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Is Piracy the Pathway to Apple Profit?
An anonymous reader writes "Over at Apple Matters Chris Seibold writes an interesting piece hypothesizing that Apple's strategy may bank on people pirating OS X for their Intel boxes."
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Worked for MS :) /flame on
"Old man yells at systemd"
...we might be using Machintoshes as PCs now. So, why not? It's never too late to start... but how long will it take before we get 50% Apple and 50% Windows market share?
mirrordot link: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/a275d1e2b1ec65915 edb446546758a8b/index.html
How long before my next machine comes with the words "Don't steal operating systems" on the plastic wrap?
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Posting AC for no karma whoring.
Apple computer: Is Piracy the Pathway to Profits?
by Chris Seibold
Jun 13, 2005
If you remember the heady days of the first incarnation of Napster chances are you downloaded a song and later discarded the foul bit of pop. Chances are also pretty strong that you downloaded a song and ended up buying the compact disc from your local music store. For me the discarded song was Come on Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners. I am sure the music industry chalks that up to a lost CD sale, but honestly, there was no way I was ever going to buy any music by Dexy and his intrepid band of late night dashers. On the other and when I downloaded Devil's Haircut by Beck I went out and actually purchased the entire CD.
The above is a simplification of how piracy can actually move product. Chances are very good that without the illicit download one less copy of Odelay would have been sold. So, for no great investment on his part, Beck sold one more album that he normally would have thanks to being pirated. Software companies have understood this concept for quite some time. They will grudgingly put up with piracy if it sells more copies in the long or if it prevents a competitor from gaining a foothold. Say, for example, someone company produces a legitimate competitor to Adobe Photoshop. The new product feature all of the pixel manipulating goodness of Photoshop but retails for half the price. In basic economic theory the new product would soon displace Photoshop as the image editor of choice. In reality that is not necessarily the case. If Adobe Photoshop gets passed around on P2P sites there is no incentive for theft happy users to try the new competitor, both are stolen and to the end user stolen=free. Years later the one pirate removes the eye patch and becomes burdened with kids and full employment. Suddenly spending hours on the internet looking for registration codes and illegal copies no longer holds the same appeal, it has become easier and safer just to purchase a legitimate copy.
Which brings us to the question of Apple computer and piracy. You, as a reader of fine Apple oriented commentary, are no doubt aware of the recent announcement that Apple is switching to Intel. This has some interesting ramifications, one of the foremost is that you will now, in all probability, be able download a copy of OS X on a P2P site and run it on any plain vanilla Wintel box by employing some sort of hack. To many Apple fans this is a nightmare scenario. "Why" they wonder "would anyone ever buy another Mac if they can run OS X on a Wintel box?"
Before considering why people might still buy Macs even if they could hack a Wintel to do the job let us consider the benefits of OS X piracy. For years interested parties have heard people complain: "Macs are too expensive." At this moment most people are thinking about only of the retail price. This is a mistake, the cost of Macs to a fence sitting switcher encompasses much more than the price tag. To get in the world of Mac you have to be willing to take a massive leap of faith. You must be convinced that a Mac will serve all your computing needs admirably and you probably have to accept that as a truth without extensively using a Macintosh. It is also wise to remember that for most computer users it is an "either/or" decision, not many have the resources necessary to grab a Windows for safety and a Mac just to decide if it a suitable OS. Faced with a decision like that it is not hard to understand why people, time and time again, choose the OS with the greatest amount of familiarity. With rampant piracy suddenly this is not an issue. People can play with OS X on their Wintel box and make an informed decision when they make their next computer purchase. It is not hard to imagine that actually being able to use OS X for a significant period of time might result in more switchers than Apple's ads ever dreamed of producing.
Here one suspects Apple will face a careful balancing act. If hacking a PC to run OS X is triv
Since TFA seems to be down already, I assume it is talking about allowing the release of Tiger for Intel to propogate on BitTorrent networks. Perhaps Apple is allowing for this to give curious Windows users a taste of OS X and it's suite of apps, but this certainly would not continue when the final version is released.
