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Successful PearPC/Mac OS X Install Documented
rocketjam writes "OS News has an article by a user who successfully installed Mac OS X using the 0.1 version of PearPC, the PPC emulator for x86 machines. He said it took 5 hours to run the first install CD but he did get it up and running on an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 512MB of RAM. The article has several screenshots of the Mac OS X install and new user set up running on his machine." See our previous story.
Pears are better than apples...
I've gotten OS X Panther to install as well, you can see it here. Took about 7 hours on a Duron 1.6Ghz with 512MB SDRAM.
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
Isn't one of the biggest pluses of a Macintosh system the flawless integration with the hardware? That's always been something I've admired, and something that's been a pain in the butt for both Linux and Windows. I wonder how stable this runs?
So now I can finally run Photoshop on my Windows machine! What's that you say?
Ok Steve, Hell realy *has* frozen over now.
"If only Apple would port the thing themselves. Add a windows compatibility layer and you've got one hell of a competitor to Microsoft."
And just like BeOS, that would probably kill Apple within two years or so.
read the article
"Of course everything was not running very snappy; on their website they warn you: the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor. Still, I was amazed at what I saw: it worked!"
At 40 times slower than the host, you'd need one hell of a CPU to use this for as your primary environment.
Get a nice usb keyboard/mouse set, and a mac.
How efficiently does it run? I.e., how fast/expensive a box do I need to get a normal experience?
From the post: He said it took 5 hours to run the first install CD
Sounds like it's not physically possible to throw enough hardware at this thing to get a normal experience at this point.
I write in my journal
It Just Works
With one button - how can it break?
the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor.
Great, if you were to do this with a 2GHz Pentium, you would get the performance equivalent of around 50MHz. There is no way in hell that OSX would run decently at that speed, what with all the transparancy and animation of the UI. But hey, at least it works.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Apple would have to sell it for $3,500 a seat to recoup the costs of doing and maintaining the port, and they'd be eaten alive by piracy unless they spent even more money building some kind of kick-ass licensing system which would just get cracked by the script kiddies anyway.
And by the way, they'd then have to spend even more money creating a Microsoft Office 2004-compatible office suite, because you know MS would kill Office for Mac in a heartbeat.
All in all, sounds like a losing proposition to me.
I write in my journal
And this is ever so much better than actually buying Mac hardware because...?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Oh SO FUNNY!
1992 called. They want their joke back.
I don't think the software is far enough along for you to be able to get a "normal experience" out of it. It's slow even on the fastest hardware. That's not to say that this will always be the case, and this is a huge step forward to that end. First you emulate accurately, then you emulate efficiently.
This screenshot on the pearpc site might give you a bit of an idea of the performance you can expect:
http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/screenshots/kde.pn g
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
Nope, even on top of the line PC hardware its slow as dirt. But there are already people working on ways to speed it up. Expect massive speed increases in the near future.
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
OS X treats the right button of a two-button mouse as a control-click, which seems logical enough..
Elaboration follows:
On a Mac, control-click sends the target a mouse-button-2 event. If you plug in a two-button mouse, the Mac automatically understands the second button as mouse-button-2. It's not that the Mac is remapping the second mouse click to some other kind of event; just the opposite.
Furthermore, a third mouse button works as well. Clicking the third button sends a mouse-button-3 event. Same with scroll wheels, and so on and so on.
Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work.
I write in my journal
You are missing a leading decimal. This was installed with version .1, as in 1 tenth of 1.0.
This is still pretty early in the development cycle and if they only consider this to be 1 tenth of the way to a release version there is reason for immense optimism.
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
The CB App. What's your 20?
Many other stories are fairly gray, but I'm pretty sure the license to use OSX pretty much says that you are only allowed to install it on Apple hardware (although correct me if I'm wrong). This is promoting a fairly blatant breach of the license (Pear doesn't actually breach that license by existing).
It should be noted that this actually goes against the OSX EULA, which specifically states that the software cannot be used on anything other than Apple branded hardware, unfortunately :(
Do you see what I did there?
Really I can't see whats so breathtaking about an Apple emulator, well don't get me wrong it's a nice trick....but wouldn't it be far MORE interesting if say somebody compiled that little Darwin kernel for x86 and got OS-X to run NATIVE on it?
Emulators are just too damn slow. The flip side of this is Virtual PC which works quite well but does not touch the performance of any Win box.
