Cherry OS Claims Mac OS X Capability For x86

jediboytj writes "According to the MacWorld Article, Cherry OS, does what Virtual PC does for Macs, only the opposite. PC Users are now able to run Mac OSX at G4 Speeds (Company claims 80% of the speed of your PC). It also includes full hardware support: hard drive, CPU, RAM, FireWire, USB, PCI, PCMCIA bus, Ethernet networking and modem. The software is being distributed through electronic download at $49.99 USD..." Note: it does not come with a copy of any Apple OS. Anyone in Windowsland tried it to provide a thumbs up (or down)?

Comments

Finally...

[Daimaou]

I've always wanted to try OS X to see if I'd like it, but I've always thought buying a Mac was an expensive way to "test drive" OS X, and thus have never done so. $50.00 on the otherhand is quite reasonable, I think. Perhaps I'll finally give OS X a try.

Re:Finally...

[krunk7]

I find nothing morally wrong with downloading a torrent if your intentions are to "try before you buy". I do this with every game before I buy. I give it a week, if I like it I buy it.....every time.

So try osx, just make sure you give it fair shake, the first time I tried it I didn't particularly care for it. But after giving it a thorough try out (e.g. not just fiddling in spare time, but used as my main os for a month) I never put it down.

cheers,
-james

Re:Finally...

[Trolling4Dollars]

Yesssss... but have you paid for it now??? ;P

Re:Finally...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because I'm sure Cherry OS runs like crap, just like Fusion did back in the day. But if people experience MacOS at reduced speed and performance, and decide they like it more than Windows, they might buy an Apple machine to get the full experience.

Re:Finally...

[squiggleslash]

Then buy an Apple keyboard and plug it in a spare USB slot and hide it around the back. You've introduced the missing Apple hardware into the equation.

but..

[TheScottishGuy]

isn't the whole point of running osX that it's mac hardware too? why would you want to run it on a pc?

Re:but..

[yamla]

Most of my software development takes place on ix86 machines, targetting Windows and less often, Linux. It just isn't worth the cost for me to buy an Apple computer.

I'm not saying they aren't good value for money or anything. But if I could compile and test software for OS X on my ix86 system, that could well be worth the purchase price of the software and a license for OS X. Provided, of course, it is fully compatible and runs at a decent speed.

Heck, if they really are close to 80%, this is a pretty good deal. If I was to buy Apple hardware anyway, just for testing, I'd likely end up with a 1.25 Ghz eMac or whatever. The emulation route would result in a much faster OS X system for me as my ix86 computer is generally always quite high-end.

Re:but..

[el_gordo101]

To be able to test web apps on the various Mac web browsers, for one. I'm sure that there are any number of other reasons why folks would want to.

Looks... non-existent

[Rosyna]

The screenshots are missing (last I checked), the site is full of spelling errors and they called it "Apple Install Shield". It being Installer.app, I guess?

Emulating a G3 at 80% might be within the realm of possibility if I was on LSD. However, saying you can do a G4 (which implies AltiVec) is just not possible. Seriously. That'd be like emulating SSE3 on a G5. Ain't gonna happen.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[dalutong]

I would guess they won't because either 1) they have some no-compete-on-x86 clause with their deal with MS or 2) they couldn't have quite as nice an experience with x86 -- if you don't control the hardware it is much harder to have such a nice stable system

Re:Looks... non-existent

[forkazoo]

That, and there would be no apps, a huge amount of cost for technical support, and if 100% of the Apple user base switched over to OS/X x86 (by some miracle every app ever was ported), THEY WOULD STOP BUYING MACS!

Apple has had an "escape plan" for years. The original plan was called Star Trek, and it was a port of classic Mac OS. Now, it's called "If we wanted, we could recompile the GUI for almost any platform gcc targets in probably a few hours."

Re:Looks... non-existent

[forkazoo]

Have you actually worked with either instruction set? "It's probable that most instructions will map directly" is not a compelling technical argument. I'm not going to clasim to be an expert, but I have dealt in passing with both SSE and Alti-Vec. There isn't a 1:1 mapping. Even if there was, the differences in register layout make emulating AltiVec a bit inconvenient, to say the least.

