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Cringely: OS X on Intel
sti writes: "Cringely's column this week argues that Apple should port OS X to the Intel platform. He makes an interesting case for it. I would definitely favour this. I've always had this warm spot in my heart for Apple but rarely had the money to pay for their overpriced hardware."
With a BSD base to work on, the porting process should really be a piece of piss.
But would apple really want to do this?
The strength of apple has allways been tight integration of hardware/OS. But with such diversity in the x86 world, it throws open a whole load of problems that apple have never had to deal with - support for various chips/chipsets, interdependency problems, conflicts, support for non-standard hardware, support for the latest, greatest graphics cards etc.
Quite a number of the things which apple get right but MS dont is purely because apple have allways gone their own on the hardware side. If they ported to x86, they would be in direct competition with MS, with all the drawbacks of the architecture.
This site talks about a project at Apple some ten years ago to port Mac OS to Intel hardware.
The article also talks about the work done by ARDI, the firm mentioned in the InfoWorld story.
Apple assembled a small team and got Mac OS runnning pretty quickly, but it seemed the firm didn't have the willpower to push it to market.
It probably would be different this time around with the forceful Steve Jobs at the helm.
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bzzzt. X runs just fine under OSX. Check out the XonX project .
. It is under darwin but that is a seperate distro and not is the bundled OSX that comes default with all macs
What? Darwin is the same, with or without OSX "on top".
The only Unix things I can run in OSX is stuff like sed, awk, etc.
Dude, what have you been smoking? You've never even *seen* OSX, have you?
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
There a some misconceptions in your post :
- Infact I can probably run macos9 apps faster in linux then MacOSX : The Classic environment in Mac OS X is build on the same idea than mac-on-linux. The speed of Classic apps is the same as mac-on-linux's speed, ie. near 100%, provided you have enough memory.
- WIth Linux, I can run MS Word, Excell, IE, quake3, and even java : really, these apps are far better under OS X than under OS 9 : Microsoft did a good job porting its Office suite to OS X. Quake 3 works well too (never tried it, but often heard it) and Java is well integrated in OS X
- I don't believe X is even supported under OSX : XDarwin 4.2 works very well under OS X, in two screen modes : 'Rootless', where the Mac Apps and the X apps coexist on the screen and 'Full screen' (you have to switch between Mac OS X and X thanks to a key combination).
- OSX is slower according to all the benchmarks I have seen comparing it with linux : I think that OS X's window server/manager have still to be optimized and therefore are to blame for the slowness of OS X, so this comparison is not really accurate.
I'm not a Mac OS X zealot, I know it isn't perfect, but it's worth the look. Really, go and try it, you'll be surprised.
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
I expected more from Cringely, but even he uses a car analogies for Macs/PCs.
Yes it is true that Porsche buyers will always WANT to buy Porshes. But Mac users (not zealots mind you) HAVE to buy Macs.
If I could get a Mac in a beige box that was as fast (faster?) than a purrty Apple case and it was $1000 cheaper you can sure as hell bet that I would.
How many people do you know with Apple towers have ugly, but functional, beige monitors attached to them? Nearly every Mac user I know breaks the aesthetic with an ugly monitor.
I'm a professional. I need to get work done. Getting it done econimically is always nice. Sure I like Apple, I like the design. But I LOVE my money.
OS X on Intel would definitely hurt Apple. No non-zealot would ever value the architecture and design of Moto/Apple over the price and performance Intel/Generic PC maker. All things else. (the OS) being equal.
the only tinkering i do with my mac is adding peripherals, or minor optimizations in the UI in OSX. I dont have to deal with driver issues or endlessly tweak XFree and mouse config files.
The question of whether an Apple computer is "overpriced" is completely speculative. Comparing hardware for hardware can be direct, but the overall 'value' of the system can be compared with things like usability, integration, and "wow factor" (along with just about anything anyone could 'value' in a computer).
