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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?"
Furthermore, I regret to say that I don't see much prospect of any of the Linux GUI efforts approaching the ease of use and elegance of OS X any time soon - partially due to a lack of imagination, and partially due to being over-wedded to X which is evolving way too slowly and is over-wedded to a basic design that is simply outdated.
For the past several years I have been buying nothing but Apple products for myself, coworkers and family members. I have been willing to pay a higher price for better (more innovative) physical design, less cabling, and an innovative OS. The downside has been limited hardware choices that are generally a few steps behind the curve of x86 machines. That being said, I would seriously consider 'switching' to OS X on a x86 machine if it was produced and supported by Apple and possibly the hardware vendors. At the same time, however, I really like the ever evolving designs that come from Apple. When was that last compelling design change of the ubiquitous x86 desktop or laptop (maybe from Alienware)? So for me to do a pseudo-switch, I would probably also need to see some changes from the hardware vendors (how many cables run across the desk of a typical workstation?). To sum it all up, I think it would be a great thing for Apple to release OS X to the masses. It would certainly send Balmer on another sweaty spin!
My
It never ceases to amaze me how so many people who use their computers for just basic, simple tasks like office functions act like they have this incredible need for powerful hardware. I bought a Compaq Presario with a Sempron 2800, 256MB DDR Ram and a 80GB hdd for only $445 including S&H, and with SuSE 9.1 it does everything I need. It's not a game machine, so uhhh why exactly when it's just going to run Java and C++ programs for class, would I need the latest Athlon64 or Pentium4?
The reason for owning a Mac has never been about power, but utility. Every convert to MacOS X from Windows that I know switched because Macs are actually much more useful in many areas than Windows PCs. The hardest pill for many of them to swallow is that the "Apple way" really is significantly easier and more productive than the "Microsoft way."
The average computer user who could afford one, would actually be much better off with an iMac or iBook than a typical off the shelf PC. It gets the job done, and done well and it is made much better than the usual PC.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Me too I would switch in a heartbeat. however the days of Windows as the pre eminent gaming OS might be numbered.
Latest rumor out of a major games house (Not sure which one as I got the "tip" at the Linuxshow) is that the game companies are working on using LiveCD technology for games. They can tweak the kernel and the ATI / Nvidia drivers (source code issues goes away since they will be supplying binaries only) and presto you have an almost console type platform for their specific needs.
Help fight continental drift.
I have a Mac that can run OS X (but runs Linux). If OS X were released for x86, I could start running it on a PC. But I wouldn't. The reason?
I have programmed x86, MIPS, and PowerPC assembly, and studied the instruction formats for these architectures. x86 is a mess.
Ever tried to use ACPI power management under Linux? Chances are it won't work, due to bugs in the BIOS. The USB controller on my old laptop wouldn't work, because the BIOS assigned the wrong IRQ to it (it said it was on 9, but it was hardwired to 11). Ever had PCs crash because of IRQ conflicts? I have.
The PC is so full of kludges it's amazing that it still works. The system starts in real mode (16 bit, 1 MB of addressable RAM). You really want to go to protected mode (32 bit, all RAM addressable). However, certain things need to be done in real mode, because BIOSes don't do protected mode. Does your hard drive use CHS or LBA?
Have you ever compared efficiencies of other architectures with x86? It's amazing how much power goes into supporting the cruft that's in x86. It's too bad the CPUs are so small, or you could use them for cooking.
Anyway, time to quit ranting. x86 is not for me. And oh, I run Linux on my iBook because I know how to customize every part of it, and because it starts applications faster than OS X. It also has more software available (a lot of software uses GNU extensions and thus requires a lot of effort to port to OS X).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Alright! Round two!
Finding software for OS X/x86 will be just as hard, if not HARDER than it is for PPC. I don't own a Mac, actually, I use x86 hardware at home, but admin about 200 Macs at work. We don't have trouble finding software for them at all. There's good software in almost every category for OS X, and I've found that Apple's free development tools and NeXT-derived libraries lead even shareware apps to be of great quality and usability.
I know that EFI BIOS is coming, but it's still not here. I've been enjoying a 32-bit BIOS with a GUI bootloader, network booting, single-image support, and no hassles since the Blue and White G3 came out in 1999.
Most Mac setups have a LOT simpler cabling than their PC counterparts. I set these things up for a living. Macs typically install in about half the time from 'boxed' to 'bootup'. I've got a G4 on my desk at work, and an ADC monitor. My monitor gets signal, power, and USB on ONE cable to the CPU. The powered speakers get power and signal on one Y-cable, as opposed to a stereo cable, a left-to-right cable, and a power cable on the PCs. I've got ONE cable coming from the back of my screen to my keyboard, which has a built-in hub for the mouse and my flash-reader. Macs have a lot less cables when properly purchased and set up.