I'm trying to boggle over how exactly one would go about trying to do it. My brain keeps insisting that register starvation really is an issue. I guess they just have a lot of stuff sitting in L1 cache, and keep a really tight loop for the emulator core. Regardless of the actual marketing claims, if it works, I'm impressed. They should just be very careful about letting Marketing make empty promises. If they fail to deliver, they are sunk, and have no credibility. If they had just made no speed specific claims, they wouldn't have to worry about failing to live up to them.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[DurendalMac]

Atlivec is a 128-bit vector processing unit with 162 instructions. I would LOVE to see an x86 chip (32 or 64 bit) just TRY to emulate that at 80% speed. They'll be lucky to get 25%.

Re:Looks... non-existent

[Pius II.]

You mean Quartz Extreme. Quartz is to OS X what GDI is to Windows. If you rule out Quartz, you can just use Darwin (which is basically Mac OS X without Quartz). And no, you don't want that.

Uh...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Yeah that will piss bill off. People that wanted to buy an apple will just buy a windows pc, Cherry and OSX. That will really tick him off. Drain off all of the apple hardware margins and increase windows revenue. Life must suck for him right now.

Re:one problem

[ShdwStkr]

behind on your security patches then, are you? :)

Re:recipe for a slashdotting

[John Harrison]

and then run your webserver on Windows using ASP for static pages.

Re:From the CherryOS Site:

[Feneric]

I personally find it hard to trust a company that's supposedly created a full G4 emulator capable of running Mac OS 10.3 but still hasn't figured out the difference in computer land between Mac and MAC.

Re:I have no idea

[Lucky Kevin]

but they probably won't be very keen on a commericial product that violates the EULA.

How does this violate the EULA? Apple can't go after the company for simply providing an emulator.

Now the end user, well that might be a different matter.

Re:I have no idea

[vhold]

It's really a double edged sword for Apple.

Pro: PC users buying Mac OS, PC users buying Mac OS software, PC users going 'Hmm Mac is great, I think I'll just buy a Mac for my next computer'. Basically it way lowers the bar for introduction to the platform, seems like a MASSIVE win for Apple.

Con: Mac users not really utilizing their macs from a horsepower perspective, they are just browsing internet, email, a few things, they think, hmm, I could buy a cheap Dell, put this on there, and probably have an ok machine... hmm. Or... Mac users with an inclination towards games, it's an obvious win for them to have a real PC for games and use MacOS for absolutely everything else that isn't nearly as performance related. Aka: -Actual- hardware competition for Apple.. That alone will probably drive Apple into a frenzy.

I personally think the pros outweigh the cons, just simply because there are a ton of people that will never even try Mac simply because of the high cost and risk of introduction. This could lower that bar to almost nonexistant.

Gentlemen, start your binary diff tools..

[SiW]

..because 10 bucks says this rips off PearPC wholesale.

Re:Gentlemen, start your binary diff tools..

[bedouin]

Indeed. At best this is a repackaging of PearPC, kind of like what the WinTel people did with Bochs.

Re:Try this instead:

[jdray]

Good point. Two things come to mind:

Does Cherry have any Pear in it? Will there be a code license war coming up between the two?

Also, does anyone here have practical experience with Pear? What's its performance like? I've got a Celeron 1.6 with 512 MB RAM running SUSE 9.1. Can I expect Pear to run like an 800 MHz PPC? 300 MHz maybe?

Re:one problem

[The Bungi]

Rebooting for a mere driver upgrade is ridiculous

But compiling the driver and then crapping around /etc for thirty minutes isn't.

It's a desktop PC. God will kill no kittens and the world will not come to an end if you reboot once in a while. If you do not want to reboot a desktop PC it's either because you have some psychological issues or you're running some mission-critical application on it, which is dumb to begin with.

Re:just buy a mac :-)

[Lifewolf]

Why not just go with inventor of the GUI and the maker of the first 64 bit PC ???

What do DEC have to do with Mac OS running on Windows?

Step away from the reality distortion field.

Thievery

[JQuick]

Downloading a stolen copy of the OS is just plain wrong.