The standard reply to the "I want OSX on Win" plea is that Apple will never do it as it would kill their hardware sales. However I don't think this is the case: Just look at Sony, they are aimed at the same market as apple : High end Multi-media. And their PC's are just as, if not more expensive, than Apple.
There is more going on on a corporate level than we know. Jobs and Gates are in a hot tub somewhere in Switzerland right now thumb wrestling for million dollar bills. (no pun intended) IMHO-
"It's all just meme meme around here"
Now, the tricks as I see it are:
Start a happiness pandemic
First is the obvious that if you can never emulate something the same speed that it would be if it was native. It will always be at least a hair slower.
In actuality, this is MUCH slower. There are a few reasons:
Those are the main reasons. I think we'd all KILL for OS X on PCs, but I think we all know that realistically it's never going to happen.
Still, remember the software is only v0.1 so when they add things like Altivec and just do general optimisations, things should get faster.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
No, wait, here's what you need to do:
Get a Sun system that supports those wacki SunPC SBUS cards Sun used to make -- you know, with an actual Intel desktop processor on them.
Install Linux. This gives you 'Linux inside Solaris.'
Install VMWare on that Linux.
Install Windows XP through VMWare. You now have XP Inside Linux Inside Solaris.
*NOW* use Pear and install MacOS X, giving you OSX Inside XP Inside Linux Inside Solaris.
Way 1337er.
still, it's probably faster than running the thing on a G3 from what i've heard ;)
Software Freedom Day!.
Pears are better than apples...
Classic George Carlin bit:
"And now, a message from the National Apple Institute: FUCK PEARS!!"
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Speaking of which, does anyone know if PearPC uses multiple threads? I mean can it really take advantage of SMP? Because while it may be slow (a 3 GHz PC would run like a 75 MHz Mac), if it could use multiple processors (different tasks use different processors) then it would FEEL faster.
If this was the case, all you'd need is 4 Opterons or Xeons with HT and you could get yourself the equivenent of a 300 MHz iMac that you could buy for a fraction of what all that hardware would cost you. But it would be really geeky! Who says Macs are more expensive than equivelent PCs ;)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
...and only Steve can decide if it's worth the trade off. Personally I think Apple stands to profit more from software sales than they stand to lose from hardware sales. Apple's hardware (especially their laptops) is innovative, and that will continue to a large portion of their sales.
Even if MacOSXIntel is in the works I think Apple needs to do some things before they can consider going toe-to-toe with MS. If MS sees Apple as a threat they would logically pull support of all their products from Mac OS X. This means that Apple at the very least needs a viable alternative to MS's biggest non-OS products: IE and Office. Apple already tackled IE, and Safari is great. They don't have anything that can compete with Office, though Keynote could be taken as an indication that this is the direction they are heading.
There is a slightly dated, but never-the-less relevant opinion column by a friend of mine, Joshua Thorpe, on my website at http://www.macopz.com/columns/jt/thinkswitch.html
-=(Lord Crosis)=-Andy Rooney of Borg: "Ya ever wonder WHY resistance is futile?"
Yeah, well--
.= "retort ";
#!/usr/bin/perl
$year = 1999;
$retort = "";
while(1) {
$year++;
$retort
print "$year called, and they want their witty retort $retort back\n\n";
}
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
The project is cool, but unfortunetly it may never be fully usable. The target goal is for it to run at host/10 speed. For those of you who have used vmware (not an emulator) know that it can be quite slow, and its speed is way faster than host/10. Right now, it works at a speed host/500 or host/40. You know how people are, once the host/10 is reached he might just say to himself "I can do a little better," and host/9, host/8, host/7... One day, it might be usable. I'd love for Apple to release OS X on x86. There are some rumours of an x86 version being developed inside Apple for the day that they might switch to Intel. I am quite tired of the beige computer that I have in front of my face. The thing is that I will never by their overpriced hardware. For those of you that say that Apple will die if they switch to x86, I think that you are wrong. People don't care about the processor. When people buy a Mac, they buy the whole package: - the good looking monitor - the good looking tower - the good looking keyboard - the good looking mouse - the good looking speakers - the good looking OS X. I believe that they can get a lot of the market if the lower the price and switch to x86. In the past few months they have sold more iPods than macs, this should be a red flag that they have to do something about those prices. We all know that the hardware price is a ripoff. What I am wondering is if there is a scheme where the price from hardware goes to sofware. OS X comes with a ton of software for $130, while XP $300 comes with a crappy browser and notepad. They might be making the sofware look cheap and put hidden charges in the hardware. It is possible that I am wrong, but who trusts businesses this days?
