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If Mac OS X Came to x86, Would You Switch?
A not-so anonymous Anonymous Coward would like to put this query before you: "I'm not a fan of Windows, and never have been, but I am a fan of the x86 architecture. I really like Linux, but there are still a few issues that are keeping me from switching completely. I really like Mac OS X but I don't want to drop $2000 on a computer that is only as fast as an x86 computer at half the price. Darwin, Mac OS X's unix-ish core, has been ported to x86 and Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn OS seems to be disliked by everyone but Microsoft. If Apple released Mac OS X to compete with Longhorn, would you switch?"
Never going to happen though, since Apple make their money from hardware, not the OS.
I would most certainly purchase and install it.
Doesn't mean I wouldn't still run windows. Possibly do a dual boot or a windows on mac kind of solution.
Ain't never gonna happen though. Apple makes money off there hardware and the OS is why people purchase the hardware. Be a foolish thing for Apple to do.
I can't count the number of times that I've heard this asked. The obvious answer is that yes a lot of people would switch if OS X was ported to x86. But I also can't count the number of times the people who keep asking this question have been told how irrelevant it is to do so. OS X is not going to be ported, for the simple reason that if it were Apple would go under and then OS X would no longer exist.
If you need to know why that is, just google for "if os x were ported" and you'll find the same explanation on thousands of pages. I don't feel like rehashing it here.
You're out of date. Macs are comparable (the WSJ's Walt Mossberg even claims cheaper) in price/performance to x86 boxes. When you factor in the reduction in neck pain, the lack of truly low-end macs is easily compensated for. OTOH, you can always get a used mac; OSX runs fine on any PPC version. As to your question, one of the main reasons that OSX is able to be so stable and still provide all of the eye-candy is because of a very small HCL. That advantage would be lost by moving to the rather chaotic wintel platform.
The only apps you could use would be source-based unix stuff, which you can use on linux anyway, and many of which won't actually run on OS X without a lot of work first.
So no...I wouldn't switch.
I hate to tell you this, but the problem with x86 has always been Windows. The BSOD was not built in at chip level. I'm writing this on a Linux box that hasn't been rebooted since March.
drop a few hundred dollars (or pounds) on an eMac. If you find out that you don't like it flog it on ebay - mac's have great resale values. If you find that you do like it flog it on ebay and buy a more powerful model... duh!
there's no chance that apple will release OS X for X86.... and the software developers will not stand for another platform, cpu, os change.
also, the apple mac hardware would get left behind which is where apple make the money. unless of course osx86 was a poor cousin that lacked features or support and why bother in that case.
If Apple switched to x86 (well, x86-64 now), they wouldn't let it run on your commodity boxes. You'd have an expensive (although less so than PPC) x86-64 box with OpenFirmware BIOS and a few Apple ASICs to provide the same functionality that Apple has on the PPC. You'd be buying Apple hardware to run it on, without a doubt.
There are several reasons for this:
1. Apple makes a lot of money on their hardware.
2. OS X has limited driver support, opening up to all breeds of hardware would slow the development of the OS down and reduce stability.
3. There's stuff you have on Macs that just doesn't exist with your typical PC BIOS, stuff like target-mode and netboot (much better implmentation than PXE).
4. Apple are about the total experience of the platform, putting OS X on your Dell with it's rat's-nest of cabling is something that makes Steve Jobs cry. Steve has a VISION, and a huge part of it is massive reduction in cabling.
Don't hold your breath for OS X on commodity x86 boxes, it'll NEVER happen. Apple might switch to x86-64 someday if the PPC architecture hits a dead-end, but I find it more likely that the opposite is true.
I will also venture to say that the submitter of this story has something wrong with him if he prefers x86 over PowerPC. The PPC architecture is beautiful, simple, and clean. And Apple isn't the only company selling PowerPC hardware.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
There are reasons for the decisions that Apple makes, and a lot of them are documented. You can look at their Human Interface Guidelines here.