Apple paid 400 million dollars to buy NeXT. They then spent years of development effort integrating their older MacOS technologies to ensure backward compatibility. They released the resulting core OS for free use (in source code no less). They base a number of their core utility software on OpenSource products, and contribute much source code back to the community.

If you are running a BSD Unix, or running Linix, chances are you are already benefiting from Apple contributions to open source projects on a daily basis.

Ooh, you say, now we can pirate their GUI development utilities and application software! Grow up!

Why would you benefit from doing so? Because the software is worth using, will save you time, and will be enjoyable. If you benefit from a product or service, show some respect for those people responsible for providing it.

If you are not willing to pay anything, then use what is given for free. They respect and contribute to both GNU and BSD based projects.

If you are not willing to buy a new machine, then look on eBay, or online retailers who specialize in repairing and reselling older Mac hardware.

Yes, the software is damn good. No, they currently do not sell it on Intel hardware (either native or emulated).

Whether you or I like that or not, is beside the point. Using tools which improve your productivity or quality of life is worth something to you. If it is worthwhile, put up or shut up. In the open source world, contribute money or time to help improve it. In the commercial world, buy the product, and help fund further improvements.

Re:Thievery

[b-baggins]

Nice rationalization. However, people who still have their common-sense morality working know that, morally, there's no difference. You are taking something that does not belong to you without paying for it.

Re:Thievery

[Ford Prefect]

Theft or stealing has the implication of denial of the object from the original owner as a necessary part of it's definition.

Well, you can steal a kiss or steal a glance, neither of which involve the denial of an object from an original owner - and 'he stole my ideas!' is a valid, well-understood statement in English. 'Copyright theft' is also a valid, well-understood statement, much to the chagrin of many Slashdotters it would appear.

Why are people so worked up about this issue? Are they trying to rewrite the English language so they don't feel so guilty about something?

Re:Thievery

[kommakazi]

You're denying the owner the monetary compensation they deserve in return for you getting a copy of their software, so yes it is theft. You're not stealing the object, you are stealing the profit.

Re:Thievery

[mildness]

If ran off without paying for a haircut is that theft? Yes. You robbed him of his product even though there is no physical object for you to see.

It is called "theft of services".

And the fellow who says it's not stealing if he would not pay for it in the first place too high to talk too now. I'll post another note when he's had a chance to come down.

(:-{)}

Cheers

Bill

Re:Thievery

[metachor]

There's nothing crippled about Apple's hardware. It shitty ports that make some game perform poorly on the Mac. *cough* Halo *cough*

The irony being that Bungie, the makers of Halo, were previously a Mac-only development group. (Halo is the 4th game in the Marathon fps series.)

Microsoft bought them up, licensed Halo for the X-Box, and half-assedly requested a port to the Mac at the last moment.

Re:Thievery

[FurryFeet]

Yep, nice fallacy. Specifically, you are defining theft to mean what you want it to. Why don't we ask someone who knows what he's saying?

From Websters: "\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny."

Mmmmhhh.... let's see... "with an intent to deprive..."... mmmmhhh...
Care to try again?

Re:Thievery

[kommakazi]

Thats because Bungie didn't do the port, Westlake did.

Re:Thievery

[OnanTheBarbarian]

Uh, it's hard to imagine what people mean when they say "theft of services", then. If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.

This seems to be a popular semantic game on /. whenever this topic comes up; redefine 'theft' narrowly and then celebrate the fact that software piracy doesn't equal theft.

Next up: someone will no doubt assure us that it's permissible to pirate stuff because it's 'low quality' or because they want to 'try before they buy' or some such. Like all that stolen IP out there is this big protest against capitalist exploitation and mediocrity.

Re:Thievery

[JQuick]

The court system (both federal, and most states) does not agree with you.

You are correct that until rather recently most statutes concerning theft did correspond to older dictionary definitions requiring that a physical object be missing of that an object be moved from its rightful place.

However in 20th century statutes using the word "theft" began appearing which no longer rely on that old definition.

Statutes for theft of service, involving electrical power define unpaid use of electricity as theft. You have not stolen electrons, merely some of the motive power they convey. Legally however this is a from of theft. Later, theft of service in other forms was legislated. Tapping into a cable TV feed, receiving and decrypting real time stock ticker information broadcast over radio, are all considered theft by both federal and state laws.

