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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.
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)
Sorry to feed the troll, but I have to state the obvious:
Darwin is a BSD variant. More than likely, it will be released under the BSD license (duh.)
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
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
Fat binaries are pretty cool, but he's referring only to Darwin, which is a pretty vanilla BSD variant, though with some interesting capabilities. It is very unlikely that Apple will be compiling and optimizing Cocoa, Quartz, QuickTime, Carbon, and all the other high-level libraries for x86 given they're not actually selling a product for that platform.
The fat binary capabilities could certainly ease future architecture transition, however.
- Mali
For their own code, Apple is using their own license, which they call the Apple Public Source License, or APSL for short. It is not a copyleft license, but has been approved as an Open Source license. GPL'd software that they enhance--GCC, for a very notable instance--is, of course, submitted back to the FSF, and folks at Apple are working on reassigning copyright for such software to the FSF. Not, however, the entire operating system, which is APSL. They're playing nice, but probably not nice enough to satisfy many of the ranks Stallman has inexplicably managed to brainwash.
Personally, I think this is a good course of action; I dislike the GPL, and think it especially ill-suited as a license for the basis of a commercial operating system.
The APSL: http://www.publicsource.apple.com/apsl/
Darwin runs Mach-O (Mach object format) binaries. It is a BSD variant built atop a Mach 3.0 microkernel. I don't expect to see a Linux binary compatability environment spring up, but you never know.
- 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
--
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.
--
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.
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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?
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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
The problem with the Intel platform isn't the processor... it's the rest of the hardware. For Mac OS X to support hardware other than Macintosh kit, Apple'd have to spend a hell of a lot of time writing drivers.
I bet Windows would be pretty stable if Microsoft could prescribe exactly what hardware is used.
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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I'm hardly saying I think Apple has a shot at taking down Microsoft by selling iMacs, but the platform war is far from over. It's just starting to get interesting again. The typical computer user needs a basic word processor, E-mail software, a web browser, maybe a finance program, and some games. You hardly need Windows for that. You hardly need a computer for that, these days. Playstation 2 anyone? Dreamcast?
The Wintel PC is getting some new competition, and it's coming from companies that make "the whole widget."
Apple's place in this isn't very clear, but if these devices do take off, it'll hurt MS more than Apple. Apple makes most of its cash selling high-end boxes for content creation. The sale of millions of these devices would only enlarge the market for $3500 G4 machines.
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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
------
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.
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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
You seem to be missing the point. Darwin is open source, MacOS X runs on top of darwin. In order for MacOS X to support pc hardware, someone would have to write drivers. That someone doesn't have to be apple, because it's open source pretty much any BSD developer could help out. This will have to be done in order for Darwin to run on x86. Therefore, it's not that much of a stretch to see MacOS X on x86 hardware. The release plan as of last october at FreeBSDCon was to release darwin and continue updating it as a seperate open source project in conunction with OS X. For the corporate apple world, they got the full package. For the open source fans, they get Darwin w/ the apple gui replaced by an eventual port of XF86. (this is done, and was slashdotted a month or so ago.) Looks like things are progressing nicely for a full darwin environment on x86.
sqweak
"They have computers and other weapons of mass destruction" -US Attorney General Janet Reno
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.
off point: amd/intel didn't bump up the dev cycle or cut corners. the normal plan is to s-t-r-i-n-g things out to maximize profit. remember: we really haven't had competition in the x86 space until late 1998. i wonder how this will pan out for microsoft as other oses begin to dampen their own string-out sched.
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!-
Funny how some things fail to get mentioned.
One, a good reason for porting and cross-developing software -- including OS software -- is that it provides a relatively easy quality test: the better the abstraction from the underlying, and the fewer assumptions based on that creep into production code, the more robust, reliable and maintainable the code.
Darwin, or its predecessors, have always been built for Intel. As well as several other platforms. This has also been relatively simple: hardware abstraction is, to a great extent, offered by the microkernel. There simply is no driver purgatory like there is in monolithic OSes.
Drivers are an important issue. Writing them is a pain. It's difficult and hazardous, and, on OSes of a lesser design device drivers put the entire system at risk. On OS X, however, you get full driver protection, and a high-level development environment for drivers and kernel extensions on the side; and these can be added, or removed, from a running kernel, just like that.
I'll have that, thanks. No thanks, you can keep your monolithic, russian-roulette spaghetti-coded Unix lookalikes; I'd rather go for the real thing, with a solid architecture at its core and an unrivalled contemporary development environment-cum-frameworks (ProjectBuilder, Interface Builder, Object Modeler, Foundation Kit, AppKit) to go. It compiles (and runs) everything Unix as is, but more importantly, it goes way, way beyond. And '70s Unix may be good enough for some, but well, it's just '70s Unix to me. More, please, but more importantly: better, please. An environment that values *my* time, please. Yes, I'll order a few. To go. Make it snappy, please.
Thanks.
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.
How exactly, can Apple grow their marketshare in an era where corporate environments insist on standardizing on Windows? They can't get their foot even near the door.
And if "Tiny niche markets" can sustain a billion-dollar company, then why the hell not? How many Macs have shipped in the last year compared to, say, Silicon Graphics O2?
I don't worship at the feet of the Steve, and when I started working with Macs I didn't have a clue as to who was the CEO, or what their plans for anything were. I simply saw applications and interfaces that were miles ahead of anything I had used under DOS and Win 3.1. How more objective could I have been?
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
True, I'm not overly concerned about the processor speeds. Yet... Sure, AMD and Intel have 1 Ghz chips that you have to buy a dell or compaq server to get. Am I the only one who is a little worried about these chips? I mean, both companies announce they will have gig chips in like 6 months and then suddenly, wham they get into a pissing contest and they are here. Now, did they really bump up their release schedule 6 months without cutting any corners? I dunno... Plus with supply short on the higher speed PIII's, it's not that easy to get a super fast PIII.
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.
And MacOS X is very accomodating of "fat" applications. The .app files (which are just folders) can contain subfolders for different architectures. This is, of course, inherited from NextStep, and was supposed to be exploited by Yellow Box for Windows.
.app files on other platforms? The internals are very well documented. And it shouldn't even be necessary to "emulate" Cocoa -- there's nothing that says the architecture-specific binaries have to use the same API. I can see this being exploited to create create a single executable that runs appropriately in Gnome/KDE/console/whatever.
But it seems that Apple (read, "The Steve) has decided against Yellow Box for Windows. So I was wondering the other day, why not take advantage of the incredibly flexible format of
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
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
People need to understand that Apple doesn't need to overthrow Microsoft in order to survive. They can very comfortable survive as 'the other consumer platform'. Their marketshare now isn't too bad, and while I'd love to see it grow a few more percent, it's not hard to find anything I've needed for the MacOS (except for games, but that's improving as well).
If Apple can maintain 5-10%+ marketshare, then they'll be around for some time. If they can hit 15%, then things will be perfect. You don't have to have a monopoly to survive.
(BTW: People have been anticipating Apple's death for 25 years - I would hope that they'd learn by now that it's just not happening)
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
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
--
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
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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.