Apple could not easily survive as a software company. Apple has been a hardware company for it's duration. Remember back in 1997, when Apple almost died? Steve Jobs had to kill the clones because Apple could not compete with the cheap hardware. Arguably, Apple is in a much stronger position to sell software due to it's larger user base, better public image, etc., but I don't think Apple would profit as much.
Apple is a hardware company that might be hoping that some users download the torrent, fall in love with OS X, and buy an Intel Mac in a year. Or maybe this whole thing is overzealous speculation on the part of imaginative bloggers. Either way, Apple will remain a hardware company and provide an integrated computing solution that is clean, solid, and attractive.
First of all, I remember reading that OSX will only work on the Apple computers, and while a crack may exist, one would have to wonder how long it will be until such a fix would be mostly bug free.
The other problem with that idea is that people are going to have to download new programs because being an intel computer of any type doesn't allow you to install the same software on Windows as you do on Unix. OSX is a BSD Unix system after all. This may not be a very good toy unless people are downloading it to make a complete switch pending any advancement in cross-platform software.
Lastly, how many people can you think of running pirated WindozeXP that were so impressed with the product that they bought it? It may work for CDs in a good number of cases, but I can't see that happening as much as this article hopes on an OS level. It may help to increase publicity, which will garner some increase in sales, but nothing like the fame achieved by The Grey Album.
If it works out for Apple in the end, then kudos, but with increased DRM practices and the great deal of elitism among the diehard mac fans, one would have to wonder about the possibility of two camps of mac fans if the piracy worked. Imageine authentic vs. underground fans disputing like Linux vs. BSD users sometimes do...
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
"Also Apple is at heart a hardware company."
Wrong. From the lips of Steve Jobs himself: "The heart of Apple is OSX."
How can you call Apple a hardware company? Because they put everything in a well designed box? All the components are 3rd party... Apple doesn't make processors, Apple doesn't make memory, Apple doesn't make harddrives or video cards or sound cards. They buy them from hardware companies, put them in a shiny box and then run *their software* on it.
How is Apple going to use the DRM features of a chip I do not have to prevent me from installing OSX on my P4? Am I missing something?
;-)
There's a couple of methods they could use:
1. Have Mac OS X check for the presence of an authorization chip ala NES Carts. If no chip is found, refuse to install.
2. Make the OS rely on OpenBoot features. Since PCs have a BIOS instead it would be difficult (if not impossible) to install OS X without swapping out your BIOS.
3. Replace all the crappy PC hardware (e.g. chained interrupt controllers, A20 gate, etc.) and replace it with something more sensible. OS X would then only run on a machine with sensible hardware.
4. All of the above.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
My guess, if I had to put money on it, would be:
- It'll be "legacy free", that is, no PS/2 or serial ports. It will have USB High Speed, IDE, and maybe Firewire, just like their current line up.
- They'll do several single board machines without PCI, similar to the motherboard in a PC laptop in hardware spec.
- The architecture will essentially be that of a PC clone. This'll ensure they can use off-the-shelf components for lower cost machines.
- They'll probably use EFI instead of BIOS.
For reasons why, see the JE linked to in my .sig.
There are a lot of comments that have come out of Apple, together with actual actions, that demonstrate where this is heading. If they wanted to produce a non-standard machine that just happened to have an Intel CPU in it, they wouldn't be making a lot of the decisions they're making. There'd be no reason to abandon Open Firmware. There'd be no reason to change the disk partition format. There'd be comments from Apple to the effect Windows is unlikely to run. What you'll have in a year will be a machine that may well run many industry standard PC operating systems out of the box.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I wouldn't trust a .exe ;) .iso or .bin/.cue pair.