In the latter form, you have deprived no-one of use of their property. You have however, attempted to derive personal benefit from something for which you have not paid.

On legal grounds your definition of theft appears unsound.

I see many problems with intellectual property and patent laws which no longer serve the public. Their intent was to provide a short time limited monopoly which was to spur innovation, and then devolve to the public domain and benefit everyone. In my opinion the grant of limited monopoly is no longer limited, and the benefit to the public vastly reduced. However that is a matter of politics, not of pragmatics or ethics.

I agree with your opinion that copying aught to be somehow different. However, ethically and pragmatically it still feels like theft. Legally, it also looks like theft.

Admitting that it is an illegal act, but insisting it is not theft is mere hair splitting.

Re:Thievery

[Geoff-with-a-G]

If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.

No, you're denying them a concurrent haircut. You were consuming the time and effort of the barber/hairstylist. This does not parallel to code or music. Try another analogy.

This point comes up a lot, because it's not just semantics and nitpicking; it's the crucial point. If I had no intention of buying a CD, and I copy it, I have not harmed anyone in any way. I haven't deprived anyone of anything. It's copyright violation, which shouldn't be ignored, but it shouldn't be called theft either. It's not theft anymore than ignoring someone is murder.

Re:Thievery

[westlake]

It's still wrong and illegal - so why are you so upset at the thought that it might not actually be theft?

The more interesting question is why you should become so upset when by common usage or statutory definition copyright infringement does become theft. You have already admitted that it is illegal and immoral.

If I shoot your father dead, will you accuse me of stealing his life, and try to have me prosecuted for theft? No, you'll accuse me of homicide

"Stealing a life" would be acceptable almost anywhere as a poetic definition of murder, even though a man cannot be owned as property in the modern world.

The pursuit of civil remedies, monetary compensation, for crimes as extreme as murder and rape was encouraged in the law codes of Alfred the Great (871-899), and still has relevance today, as O.J. Simpson discovered.

Re:Thievery

[nathanh]

Uh, it's hard to imagine what people mean when they say "theft of services", then. If I flee Supercuts after getting my hair cut, I'm not denying anyone a subsequent haircut from the same person, but I am definitely stealing something.

It's not a sufficiently accurate analogy to copyright infringement. When you sat down for your haircut there was an implicit contract. You would get your haircut and the barber would get your money. When you ran away after getting your haircut it wasn't the haircut you were "stealing", it was the money you owed the barber.

With copyright infringement you never even meet the owner of the copyright work. You put all the effort into making the copy. Although the owner has been "ripped off" it's not money you've "stolen"; what you've done is violated their exclusive right to copy or to permit copying. The lost opportunity cost - what you would have paid for the copyrighted work if you'd bought one of the owner's sanctioned copies - is not the same thing as theft. Look up "opportunity cost". It's a standard economic term. It's not theft.

While I agree copyright infringement is illegal I don't think your "haircut analogy" cuts it (pun!).

Re:Thievery

[Vellmont]

It is called "theft of services".


Nice try, but wrong. Software licensing isn't a service. It's a product and if you copy software without a license you're breaking copyright law. It's really quite as simple as that. It's not a criminal act, but it is something you can be taken to civil court for and sued for damages. Theft of service would be more like contracting with someone to write you a software product, receiving the end product, then stiffing them when it comes time to pay.

Any attempts to define breaking copyright law as theft are just plain wrong as a legal definition. Attempts to define it morally as theft are problematic at best since the immoral act is generally considered to be depriving someone of their property, breaking and entering, etc. Violating copyright law involves none of those.

You can still have your moral qualms about it, just don't try to associate copyright violations with theft.

Re:Thievery

[div_B]

If I had no intention of buying a CD, and I copy it, I have not harmed anyone in any way.

I'm not staunchly for or against here, but there's a big flaw in this argument.

What if you have no intention of buying the CD, only because you know you don't have to? What if you couldn't possibly obtain it any other way than buying it? Would you then consider purchasing it?

Let's be realistic, if you have no intention of buying it because you don't really want it, then sure, pirating it isn't really costing anyone else anything, but, I'd wager people generally pirate stuff they DO want, stuff they potentially would buy, if pirating it wasn't an option.