However, just for empyrical purposes, I've outlined a Dell system that's similarily spec'ed out as the new iMac:
Dell Dimension 4400 VS iMac:
Both systems come with a 15 inch flat panel (admittedly, the iMac screen is of higher quality)
Both systems come with mid-range processor speeds for their respective platforms.
Both systems Come with a 40GB IDE hard drive and 128MB system memory (specs on hard drives unavailable, Dell system memory is DDR while iMac is PC133)
Both systems come with an Nvidia GeForce 2 (Though, the Dell version has 64MB of RAM while the iMac has 32).
Both systems come with a CDRW drive
Both systems come with 10/100 networking and 56k modems
Both systems come with keyboard/mice/sound/bundled software.
Dell: $920 (not counting $100 rebate)
iMac: $1300
So is Apple over-priced? That's up to you to decide.
You might also want to note that the Dell comes in a standard PC tower case while the iMac comes in an aesthetically pleasing housing (prettier, but less upgradable).
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
Back when OSX was NeXT's OpenStep, any body could ship fat binaries for all four supported achitectures (PA-RISC, SPARC, M68k, and Intel) by clicking their checkboxes before the build in ProjectBuilder. The objective-c frameworks (now known as 'cocoa') handled all of the porting issues. No changes in the source were required...just 3 checkboxes to invoke the cross-compile for the architectures that your box isn't. Application vendors, of course, actually did this because it was such a no-brainer. Apple could do this again, and vendors will ship their binaries fat. (And end-users can strip out the un-needed architectures using lipo, if they really need to.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Gates will never allow this to happen. If Jobs wanted to move OSX to an Intel platform, he would not be "granted" Microsoft Office to run on that platform. Moreover, its very likely that Gates would then pull Office from the OSX on Apple hardware. This would be suicide for Apple. You can beat your drums all you want and the govt. could threaten the MS monopoly and so on and so forth. In the meantime, Apple would be dead...
FMFrank W. Miller
Actualy when I was running X.1 on my iBook (300/192/6.0) and watching the processor and memory usage, the visual interface actualy took up very little resources except when doing something funky like the genie effect. And even in those situations, it was very good at determining whether to take the resouces from another program or just forgo the eyecandy all together.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Everyone is saying the same, obvious things about how Microsoft would pull their applications and that apple is a hardware company.
The truth is that OSX sucks. I know, I have it running on my Powerbook. The thing is that MacOS is poorly designed and it has only gotten worse. I really laugh when people say that it is easier, as I find it the most difficult and annoying operating sytem to use.
I will admit that the user interface in OS9 was quite nice, although far from perfect. Unfortunately, OS9 was also unresponsive.
The problem isn't raw speed, which in OSX can sometimes be a factor as well.. but the way that they multitask. OSX will give the active application full tasking priority, lets say it is Internet Explorer or Mozilla.. and it is fetching a page, while it is doing such.. it will put up the wait cursor. While the wait cursor is up, that application is using a lot of CPU and makes it more difficult if not impossible to switch to another application.
This has gotten worse in OSX as it has replaced the popular finder with the Dock. Unfortunately, even without anything running or using lots of CPU.. trying to use the dock to switch between running appliations can be somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Well, this shouldn't be a rant about usablity.. the point is that I don't think that OSX or any other version of MacOS is a very well designed Operating System. The best commercial OS, imho is Irix (although still far from perfect, still better then OSX)
I disagree about there being no DIY: While you usually don't start with a motherboard, choice of power supplies and processors, etc., there's a pretty large assortment of choices to start low and build big.
My 8500 (~8 years old) was designed with a PPC604 CPU running @ 120MHz. Standard buss was Fast-SCSI-2.
It's now got a relatively recent G3/400MHz in there, and ATTO Ultra-Wide SCSI controller, lots more RAM and DASD. All of this, I've Done Myself, and the box is MORE than usable for the variety of tasks I throw at it; if i needed more juice, I could certainly add it.