I've run OS X on a beige g3 (233 mHz) and i can gurantee that it runs better than an emulated PPC running at, oh, lets say hypothetically... 70 mHz (2800 mHz / 40 ). Most problems running OS X i've had have been to a dearth of memory, not lack of proc.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
Windows -> Cygwin (?) -> Linux
Linux -> PearPC -> OS X
OS X -> VirtualPC -> Windows
repeat ad infinitum.
Yes folks, we just have discovered the new way to stress test your new computer. The more loops you can get going, the better.
Why bother? Why...BOTHER??
:)
*fart* *gasp*
Because!! Because it can be done!
Wha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
You know the drill, not alway sane, but sometimes entertaining! Hell, if I had no concept of modern entertainment and nothing better to do...well I'd probably watch porn, but hey.
Quack, quack.
Why not Yellow Dog Linux for PPC, why not AmigaOS 4.X, why not MacOS 9.X, why not the PPC version of BeOS? Anyone tried those yet?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
SheepShaver is not a CPU emulator. It is just a hardware abstraction layer. It needs to run on BeOS or PPC Linux.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I don't see where Apple hardware is really that much more epensive, especially when you consider the higher quality and better design of Apple's computers. Add the OS and iLife and I don't think there's any comparison. Maybe you haven't looked at Apple's hardware lately, thats the only reason I can see for your statement.
This is a comparison after a quick search on Dell.com and Apple.com...
eMac - $799 Dell Dimension 4600 - $746
1.25 GHz G4* 2.8GHz P4*
256MB RAM 256MB RAM
40GB HD 40GB HD
Combo Drive DVD-ROM Drive
12" PowerBook - $1599 Dell Inspiron 600m - $1368
1.33GHz G4 1.4 GHz Pentium M
256MB RAM 256MB RAM
60GB HD 40GB HD
64MB Graphics 32MB Graphics
Combo Drive Combo Drive
*note - regarding the eMac vs. the 4600 processor. I am writing this on a 2.66MHz Sony Vaio that seems for most things no faster than my 1GHz G4 PowerBook, so I don't think that comparing the two processors is too far off.
Since I had nothing else to do (PearPC took 99% of my processor and all the RAM it could possibly find), I actually started to clean my bed/computer room. Thank you, PearPC.
Other testimonials:
PearPC changed my life! I no longer have to use this silly pacemaker - Dorothy Krutz, West VA.
Without PearPC, I wouldn't have been able to achieve cold fusion in my livingroom! Thanks, PearPC! - Johnny Taylor, Age 12, Branson, MO
PEARPC HAS MOST GRACEFULLY HELPED MY EMAILING BUSINESS, BASED IN NIGERIA. THANK YOU MOST SINCERELY, PEARPC - Mganda Ngawe, Nigeria
I wonder if PearPC will run in Virtual PC on a Mac. I mean, not that you'd want to, but it would be an interesting experiment: PPC running OSX --> Emulated x86 running Windows --> Emulated PPC running OSX.
Okay, enough caffeine for me today.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
...running VirtualPC again, with the PearPC running OSX with VirtualPC with.... hm. Wonder when it all says *poof* if you try this...
FX!32 was an optimizing emulator, with native system calls somewhat supported (in windows & linux both). It is much like what transmeta later came up with and called "code morphing". It would load a program, and run it like a normal emulator, and cache it in native form, but as a section was accessed more, it would attempt to optimize that section more and more, which meant inner loops might be as efficient as native code, while the startup section was as fast as another emulator. Really cool technology, and meant that they were quite good at running x86, and combined with the native system calls, were often faster at one point than x86-native execution. Unfortunately, for Alphas, and Microsoft (because alphas got buried at compaq in favor of Itanic, and microsoft, because NT 4 on Alphas was more stable than any other Windows OS to date (2000, server2003, XP) on any other hardware (x86 and ia64, as all the others died pre-2000).) they didn't keep it going, otherwise hacks like x86-64 would not have been needed at all. It would have been like the Mac's 68k->PPC transition, another case where emulated code was faster than native.
Emultion doesn't have to be slow, it just is hard to find examples of where it isn't, because for computers I can only find 2 examples that aren't really old systems where everything has many times over the power: C64-era and like.
This could be helpful for developers looking to test their open source code on Mac OS X.