Re:Thievery

[dsanfte]

Just stop. You're wrong.

"Theft of Services" applies to a haircut because you are depriving the barber of his time without due compensation. His time is worth something.

Once again, if a kid in Russia copies Win XP, does Ballmer's jaguar stall for 20 minutes? No. Please, just shut up.

Re:Thievery

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Not quite. You really don't have to deprive them of anything.

My local Sam's Club has to discard unpurchased rotisserie ribs every evening lest they go bad. Is it theft if I take one about 10 minutes before closing (before they've discarded it) without paying for it?

Yes. There's nothing you're depriving them of, there's nothing they'd lose, but it's still theft, because you've taken something from them without permission.

Re:From the CherryOS Site:

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally find it hard to trust a company that's supposedly created a full G4 emulator capable of running Mac OS 10.3 but still hasn't figured out the difference in computer land between Mac and MAC.

All doubts aside... I find it more difficult to believe that someone like an engineer or plain jane coder would have anything to do with the press release writeup than the secretary doing the writeup to confuse MAC and Mac.

Moderators, lay off the crack!

[John Harrison]

How is this insightful? Of course the software cost more than $50 to develop. They probably plan on selling more than one copy before getting sued into oblivion by Apple. For all you know Cherry OS hired a bunch of guys in India to write the thing and it did cost $50. In any case prices are governed by the law of supply and demand and not by you.

Re:Moderators, lay off the crack!

[ThousandStars]

I don't think the moderators are on crack: it takes a tremendous amount of time, effort and expertise to write an emulator, especially with the kind of features CherryOS claims to have. VPC has been around for a decade, and has had man-hours unnumbered put into making it usable.

The real kicker is the claim that the company emulates a G4, which seems highly unlikely for reasons too long to go into here -- read the rest of the thread for other posters' interpretations.

I'm skeptical, and so is the grandparent, and so should other readers. Extraordinary claims like the ones being made by an unknown company with no history demand extraordinary proof before they're accepted.

Given this context, I think the moderators are doing an acceptable job.

Re:one problem

[julesh]

Indeed. The Win2K machine I'm writing this from has been up since 30 June, and sees daily heavy use. Windows' reliability problems have been wildly exaggerated for the last 4 years, at least.

Re:CherryOS's speed claims, at least, are fraudule

[arminw]

There is no reason why Cherry would have to get Apple's blessing for this if the emulator/translator emulates the PPC on an x86 box. Apple does not make the PPC chip and if none of Apple's code is used, they will not be able to sic their lawyers on Cherry.

Using the word "impossible" is dangerous. There have been too many times in history where such sentiments were expressed by skeptics, but what "could not be doen" was done, often to the chagrin of such skeptics. The proof of the pudding is of course easily checked out. Risk $50 +$130 for the Mac OS and try it.

Re:Good news..

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, like, someone made a kit that will let you put a BMW body onto a Honda! Dude! Like, I'll be able to try out that BMW stuff without having to buy a BMW! It will be just like a BMW too, I'll get some stickers and a steering wheel cover that says 'BWM' and then I'll be able to have the BMW when I want something that's easy to drive and looks fly and I can use my Honda that fixed up by adding a cheap Turbo kit, a big tac, and a bigger wing for street racing... Dude! It will be the best of both worlds! :P

I think it's a scam, i.e Fraud

[theolein]

For one thing, I just did a couple of whois on cherryos.com, all of whose contacts are listed as arben kryeziu, whose email is given as arben@bumpnetworks.com. Do a whois on bumpnetworks.com (which is a run of the mill web development company according to its website) and you get all the tech contacts as arben@kryeziu.com, which is a simple holding site, obviously the guy's own.

Now, this Arben Kryeziu guy is the one in the, of all things, java video player on the video link site.

So this guy has time to run a web development company, be the tech and admin contacts for all the sites, and run a PPC emulation development outfit on the side? I seriously doubt it.

Not that it might be possible, who knows, but companies such as Connectix (now owned by Microsoft) spent literally years, getting their x86 emulators up to about 1/4 of the speed of the host PPC CPU. And this guy has done it on his own, with a tiny outfit in no time and with no news announcements, and got it to run at 3/4 the host x86 system? I doubt it again.

