Apple Secretly Maintaining x86 Port Of Mac OS X

Earlybird writes "According to this eWeek article, Apple has ported the whole of Mac OS X to the x86 architecture and is maintaining it in parallel with the PowerPC builds. Dubbed Marklar, the project is perceived as a fall-back plan, and, quoth the article, 'has apparently gained strategic relevance in recent months, as Apple's relationship with Motorola has grown strained and Apple looks to alternative chip makers.'" Believe what you will ...

Comments

Ported all of Mac OS X to x86?

[qslack]

They have ported all of Mac OS X to x86? Not just the kernel?

Let's pool $100,000 (Blender-style) and bribe the guy who runs their internal CVS repositories. Anyone wanna throw in a few bucks for macosx-x86-0dayl33t.iso? :)

I hope this marklar work out.

[laserjet]

I hope this new marklar really works on marklar marklar. Marklar seems to be the marklar of the marklar, not just another markler off the old marklar. Marklar really does need to marklar another marklar maker in order to be marklar with the marklar. Marklar is just not marlar anymore, and this seems to be a good marklar to the marklar. A small marklar to marklar, really.

Apple's Trump Card against MS.

[cryptochrome]

I think the advantages of actually putting out an x86 version of os x (which by the way went by the name "Star Trek" before, IIRC) are outweighed by the various (mostly hardware-revenue related) disadvantages.

However, it's an invaluable asset to have anyway, because you can blackmail microsoft with it. Remember when MS bought all that Apple stock? Remember what dire straights Apple has been in in the past? Despite all that, Mac OS remains to this day the only consumer OS besides windows that has managed to gain and hold onto a significant userbase versus Windows. And it has a lot of software. So pretend you're Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs gives you a ring and says "If we start to go under, for any reason, we're releasing our x86 build of Mac OS X... as open source." There's not enough TP in Redmond to handle that kind of threat. Or any of the lesser ones they could make too.