with that price.
;-) As for USB, thank god they ditched ADB when they did. ADB was (and still is) better then any x86 peripheral hookup scheme, short of USB. PS/2, serial, parallel? Get 'em off my board, PLEASE.
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.
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.
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.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
How nice that you've convinced yourself of this. I wonder how many other half-baked prophecies you've acquired from Jesse Berst and friends?
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.
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.
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.
woof!
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.
Accourding to macosrumors, there has always been an intel version compatiable os OS X foating around apple. Most of MacOS X has is already platform independent. Even Apples build tool Project Builder have a check box for building for intel software. IMHO, I think Apple is just keeps there options open.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
That should be www.xlr8.com.
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.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I think it would be great for apple to start selling OSX-intel boxes. They could sell a box with usb, firewire and scsi cards that they support. Apple would not have to write drivers for every possible card and thus, to have a PC that works well with OSX people would have to buy it from Apple allowing apple to maintain their hardware business model. If it takes off and people start writing drivers for all kinds of devices and OSX starts to spread to lots of desktops/configurations (imagine dell and gateway selling OSX compatible models that are also Windows compatible) then apple could start to have a business model that is software sales based.
I'd love to see it.
no sig.
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.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Software may be more profitable than hardware, but it is difficult to make money by selling an OS. Microsoft is probably the only company that has managed to do this. Except for the Linux vendors and the struggling SCO, I can't think of a company that is making a profit off selling a desktop OS. The companies that do make a profit tend to be niche companies.
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.
This whole theory with "cannibalizing Apple hw sales" doesn't seem right to me. Well, maybe it would make a small fraction of those considering buying Apple hw change their minds, but I'm quite sure things would evolve differently in the long run. Releasing a low-priced x86 MacOS X would provide a chance to taste the system for those unwilling to buy a whole Apple system; I think many would become addicted, especially if the development tools are sold for a reasonable price (that would enlarge the apps pool too - every other development system looks crippled after using the NeXT dev tools and frameworks). Then many of the new addicts would buy Apple hw, coz that's the real thing ! I've been running NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP on both NeXT and Intel hw, and while overall system performance/stability was close, installing the system and setting up peripherals on Intel hw was nowhere near the seamless, out-of-the-box-and-running feel of the NeXT hw.
Tuff that Smatters.
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).
While Apple doesn't have a multi processor system out right now, XL8 has shown off a Multiprocessing Carrier.
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."
Lets see
;) )
;) sorta...
;) )
:)
;)
;)
;)
;)
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,
---
Live Long & Prosper \\//_
CYA STUX =`B^) 'da Captain,
Jedi & Last *-fytr
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.
- Mali
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.
- Mali
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.
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...
it is only a small part of the (future) MacOS. This does NOT mean that the Mac as you might know it will run on Intel. Apple is a hardware company, the chances of them risking the cannibalization of their HW sales by having a full MacOS running on intel is pretty slim, IMHO.
Point and Grunt
Darwin was cross-compiled, using a PPC, into binaries for both x86 and PPC.
Apparently, the majority of Apple's profits come from their mildly over-priced hardware. As of right now, Apple has a very limited foothold in the land of x86/PCs.
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
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rJames.org - illustration
Just out of curiousity:
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
--
rJames.org - illustration
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
Although it is a step in the right direction, I honestly wonder how far they will go with it after the darwin effort is completed. I don't believe that we will see full blown MAC OS chugging along on Intel for the long haul. I don't see where the shift in platform fits in to Apples longer range plan. They have been making much headway lately with the flavors of the month and continuing to provide for the apple following, not no be a sad ass, but moving to full intel compatability just doesn't seem to fit into their business model which seems to be working pretty well for them. If it's not broken, don't fix it.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I understand that the apple s/w and h/w marriage is a key element in their success, it was also a key element in their failure the last time.
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.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
"Darwin" is only a small part of OS-X. Just because it compiles on Intel doesn't mean that the rest of Apple's code will. Apple's new OS is a lot more than just the kernel.
+--------------------- You idiot! I told you we were facing the wrong way!
What's next after Darwin? Maybe a school in Kansas will bans Macs?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.