And then, he sells the whole thing for $50????? And only by electronic download???? With a PDF manual that closely resembles the PearPC effort???? Has anyone actually downloaded this and paid the guy his $50???? Has anyone seen it run???

Even in that weird video (why no wmv, why no real, why no quicktime?) where he supposedly "demonstrates" the application, you don't actually see it running.

My guess is that, if the application really does run, it is simply a PearPC wrapper and runs at around 1/10th or less of the host speed. (Notice the typical marketing "up to 80% of the host" x86 system?)

I have nothing against Albanians (Kryeziu is an albanian name, listen to the guy's accent), but I think the guy is trying to make a quick buck off the hopefuls who want Mac OSX but won't or can't buy a Mac.

We'll see when the first real reports come in of how and if this thing performs, but if it truly is what he claims it to be, which I seriously doubt, then he has one big hurdle and that is Apple's EULA, which states that Mac OSX is only allowed to be run on Apple branded hardware.

Re:Good news..

[JudgeFurious]

"Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go."

Yeah but they suck right? This is Slashdot right? Microsoft still sucks? Come on, somebody, what's the official party line on this?

MOD PARENT DOWN

[kuwan]

I'm sorry but drinkypoo doesn't know what he's talking about. Follow this thread a bit more to see where he's wrong.

His comment is anything but informative or insightful.

Re:Could this actually help apple?

[forkazoo]

So, you really think that people are going to spend $50 for an emulator, and over $100 for the OS, so that they can emulate a platform they barely know exists? And then, the slow performance of non-native operation, the lack of the slick full user experience, and the quirks that are in every real-world emulator... All this will inspire them to buy a Mac?

IMHO, this is a system targetted for people who already have a base of Mac OS apps that they want or need to use, and have an existing investment in PC hardware. For example, somebody who needs a laptop, and wants to use it for games, so they have to get a PC, but also occasionally needs Safari for testing web pages, or X Code to do cross platform builds on the road.

I love my iBook, and I love OS-X, but there are relatively few reasons I'd feel a need to run it on my Dell.

Re:Why Apple won't do that?

[adzoox]

Why is $529 for a 17" Monitor, CPU ,and keyboard/mouse + TONS of awesome software - with a one year Apple Warranty too much for you?

See the Apple Store special deals section.

A Report From Maui

[cmholm]

A short article appeared on the Wisconson Technology Network, among other places, whose author evidently ran into Aren Kryeziu at a hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii, and talked briefly about Maui X-stream. Unfortunately, the company office is in Wailuku, rather than the Maui tech park in Kihei, so I'll have to wait until lunch to drive over to check 'em out. Among the techno clique I've talked to in the tech park, nobody has heard of these guys. In all fairness, it's not unusual for someone to cut loose from the rat race in San Jose for a house on Maui, doing their own thing at the home office

Re:Bah...

[Greyfox]

Nevermind the software, the average user's hardware is crap -- usually the cheapest they could find with various cards they bought later installed by their friend or whoever happened to be handy, irrespective of that person's drug habits, hygene or understanding of the need for adequate cooling, etc. And they expect the software to magically be stable on their crappy systems.

As a benefit of their monopoly hold on the marketplace, Microsoft can afford to ignore the users with the crappy hardware. They can afford to have the reputation for having crappy software that crashes if you so much as look at it, even if that reputation is mostly caused by bad hardware. Notwithstanding the host of crapware that installs itself within seconds if you hook an unpatched system up to the Internet. Apple doesn't have that luxury. They're the little guy, they have to have a reputation for quality if they're going to hang in there. They can't keep that reputation by letting Joe-average-user run their operating system on his Packard-Bell with discount motherboard and memory upgrade from Bob's World of Computers. He'll install OSX, it'll crash as much for him as Windows did, and he'll get pissed off with Apple.

Re:Why Apple won't do that?

[mikrorechner]

One word:

Support.

If Apple sold OS X for x86, they would step from a small variety of hardware to the literaly unlimited number of CPU/chipset/GPU/etc. combinations in Intel/AMD-land.