To quickly answer why they have the menus at the top of the screen: Fitts' law, which describes the amount of time that it takes to move a mouse pointer to an object on the screen, indicates that it's easier to get to the menu items at the top, since you can move your mouse pointer up with no regard for missing the menu bar. Because you run up against the edge of the screen, that parameter is effectively infinite, and reduces the amount of fine controlling you have to do to select your item.
You can also do further reading about such user interface decisions in the book 'The Humane Interface' by Jef Raskin, one of the orginal developers of the Macintosh and its interface. Their decisions for dragging disks to the trash, and having a one button mouse really DID make sense at the time, but a lot of those decisions are lost on us now, especially if we don't have a long Mac background.
I wouldn't switch, because I'm perfectly happy with GNOME running on a Linux kernel.
OSX is really pretty. But GNOME is pretty enough for me. I love the clean, tidy look, and the antialiased fonts. And I have chosen a desktop theme that I like.
OSX is really stable. So is GNOME.
If you want to try out GNOME, the best way is to install Ubuntu Linux on a spare computer. (It doesn't have to be a brand-new computer, but the older and funkier the computer is, the greater the chance of a problem.)
The easiest way to try out GNOME is to get a Gnoppix CD. You boot from this CD and it will run GNOME on a Linux kernel, without touching your hard disk in any way. So you don't risk your data. And by the way, this makes a great disaster recovery tool, even if you are a Windows user and you aren't ready to switch yet.
I'll bet there is someone writing a "KDE works for me" posting right now too. KDE is also a good environment, although I personally prefer GNOME. To try out KDE, you could get a Knoppix CD. This works the same way as Gnoppix (and in fact Gnoppix was derived from Knoppix, not the other way around).
In short, anyone who has already switched to a *NIX desktop (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, whatever) is unlikely to be tempted by an x86 OSX.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Yeah, you're right, with the exception of a few CPU-level bugs along the way, the BSOD hasn't been built into the CPU, but that's not to say that it's always Windows' fault.
Other things that go into the Windows world's instability include:
El-Cheapo hardware du jour. This includes many, many x86 mobo manufacturers, as well as bottom of the barrel RAM and PSU suppliers. Guess what: If you're truly talking about making something the same as a $2,000 Mac for half the price (hyperbole, I know), then you're engaging in some of this, and it is where a lot of the BSODs originate.
As a follow-up to section 1: shitty driver support, particularly in the 9x days when everything, not just video, had an easy chance to cause system-level problems.
When people say x86 in a debate such as this, they generally mean the platform as a whole, not the cost of the chip. A Pentium 4 chip by itself is as useless to me as a G5 by itself. But to say that Linux or some other non-Windows OS is going to be magically immune to the cheap-ass, no-QA hardware that you frequently encounter in the x86 world is completely off base.
I have found in corporate environment where the user is regulated from doing anything stupid, the most common failure is hardware. One of the sales computers blue screen this morning. Do I blame Microsoft for the BSOD, even though it would give me brownie points here, after reviewing the machine in the lab, I put the blame on the RAM maker, simply replaced the stick and the employee was back working.
Just because a windows box fails doesn't mean it's Microsoft's fault.
Now to answer the article's question, I wouldn't switch to OS X, but I would probably buy a copy and run it in the lab. If I find uses for it, I may deploy it, but in the end, an operating system is a tool to get a job done, you simply use what you deem to be the best tool for the job. Which for me, in most cases is Windows, though I use *nix variants for certain tasks, where Windows is just not cost effective.
The entire GUI and all of the hundreds of libraries ("Frameworks" in Mac OS X) that Mac OS X apps depend on would need to be ported, and many of these are only designed to work on PowerPC currently.
Well, no, that's not true. The actual OS X GUI, frameworks, and libraries are largely NeXTStep, and that stuff is quite portable and even ran on x86 at some point.
Of course, OS X also has Carbon and the backwards compatibility stuff in it and that might be harder to port.