Does anyone have any OS X machines available for open source developers to use? Something ssh-able with apple's developer tools (make and gcc) would be sufficient.
If no one knows of any services like this, would any OS X people be willing to open up user accounts on their boxen? (PearPC or real hardware, either would be fine) email me: molotov1134@hotmail.com
Thanks,
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I think you misunderstood the emphasis of my post. I try to avoid italics, but I'll put them in:
"Macs aren't that expensive compared to PCs."
In other words, Macs are more expensive, but they aren't so much more expensive that it will be cheaper to buy a PC and emulate a Mac than it will be to simply buy a Mac.
Anyway, you say that you shouldn't judge by a top-of-the-line system, but that's what you did. $3000 gets you an unbelievably kick-ass Mac. Since Apple doesn't actually sell bottom of the barrel pieces of junk, I think it's fair to consider something like the eMac, which starts out at only $800, and it's a very nice Mac. The Mac midrange is the iMac, which starts out at $1300. I have a budget and "true technical expertise" and would happily buy either one, if not for the fact that computers that weigh over ten pounds don't agree with my lifestyle. Of course, if I could afford it, I'd get a G5, but I'd also get a better PC than your decent $800 example if I wanted a PC and had the money.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
"Basically you can plug in just about any USB input device and it'll Just Work." As a Mac user, I can tell you that this is not really true. Visit the Mac forums you will see many scanners, all-in-one print/scan/fax devices, etc do not work well on Macs. Many common and modern devices such as KB/Mouse, printers, cameras, etc do just work fine though.
and each layer having two virtual child machines... or three, or more... (somebody please build an über-powerful cray and do this :P)
Because hypothetically, this thing will get optimized to the point where it should be possible to run OS X acceptably. And there are people out there who are interested in such a thing, such as myself- I recently broke the bank to acquire a dual G4 450 for 500$- and it took another 300$ in upgrades to make it useable (to say nothing of the ~200$ worth of parts I'm permaborrowing to make it functional for entertainment purposes). That's a four year old machine.
By contrast, I can get a used PC (from a coworker) that's faster (133mhz bus as opposed to the 100 in the G4), at a used price of half the present value of the parts he put into it... which is about 160$.
The economically disadvantaged don't get the luxury of modern high-powered Macintoshes- for the price of a three-year-old G4, I can build a CURRENT PC.
If I could run OS X at useable speeds through an emulation system on a CURRENT PC, I'd buy the hardware and do things that way- seeing as how a current PC (bare bones) is between 1/4 and 3/4 the price of a current useable (re: expandable) Mac.
Better OS and included productivity suites like iLife? Yes.
Comparable in price? I do not think so.
Most Mac lovers are used to paying the MSRP as set by Apple - no discounts, no sales. As a result, when they need a price comparison, they go to Dell.com and price out a system. However, what they fail to realize is that most PC consumers price-shop!
To use more lame automotive analogies, Mac users are like Saturn car buyers who have always paid the no haggle price and are happy with it. However, they also expect PC buyers who buy Yugo (cheap white box), Toyota/Honda/Ford/GM/VW (Dell, HP, etc), or Lexus/Audi/Mercedes/BMW (Alienware, VAIO, IBM Thinkpads), to not price shop i.e. negotiate at the dealership!
Case in point: The Inspiron 600m was recently advertised to be $1050 after discount and rebate, 2/3 the price of a 12" PB.*
The price comparison with 4600 is even more ridiculous. At $770 and with free shipping, you could get a 2.8 gHz 4600 with a 17" LCD! Many web sites advertise such sales. Personally, I have recommanded http://www.techbargains.com/query.cfm to friends and family members.
So in summary, Macs maybe better in many, if not most, aspects compared to an x86 running Windows but one thing it is not is cheaper!
*NOTE* - I would still buy the PB anyway and recommand Macs to friends and families. I am just a (disgruntled) Mac user who had to pay $280 to fix my iBook's logic board that was not covered by the recall!
*NOTE 2* - Sure there is little difference when doing everyday tasks but when it comes times to encode AAC/DivX/render etc, I find a higher clocked P4 or similarly clocked Pentium-M to be superior to G4.
I'm not holding my breath. I'm sure it will improve, but not enough that this will be useful outside of special cases. The overhead involved in emulating something like a PPC chip within the limits of the x86 architecture is absolutely incredible, and clever programming can do a lot but it does have limits.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
and is currently running only 40 times slower than host, that's very impressive given the register starvation problem. With future versions I'm sure they will be working on optimisations, the graphics code may be slowing things down simewhat as I understand Quartz uses 3d graphics hardware for some of its compositing magic.