Microsoft has avoided this by practically denying the users of their OS any support and "outsourcing" it to their OEM partners (which will deny any support if you changed a single component in the system they sold you).

What would Apple gain by porting OS X? A few users that treat it as another Unix variant with a nice GUI, and most probably bad hardware drivers, like Windows had (and still has), responsible for most crashes of the OS.

But they could lose their reputation as a first class hardware and software vendor, and end up like other companies that tried to sell a alternative commercial OS on x86 (think BeOS).

Re:Ummmm... darwin...

[Graymalkin]

The underlying OS is open source and there's yet to be a massive influx of ported *BSD and Linux drivers. There's been a handful of projects porting specific classes of drivers but no large scale efforts. Apple is not structured to be Red Hat and it isn't likely they would ever want to be. Red Hat survives by the skin of its teeth most of the time.

Quicktime is an extremely powerful media framework that pervades the entirety of MacOS. There's no open source equivalent to Quicktime. There's lots of open source media libraries but nothing quite like Quicktime. Open source projects attract some of the most talented software developers in the world. It isn't like Apple's software people are better than anyone else necessarily. They are however being paid to do something (such as make a pervasive media framework in the OS) fulltime. They aren't trying to write such a system in their spare time between going to school and working part time. It is entirely unlikely that a bazaar model of development would have ever conceived of something like Quicktime let alone actually built it. The fact that there's no pervasive media framework in Linux right now is good evidense of that claim I think .There's people that could design and build it but they don't necessarily have the resources or interest to. The Quicktime developers at Apple are being paid to develop Quicktime.

As such relying on people writing software in their spare time is not condusive to being an industry innovator. Many open source projects exist to build FOS versions of closed source commercial products. There's very few open source projects in existance with the goal of "make a computer easier for everyone to use".

Re:Why Apple won't do that?

[TheInternet]

bothered me for some time now is why Apple won't release OS X for Intel platform

There was a whole thread about this just a few days ago.

In fact OS X is a really great, consequently designed GUI on top of a robust BSD Unix. It should be rather portable by nature

It is. The challenges aren't purely technical.

Possibly achieving binary compatibility for software would be a problem

Next solved these problems a while ago.

Why Apple won't do it? Maybe because they don't want to get into Microsoft's gun sight?

There are a lot of reasons. Keep a few things in mind:

1. Next already pursued a strategy like this. If Steve Jobs decided to not do it again, there *might* be a good reason
2. How many copies would actually be purchased vs pirated?
3. Some of the desireable features of Mac OS X rely on intergration with underlying hardware
4. Do you really think you'd ever see an Office for Mac OS X x86?

There's no question people want everything everything Apple has to offer without actually buying any hardware, but it doesn't make any sense to do if such an action destroys Apple and Mac OS X development in the process.

- Scott

FULL hardware support? I think not...

[GFLPraxis]

Reading the article, it says that it claims full hardware support, and lists:
" It also includes full hardware support: hard drive, CPU, RAM, FireWire, USB, PCI, PCMCIA bus, Ethernet networking and modem."

No graphics card listed. Usually, that's not a big problem, BUT, Mac OS X uses Quartz Extreme to render all the windows in 3d with shadows and fancy coloring. No graphics card = horrid windowing performance.

So does this use graphics card? Because if it doesn't, we're going to have choppy windows jumping around, performance loss when you move the mouse over the dock, choppy Expose, etc. And graphics card isn't listed.

You people scare me

[FredFnord]

It's really nice that you're so plugged into the open source community that you missed, for example:

- All the optimization stuff they've folded into gcc

- All the fixes they've folded back into the BSD code tree

I'm sure there's more, those are just the two categories that I've actually used and found helpful.

And, of course, the 'overly restrictive license' is considered to be a 'Free Software' license by the FSF. It's not gnu-compatible (for which I am awfully glad) and it (oh horrors!) allows linking to proprietary non-free software. Since I am not a gnu zealot, I find those things to be positive benefits, not drawbacks.

But, of course, the facts never stopped an Anonymous Coward before, so why should they now, eh?

-fred

Re:Why Apple won't do that?

[jcr]

can't afford the hardware.

Why don't you just pick up a used machine on eBay? I see iMac G4's and dual G4 towers going for under a grand.

-jcr