As for 'screwed when the monitor gives out', there are NO machines that Apple ships without external video. I just bought an iBook for my sister and she hooked it up to her monitor witht he included VGA adapter. My desktop G4 at work has both ADC and DVI out. Even the iMacs have VGA-out.
Where's the HUGE price difference? I don't buy 'low end' hardware, be it Mac or PC. Once you get to the 'good stuff' with name-brand components, quality hard drives and memory, and all the fixin's the price difference on both sides is close to zero. Apple's iBooks actually beat Dell laptops hands-down on price and value. The $300 difference on desktops like the iMac is easily accounted for in power savings (which also carry to lower AC bills), high-quality LCD screens, and time to setup and maintain. Once again, I sound like a fanboy, but I'm out there doing price/performance comparisons for my work all day.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Who *REALLY* is a fan of x86? BIOS should have died a long time ago. x86 is a hideous architecture with an ISA that makes all assembler code look like vomit etc. I think the only thing people like about x86 is the cost. I think the more important question is can we ever replace x86 with another architecture (I like SPARC and with Intel's R&D I'm sure we could get over any problems) but keep it as open and mix-and-match as x86 is now? Write a decent emulator and legacy code is taken care of. I'm sure OSS and it's upward trend would minimize the transition costs. But really when can we get rid of this turd?!?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Of course, if it was free, or could be easily pirated, and it worked as well on my computer as Linux currently does, I would switch. But thats not accurate.
First of all, if it ever came to be, it would have to be hideously expensive. Don't think about the $100 cost of OS X upgrades now. Those are for people who have already paid their dues to Apple by buying a Mac. If it was any good, an x86 Mac OS port would wipe out a fair share of Apple's current hardware sales. Even if they could, say, double their current OS market share by running on cheaper commodity hardware, they would still need to make half the profit on each new, non-upgrade copy of x86 Mac OS that they currently make on the average new Macintosh sold. I would be very surprised if they could make this up with a retail price under $400. I definitely wouldn't pay $400 or more for it, as slick as it is, and compared to free Linux and "free" preloaded Windows I doubt many other current PC users would, and it would never be a market success for Apple if only existing Mac users bought it.
And thats all supposing that the product is every bit as good as the current version of Mac OS for Apple hardware. That means that they would have to support seamlessly every possible combination of PC components that could show up on a computer made in the last 3 or 4 years. Darwin x86 certainly can't do that now, and even if they could port over every current FreeBSD driver, plus support every video chipset they support on Macintoshes now, it would be far from universal, although it would be good enough for me. Microsoft spends a lot of money on testing and driver development to ensure Windows works on every wacky system they claim it will run on, and that is even given that most of the device drivers are written by vendors.
Given these constraints, I don't think Apple can bring a viable x86 Mac OS port to market at a price low enough to be successful, so no matter how cool you think it would be to have OS X on your computer, it isn't going to happen.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
But, in any case, I would switch. For one thing, if
MacOS came to x86, I think that a lot of companies
who were abandoning the Mac and are reluctant to embrace Linux, would quickly reconsider.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
You know, I've been laptop shopping twice in the last year, once for me and once for my SO. I'm a serious geek -- I spend 90% of my time in a terminal -- and make my living with my hardware, so I spent a lot of time looking. My SO isn't a geek at all, and I'm her computer slave, so whatever she got had to be easy for me to support.
I'd never used a Mac before and was originally planning to get Thinkpad and run Debian on it. Both times, hands down, we got Macs. I have a 15" Powerbook and she has a 14" iBook. Both times I spent days on every major manufacturer's web sites, comparing every model I could find.
What I found was that there is no laptop, period, that matches anything Apple makes feature-for-feature at a comparable price point. Nothing even comes close. The only way to get the features I wanted in a Thinkpad was to pay $3,500 and gain an extra 2 pounds of travel weight. The only sub-optimal feature of the Powerbook is battery life -- after a year of constant use I get about 2 hours.
This comparison was done OS-agnostic, since I expected to run Debian on the Powerbook, too. After a week, though, I swore I'd never go back. OSX is amazing. It's the first time in 15 years of professional computer use that I haven't had to *think* about the operating system.
In short, Macs rule. if you don't believe me, do the research yourself. Anyone trotting out the "Macs are too expensive and slow" line is living in the past.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
I'm one of the comparatively few people here to have extensively used NeXTStep (the direct precursor of OS X - the core OS technology is still the same) on Intel hardware, back in the day when Linux was a freaky pile of small-rodent crud, Macs were "Win3.11 with an attitude" abominations and no other alternative to the evil empire existed.