I think this is definately a project to keep an eye on, plus with platforms like Athlon64/Opteron this may be far more viable.
Picture this: Pearpc with a bootloader and very basic stripped down gnu/linux system, or even pearpc with its own kernel acting simply as a Hardware Abstraction Layer to boot you into OS X. You lose the cruft of having it run on a full operating system and would hopefully improve speed .
I am NaN
We used to have IBM 51x0 desktops. These were like Transmeta - they had a RISC CPU with a VM (CPU emulator) in ROM. There were two VMs available: System 360 (for running the System 360 APL interpreter) and System 36 (for running the System 36 Basic interpreter). There was a front panel switch to select the CPU emulation. Yes, like Transmeta, running the interpreter on top of the CPU emulator was fast enough to be very useful.
So, I am imagining a notebook with a front panel switch for i686/G4.
You can buy non-apple PPC machines, yes. I haven't seen any non-apple motherboards for sale, though. IBM sells several PPC workstations - but they're even more expensive than a Mac. Yellow Dog Linux sold generic PPC machines for a while, but from a quick look at their website they now appear to be only selling Apple and IBM machines, as well as PPC BriQs - tiny g3 or g4 systems that fit in a 5 1/4" drive bay.
Wonder when it all says *poof* if you try this...
When you try to install the Virtual PC inside virtual PC and get an error that reads something like
"No, you cannot install Virtual PC inside another Virtual PC. You just had to try, though, didn't you?"
...and that's all there is to it.
Ask and ye shall see pain: OS X on WinXP on OS X
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
I want my Jesus back, Jesus back, Jesus back ribs from Chili's!
Christian music is just pop, but s/baby/Jesus, as applied by a friend of mine
THEY STILL REFUSE TO JOIN US IN THE 21st CENTURY AND MAKE A MULTI-BUTTON MOUSE.
Because God knows, nobody else's mice work on Apple computers.
Look, let me see if I can explain this to you using small words so you don't get confused.
1. Apple sells computers. (We've gotta start somewhere.)
2. With each Apple computer come a keyboard and a mouse. When you go to the Apple store, you don't have to tell them that you want a mouse. One comes right there in the box.
3. Apple believes, rightly, that the zero-button mouse is the right choice for the majority of their customers. So dropping the zero-button mouse in favor of something else is not an option.
4. If Apple designs and manufactures a three-button mouse and offers it as an option, customers who want to buy it will complain about the mouse that comes in the box with the Mac. They're complain that they're being asked to pay for two mice when they only want one. There will be strongly worded posts to Slashdot about the Apple "mouse tax."
5. If Apple removes the mouse from the Mac box entirely, then all customers will have to buy a mouse separately, which will annoy everybody equally. Annoying a very small number of your customers is fine. Annoying all of your customers is bad business.
6. In any case, building a different mouse would pose all sorts of logistical problems. (Oops. "Logistical" isn't a very small word, is it? Well, that's okay. Just skip ahead if you get scared.) There are questions of packaging, bills of materials, additional part numbers, separate warranty processing... it'd be a mess. An unnecessary mess.
7. So what's the best option for Apple? To manufacture a three-button mouse, stock it, and offer it for sale to customers who want one, I guess. That way the majority of Apple customers, who are quite happy with the zero-button mouse, won't notice a change, and the other customers will have a choice.
8. But wait. Some customers will want a two-button mouse, some will want two buttons and a scroll wheel, and some will want three buttons. Crap. Now Apple has to manufacture four different kinds of mice.
9. Okay, so we have our optimum scenario. Apple customers all get zero-button mice, and those who want one have the option of buying one of several different kinds of other mice.
10. Which is, you'll notice, exactly like the status quo, except Apple has to spend a lot of money designing, building, packaging, stocking, and distributing mice.
Why doesn't Apple make a three-button mouse? That's why.
And also because Steve doesn't like you.
I write in my journal
Here's an idea: why not put a PowerPC chip on a PCI card and use that to run the instructions natively, with the emulator front-end being a wrapper for the hardware (and possibly provide the rest of the emulated system)?
Like older macs used to have a PC compatibility card.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
The article at osnews.com ran PearPC v0.1 and had a Finder infinite loop (last 15 minutes) which has been fixed since then.
