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Run Mac OS X On Those Old Macs
AllInOne writes: "Despite Apple's claims to the contrary, Mac OS X runs just fine on older Apple hardware.
Thanks to the Open Source nature of Apple's underlying Darwin system serveral clueful folks have written kernel extensions that allow "Old World" machines such as the 7300, 7600, 8500 etc to run OS X. They even support G3 & G4 processor upgrades cards as well.
The best release (and free as in beer) is by Ryan Rempel. I just installed his Version 2.0b3 of Unsupported UtilityX on my old 8550 with a Newer G3 upgrade card along along with 10.1 and performance is quite respectable."
And elsewhere along the OS price/performance front, Cinematique writes: "I was surfing around and came across this useful little tidbit for mac os x users. Apparently, apple included a way to compress the memory-hungry finder window buffer images, but didn't turn it on at the last minute due to a debuging issue. this turns the compression on, thus saving a sh*tload of memory."
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If Apple weren't a software company, they could just jettison all the expensive MacOS development work and produce translucent, elegant, highly certified and tested x86 machines, and save a bundle.
If Apple were a hardware company, they wouldn't have lost so badly when the clone makers gave Apple's customers what the customers wanted---inexpensive, powerful machines that ran MacOS, without logos, frogdesign, or ad campaigns. Instead, Apple was forced to reconsider what made them competitive, and yanked all the software licenses.
Back in the days of PReP (a joint IBM/Motorola/Apple standard for PowerPC motherboards), Apple stonewalled on support, claiming there were problems getting MacOS to run on PReP hardware---they couldn't get it to work without having Mac ROMs, and there was some problem with *that*, and etc etc etc. A small Swiss software company (I believe called Qix) demonstrated MacOS running on PReP hardware, and IIRC Apple threatened them into little pieces. Later, Apple sorta endorsed CHRP, a successor to PReP, this time with a spot for those all-important Mac ROMs to live. But Apple never shipped MacOS for CHRP; this was the era when Apple was retaking control over hardware that could run MacOS. Of course, all that talk about engineering requirements for Mac ROMs in hardware turned out to be bullshit; the iMac next to me has OpenBoot ROMs, and loads the Mac ROMs from the hard drive.
Apple's work on PReP and then CHRP, and their commitments to supporting MacOS on those platforms led to great hopes for a commodity market in PowerPC motherboards, especially among Linux weenies like me who wanted widely available, appropriately priced non-x86 desktop machines available. Apple's broken promises are a part of why more of you aren't running Linux on non-x86 machines. But hey, at least Apple got to keep their software locked up.
Locked up? Well, maybe that's the wrong concept. Let's think of Apple-branded hardware as a Really Big Dongle, a copy-protection mechanism for MacOS. (The CPU incompatibility also keeps them from looking like they're competing with Microsoft, which makes Microsoft happy.)
Here's a fun experiment. Sit down with the parts list for a modern Mac and compare it to a well-built, well-designed Windows box from a first tier vendor, like Sony. The two machines may even have a lot of identical parts, now that Macs have PC133 memory, PCI, AGP, IDE hard drives, etc. Once you get done, add ~15-20% to the price of the PC to compensate for the generally better quality and design of Macs (if you believe that.)
If you do this across Apple's product line, you'll notice price differences anywhere between $75-100 for iMac-like machines to several hundred dollars on the high end boxes. Part of that margin is what pays for R&D, and in particular, OS development. So in some sense, Apple prices their OS by the capabilities of the hardware it runs on. Microsoft can only dream of this kind of profit maximization through differentiated pricing. Oh, and the license isn't transferable; you end up buying a new MacOS license fee when you buy a new Mac. That's how Windows OEM licenses are supposed to work; there's still a fair amount of piracy of Windows onto beige boxes, but Apple avoids that too.
Anyway, a potentially important reason why Apple hardware retains value is that a significant portion of original hardware cost is actually paying for the MacOS Dongle. Even as the cost of the hardware depreciates, the price of the ability to run MacOS does not depreciate as sharply.