A lot of postings here have tried to make points like "Steven Jobs hates untidy hardware" or "they couldn't make it work as neatly on x86 machines as they do on PPC rigs they build themselves", or even "they can't make it work on x86".
The first is perhaps be true (good for him if it is), the second might just be the case (but I seriously doubt this), and the third is certainly absolute rubbbish.
Granted, a lot of time has passed since then, and OS X is certainly more than NeXTStep 5 (as some diehards like to call it). But the nasty fact remains that the technological foundation of NeXTStep/OS X is enormously more stable, robust and inherently cross-platform than that of Windows in all its assorted versions of degeneracy. The Intel port of NeXTStep was perfectly useable and delivered all the comfort and useability to this new platform (and two more, actually - Sparc and HP builds also existed). You could not use arbitrary hardware (only that which had NeXTStep drivers), but that hardware was rock-solid, and given the availabilty of the excellent DriverKit the only reason other stuff wasn't supported was the lack of device information from the vendors (which is more readily available nowadays, partly due to Linux).
In short: if Apple wanted to pull this off (BIG if), the technological underpinnings would be there, and if it worked half was well as NeXTStep (which is pretty likely) technological issues would be the least of it. It's just not very likely from a marketing perspective, that's all (a shame, really, but what can one do...).
Just my two euro cents
A. W.
You could get that kind of stability by only supporting a subset of PC hardware, and it would still be cheaper than mac; For example, you'd only support the most worthy chipsets, like nforce for amd (it may not be the fastest, but it seems to be the most stable) and intel chipsets for their processors, only supporting the big-name video cards, et cetera. Another way would be to publish an API and stick with it so that developers could write drivers that wouldn't explode all over the place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As a techie, I always get bombarded with "Where can I get a good computer?" questions, and I just tell people either at Best Buy for 500 bucks or a Mac.
A few weeks ago someone answered that they don't like Macs because "they like to have control that Windows gives them".
So, yesterday that person needs help burning pictures off the digital camera to 3 CDs. It took us fourty (40!) minutes to burn 600 megs of data on a well equipped Windows XP machine (3.06GHz P4 HT, 512 MB RAM). This is why:
I drag the first set of files onto the CD, they burn OK (albeit a bit slow).
I drag the second set of files and get an "incorrect function" error. I'm thinking WTF?
I use a new CD and some drag-to-disc program comes up and burns the pictures much faster than the first CD did.
I try to burn the final CD, but get the incorrect function error again. It took me 20 minutes of CD swapping, ctrl-alt-deleteing, and cussing to figure out that I had to right click on the burner icon and enable CD burning for it.
Well, duh, one might say, of course you have to have the CD burning enabled. You might think so, but you'd better not wonder why the first two CDs burned, but the last one required enabling.
What I'm trying to say is that in the time it took me to burn 600 megs of data on a very well stocked Windows XP PC, I could have had the very same pictures sorted into albums, posted on my website (which runs on the same machine), and burned on a cd on a 1.4GHz G4.
Apple way might be more expensive at first, but it doesn't require you to randomly click on things to make them work. (Provided that the PC has a slew of 3rd party applications to keep it working in the first place.)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I'm of the same opinion as the grandparent, so I will respond to your question. I would most likely buy a P5 OSX over a G6 OSX. Here's my reasoning:
1. Right now I favor my dual G5 over my dual Xeon because:
a. my dual G5 is plugged into a 23" display and my dual Xeon is plugged into a poor 19" display. If I upgraded to one of the new displays, ADC support is dropped and a P5 box will likely have hardware that supports the nice DVI display.
b. Most of my commercial software licenses are for my G5. This is actually a strike against switching to the P5 over the G6.
c. The dual G5 box is significantly quieter than the dual Xeon box. Again, this is a strike against switching.
2. Cost of hardware: Umm... my dual Xeon with SCSI hard drives cost 30% less than my dual G5 for approximately the same processor performance (better drive performance). I'll assume the same cost difference applies in the hypothetical scenario.
3. There exist very good compilers for x86. I ran some benchmarks against both of my boxes and the Xeon outperformed the G5 in areas where the Xeon should have lost hands down. Inspecting the assembly code I realized that gcc (for C++ especially, but even for C) generates much better x86 code than PPC code. In fact, the C++ PPC code generation was terrible (particularly for large array/martix math). Intel's compiler is even better for C++ than g++, and the lack of an alternative on PPC makes the gap even larger.
This really irritates me. The PPC architecture *does* have advantages over x86. However, they are almost completely unrealized due to the lack of a decent compiler (metrowerks on PPC is decent, and fares well againt g++ on x86, but doesn't compare to intel's x86 compiler).
If (3) was fixed, I may be willing to accept (2) and then change my answer, particularly because my commercial software licenses more than make up the difference.