Apple cannot do this. For multiple reasons that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with marketshare and market forces.
.Net stuff, but here again, who would actually buy this? .Net is far enough advanced that it is the king of Windows and no big shops would move to Cocoa.
If Apple were to switch, it would start at point zero, with no applications, just as it did in 2000 with the Mac OSX public beta. It would not even have the Classic layer to run the old Mac apps, although that is less of a concern these days. These days Mac OSX on x86 would either have to have some very fancy easy to use WINE like environment, so that Windows users could use their current apps until OSX equivalents came along, or run Windows in a VMWare like environment.
Also, you would have to kiss MSOffice for OSX goodbye. You, as an OOo user might think this is insignificant, but it sure as hell isn't to those who use it.
Then, there would be the hardware problem that people like the article author always always forget. Apple makes most of its money from hardware. Do you think Apple would still make as much money and sell as many units if the OS was able to run on x86 commmodity hardware? Obviously not. That would force the price of the OS up. How many newbies would then pay for the OS?
Talking of newbies, how many of the gazillions of windows users who currently have never heard of OSX, or think OSX is still the same crap they used back in 1995, will fork over $100 plus for an OS without Office, without games and without other pro applications? I seriously doubt that Apple's pro apps like FCP and Logic alone are enough to sustain the platform, not to mention the intensely pissed off current users on PPC.
That means that the only people buying OSX on x86 would be geeky types like those here who are so fucking stingy (and I don't mean poor - I'm poor yet I use a Mac because it's so good) that they bitch about a $100 price difference in a computer. The vast majority would not use OSX or even think about switching.
Apple's only recourse in this case would be to make an x86 mainboard, using a special OpenFirmware with no bios, such as current Mac mainboards do, to make it incompatible with other x86 machines so that it would not encroach on Microsoft's Windows territory too much and so that it would keep users from using other x86 hardware.
And the advantage of that over its PPC platform is right around zero, so why even think about it.
Apple could have done this exactly once in the past. Back in 2000 when everyone was started to switch to OSX and there were no OSX applications for the new OS, Apple could have gone with a proprietry x86 motherboard and kept on producing a few last PPC machines until their classic MacOS users had switched and there were enough new OSX apps. That time passed as soon as new apps started coming out for OSX and people started investing money in them.
The only thing Apple could possibly do to make money on x86 these days is possibly port its Cocoa frameworks and devtools over to windows to compete against MS'
I am so so fucking tired of some one night wonders asking this same stupid question, when it is so obvious that it is just a geek cheapskate wet dream.
If you can't utilize the full-power in a machine, or if you will not utilize said power in your everyday operations, then all power in excess of what will be utilized is useless power. Now, on a rather different topic, if you're trying to suggest that a $1300 Athlon system (assuming that you're going for the best cost/parts ratio you can find and consequently build it yourself) is comparable to an equivalently priced imac G5, then I'm going to have to strongly disagree. Now, I am not including the price of a monitor, which, assuming you don't already have one, would be an additional cost in the Athlon system. However, in terms of both upgradeability and utilizable performance in currently available consumer-oriented games and applications, I would suggest that the Athlon system as stated above would absolutely kick the teeth out of the imac. If you want to talk about the advantages of the Mac OS, talk about the OS, but don't for a minute suggest the price of hardware for Macs is somehow equivalent to PCs. The upgradeability issue alone shows that PCs win hands-down in this category. An example is in order (fast-forward to this hypothetical future scenario): If I want to do a major hardware upgrade on an imac I purchased a year ago, I'm basically out of luck. Thus, the most cost and time-effective solution is to essentially get a new machine. With a PC that I assembled a year ago, I can easily take whatever component out that I want and replace it with an updated component. This long-term cost factor must also be considered when comparing the differences between the two platforms. Thus, in my estimation, the PC is still the clear winner as far as hardware is concerned in the lower-cost categories.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will