Pear PC 0.1.1
FPU: fixed fmaddx and friends (That means your Finder will no longer crash-loop)
Unfortunately it doesn't mention anything about the dock loop issue.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
I heard it probably won't work because x86 CPUs don't provide so good support for virtualization and VMWare relies on virtualization.
Apparently there's no way to 100% hide the fact that stuff is being virtualized on x86s.
Whereas it's possible on PowerPCs. IBM has been doing virtualization for decades ( and likely holds tons of patents on it).
Of course you can resort to emulation, but that's really really slow.
There have been a lot of people installing Panther since PearPC's release (esp. at different OSX emulation sites), and some have had different experiences installing/running OSX than others (different from the guy in the article). I'll quote somebody as an example..."[...] for me it's entirely usable. Changing a theme takes around 30 seconds, a wallpaper around 8 seconds, applying sytem icons takes around 40 seconds. It's not as slow as I would have imagined."
.1.1, not .1, is the latest version of PearPC. Especially with the JITC-enchanced version, the new version has some speed improvements and stuff :)
Also,
For what it's worth, I'm lonely and geekish enough to have actually done THIS
:D
....so lonely....
It took hours on end, but I finally got Mac OS X running via Pear PC on Windows XP being emulated in Virtual PC on MacOS X.
something I can run under bochs :)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Actually I don't see any. What they call "Crescendo/PCI" cards are made for the PCI PowerMacs, but install in a PDS slot, not PCI. The Crescendo/7200 is special - because the PowerMac 7200 doesn't have a PDS slot, they had to make it for the PCI. It appears to be unique, and comes only in G3 flavor.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Even if it's current, it's still a PC. You still have to deal with all the hassles of running Windows.
Installs are easy, you're just copying files. But do apps run? The only reports I've read indicate that every app crashes immediately on launch, taking down the OS with it. Even clicking on the Dock causes a crash. This is not a successful install.
There is no doubt that Apple already has OS X ported to the x86 architecture. What there is of OS X that isn't Darwin or FreeBSD (both run on x86) is largely based on the NextStep and NextStep was ported to the x86. So there is no doubt that OS X is around internally on x86. If ever Apple decides to give up on PPCs (not inconceivable (insert all old arguments about the difficulties of competing with x86/Intel/$10B chip foundries/etc)), then it must be ready with an OS X for the x86, so you know that Apple has x86 OS X internally just as a smart business precaution, to hedge its bets. But Apple is going to be extremely cautious about deciding to actually market and release x86 OS X... I think you can see why...
That should be MHz, not mHz.
Those who want the traditional Mac single button mouse gets it and those who request a multiple or scroll version gets one.
I take some issue with #3 - but whatever.
Mostly, I'm just really peeved about Apple's laptops, which are otherwise essentially my dream machine in every regard. If the laptops came with a two button or *gasp* three button mouse, I'd be ecstatic. Because you _can't_ just replace it.
EVEN IF most users would be confused - my solution is to have a "mouse" control panel, and map all the buttons back to the same damn button click. At least then we COULD set it differently, without having to add an external device to an otherwise very autonomous, wonderful laptop.
If this doesn't get resolved soon I'm going to have to take apart and retrofit one, and then somebody is going to feel my wrath.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Bullshit. Have you ever used MacOS (in any incarnation)? Well designed applications never need more than a single button. The only times I ever miss three buttons is when I'm running VirtualPC or X11 apps (and then I can just plug in a three button mouse). By only having one button on their mice, they can also have one button trackpads, which are far easier to use the two button ones (which always end up requiring some horrible contortion of your hands to use properly). The trackpad on my PowerBook is the first one I've found that I could use for long periods.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In all fairness, there are some applications for Mac OS X that require three mouse buttons: Maya and Shake come to mind. The thing about these applications, though, is that they're IRIX apps that were ported to the Mac. They don't follow the Mac human interface guidelines.
That's not necessarily to say that these are not well-designed applications. It's just that these applications have a very specific user base.
I write in my journal
I was actually refering mainly to the case of the computer, not the internal components. I don't think that there can be much defference in the quality of the internal components, at least after you reach a certain (normal) level of quality. I just can't stand the toy like look and feel of practicly all other computers. I would like to know who decided that all PCs had to be made flimsy and cheap. As to the logic board failures, I'll still take my chances with Apple. I'd rather take the (slight) chance of getting a lemon Apple than being guaranteed of getting a crappy PC.