I really like OS X. As far as driver support, it works with my wacom tablet, my microsoft mouse, my sandisk usb drive, my iRiver MP3 player, my Canon camera, and my Epson scanner. It failed to work with my Labtec usb headphones/microphone (which doesn't matter since I can't play CounterStrike on it anyway), my Canon scanner (which happened to be one of only two Canoscan models not supported--that irritated me), and my USB wireless adapter (which I tried just to see if it worked. I already have a wireless card. Besides, the USB fucker bluescreened my windows laptop on multiple occasions, so I wouldn't call its windows support great either). I would recommend OSX iMacs to people like my grandmother as and OSX powerbooks to fellow CS students.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
The new iMac ain't the old; many of the components can be replaced by the user.
:-)
Unfortunately, the same can't be said of the eMac.
And for what it's worth, one of the reasons we got an iMac in the first place (the original style, lime-colored, been with us for 5 years) was because my wife wanted a computer that I couldn't take apart and mess with
Gonna get a new iMac real soon. They're worth every penny, IMHO.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
Software:
Jobs did it in the past, supply Fat Binaries of the software, that run on(yup) multiple architectures(Nextstep ran on PPC and x86, a single application could run on either system.) the same idea would happen hear, keep OS X on ppc, while selling hardware, but supply to developers(in droves, give it away like CANDY to anyone who has taken a CS class, try and flood the market for the new sytem) the x86 system for development of fat binaries.
Port all inhouse software to fat binaries, and let longtime developers get free advanced copies of the OS to develop on, etc.
Userbase:
Have a long developer-only release... lots of beta and make sure that the x86 version is superior to longhorn, and release BEFORE longhorn.
While handing out OS X86(clever, ay?) to developers and creating a buzz, turn your back on piracy. LET the piracy nuts get copies, let them be beta testers and buzz spreaders.
Apple could make the OS source code compatible with many, if not most/all software for porting. They have done it before with Next, it CAN be done.
How would it work? Well, Apple would need to merge towards a software company. Buy a few more pro apps and secure a nitch. Then, Apple would have to strike pre-announcement contracts with atleast 1, if not 2+ OEMs to sell the systems on... IBM and Sony would be the most obvious. Get them to be able to sell systems when the 1.0 gets released.
My Opinion:
Would it work? Iffy, I would say the Jobs could do it if he took both of Apple's feet and dove 100% into the plan. He would completely gamble the companies 4+ billion dollar savings, and maybe survive. I own a 12" powerbook and I think that owning the hardware makes the system better. Yes, it could(maybe) be done. No, I don't think Jobs would do it. Yes, I would support apple if they actually were that gutsy.
Nevermind that you're comparing an iMac to a corporate-class workstation. If you'd configured a Dimension instead of a Precision, you'd probably not have had anything to post about, sorry to say. I just got done refuting someone else's claims that "Apples aren't any more expensive than similarly equipped PCs" on The Inquirer. Oddly enough, they did the same thing you did: went straight to Dell, picked a corporate class machine. Sadly, the other people made some gross misjudgements to jack up the PC price even more, by configuring the Dell with twice the RAM, more addons, etc... But still, when you get down to it, you're comparing Apples and oranges. Back on topic, even if Apple did release OSX on x86 architecture, it'd likely run poorly (at least as compared to OSX on a Mac). It's just not in their best interests to release a "perfect" version of OSX on x86 architecture, simply because I doubt Apple makes its money selling software. If there's no compelling reason for people to buy the machines (style only goes so far, OS and other software tow the load), there's very little profit potential for Apple in releasing OSX on PC hardware.
2 x ~2 Ghz 64bit cpus
A great case
PSU
Cabling
Mouse and Keyboard
Add those, and you'll have a different equations..
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Let's all face it, the reason us geeks don't, in general, buy Macs, music on-line, software, or manuals is that we feel this sort of entitlement that we know how to get around so many things and it becomes a fun game. There was that 'secret' BBS that had all the copyprotection hacks for Kings Quest and if you are 'smart', you can use Linux for FREE and don't have to pay the 'Microsoft Tax'.
It has been engrained in us that we don't HAVE to pay because we can figure out how not to and sub-contiously, paying, and especailly OVER-paying is analogous to being a non-tech who has no other choice and so we reject it with all out beings.
So get the hell over yourselves. You know what, the iPod, the iTunes Music Store, and Macs are awesome, 'premium prices' be damned. Take a look at teh 64-bit all-in-one iMac G5 that starts at $1,300 including a gorgeous display. If you've never been to the Apple Store, do yourself a favor and go.
So to answer the question, no, I wouldn't switch because the x86 architecture is a thing of the past living in the present. The best computing experience these days is coming out from Apple and that includes both the software and the hardware.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.