If you go to Mac Rescue, or David Baucom's site and the like, you'll see plenty of 'barebones' Macs and the add-ons you can buy to soup-up yourself pretty nicely.
You can get yourself a pretty nice LinuxPPC box for around $200.
Takes a bit more looking than on the PC-side (it's sort've like finding Linux-compatible componants was ~3 years ago ...), but it's definitely more than do-able.
Try turning on backing compression and see if it helps you any. To do this, make a copy of /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver/plist , and after the first <dict> in the file, add the following:
:'(
:'(
<key>BackingCompression</key>
<dict>
<key>compressionScanTime</key>
<real>5.000000000000000e+00</real>
<key>minCompressableSize</key>
<integer>8193</integer>
<key>minCompressionRatio</key>
<real>1.100000023841858e+00</real>
</dict>
I don't know if this makes a difference, but I run 10.1.2 on an iBook 500 with 640M of memory, and the performance is very nice. (BTW, I didn't come up with this hack - it's from a MacOS mailing list, IIRC).
Also, if you are running Netscape, be aware that it busy loops and consumes a lot of CPU even if it's not displaying any animations. It will sit there and consume 50% of your CPU while you have it hidden.
Also, if you have Word for MacOS X, be aware that it also busy loops, and consumes a truly impressive amount of CPU.
If you don't know what this means, the deal is that in a non-pre-emptive O.S., most applications just sit there in the event loop waiting for something to happen, and they expect the system to take control away from them when they call getNextEvent (or whatever it is in MacOS 9) if there's another application with an event running. I suspect that Netscape and Office are both expecting this to happen when they call the carbon version of getNextEvent, but they're calling a non-blocking getNextEvent, so they just sit there going "is there an event?", hearing "no," and then doing the same thing again over and over again. I'm sure this would be really easy to fix, but although I reported the bug on Netscape, at least, the next version that came out was still broken in this way.
Neither do Linux and Windows application developers. That's what libraries and the OS and device drivers are for. I just wrote a Python program that plays music, that I'm running on Linux, and I sure as hell didn't take into account what kind of sound card I happen to have.
Mac developers don't worry much about Mac hardware either, but not because there's not a lot of variation of hardware. It is because MacOS is wonderfully device-independent. That is why I can run MacOS 7.5.5 on my Amiga, using a program called ShapeShifter which acts like a bunch of MacOS device drivers that wrap around my AmigaOS device drivers. I guarantee you that they guys at Ambrosia never anticipated the hardware that I play "Escape Velocity Override" on.
I'm sure that the limited range of Mac hardware, sure makes things easier for the guys at Apple who write drivers, but to app developers, it is insignificant.
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In late January I bought a 667Mhz TiBook. This was my first Mac (not my first Apple, but the ][e isn't competitive anymore) ever, and OS X was definetly one of the reasons. For me, it's an OS with 95% of the Unix functionality I need, and 0% of the hastle. (It took a lot of effort to get Linux running on the Toshiba work gave me.)
OS X wasn't the only reason...Apple took a very sexy platform and put a sexy OS on it. Would I have bought the TiBook running Windows? Probably not. But I could go for OS X on another platform (if the TiBook didn't exist), it's just the that the features of the hardware wouldn't be as exciting.
As for the price issue, my TiBook came stock with:
512MB RAM
30GB HD
Firewire and USB
802.11b
DVD/CD-RW Combo drive
When I started trying to decide if I really wanted this TiBook, I priced out the competition. And what I found was that most of the name brand laptops that could come close in terms of feature set were $3500 or so, which is more than the TiBook. And none of them had a wide screen (which I love), or GigE (which believe it or not, I have used).
And even setting aside the feature set....this isn't some beige box that sits under the desk. It's a piece of hardware that's in my face, so to speak, and the form factor is exciting.
Apple's got killer hardware and a killer OS. For those that don't think Apple is price competitive then usually they're not being sure to add in all the features. I'm very happy with mine.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."