If it was real, it would be a
Apple also stated two other things. First, you will not be able to run OS X on a vanilla x86-based computer. Second, there will be nothing preventing Windows from running on the Apple computers and, it was stated, this is expected.
None of that means someone won't hack OS X into working on non-Apple machines. But everyone should be absolutely clear that Apple is moving to the x86 CPU architecture. Period. No Intel PPC. No Intel "Next Big Thing".
As for "stock hardware", most components in Macs now are the same components you find in x86-based PCs. The big difference is the architecture around the CPU. Interface cards use AGP/PCI bus. Memory is DIMM. Hard drive / DVD / CD is EIDE/SATA. I know I can buy off-the-shelf stuff to upgrade or replace many of the components in my iMac G5. Videocard manufacturers are still playing their games, though, by selling the same cards with different BIOS so they can charge a premium.
Not to be a stickler but Jobs said that the heart of the MAC (not Apple) is the operating system. That makes more sense too since the ipod makes up such a large chunk of the Apple revenue.
Pathway to Apple Profit?
Apple needs no pathway to profit - it is profitable as a hardware company. They need software only as a selling point for their hardware. Releasing MacOS X compatible with standard non-brand PC's would undermine their hardware sales - and it would be a pathway to ginormous losses like they had in 1997 and 1998, when they allowed cloning. They are profitable since then precisely because Jobs killed clones. Do you seriously believe he did it only to reintroduce Mac cloning ten years later?
Apple is also a company used to having their software run on a pre-determined combination of hardware and software. I suspect these dev kits are no exception. Even if it somehow leaks out, I highly doubt it will work on any 'ol wintel PC simply due to a lack of drivers.
www.lonseidman.com
The original premise was that an x86 release for generic x86 hardware (non Apple firmware) was already released. This however turned out to be a hoax. I doubt Apple is trying to make a revolution giving an OS away.
The RIAA knows this, but they are deliberately ignoring it because they are more concerned with control of the product before profitability. They have the data which shows that music sharing increases sales. But for them the issue is about control of the distribution, so they can be the arbiters of who's "hot" and who's not. They have many artists' careers to control and profit from. Surrendering that control renders them effectively useless, so they will spend millions prosecuting 14 year olds to intimidate people away from making their own decisions about what music they want.
Apple (and Microsoft) basically have one product they're responsible for, and they want that product to succeed both PR-wise and financially, so they'll take advantage of things like "quality control" and "customer preferences" .. you know, those evil capitalist things that actually involves paying attention to the customer.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
iTunes worked with a large number of MP3 players before the iPod was even a seed of an idea, and it still does.
It is possible that you are confusing the fact that iPod only officially works with iTunes, but that doesn't mean the reverse is automatically true.
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
Without those apps, OS X-x86-Lite would likely suffer the same fate as those who "tried" RedHat only to reinstall their orginal Windows because it wouldn't do anything for them.
This is a boring sig
Although there is a MacOSX developer-version that will run on a particular Macintosh "P.C.," it may not run on your regular vanilla P.C.
But what's worse is that it might run on vanilla P.C., but badly. I can see it now: punks downloading Mac OSX "for free" and having it either crash, or have Quartz disabled, or otherwise run funky. Then the fallout on many a P.C. site/blog will be all about how OSX is crap and can't run well on a Dell.
In short, this could turn out to be bad publicity, if there is such a thing.
From Apple throws the switch, aligns with Intel (June 6):
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I wholeheartedly agree. They know you probably weren't gonna buy that tune you downloaded anyway. They know that tune might turn you on and get you to buy the artist's CDs (or not).
They also know that if it's that easy for consumers to get music directly, they become redundant. Their tactics are intended to retain control of the artists.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
And don't download them, you can find them on torrentspy and torrentreactor, the problem is that the >900MB one is a goatse.cx picture weighting 1GB once uncompressed and the other one, >600MB, is stuck at 13% for everyone, plus 600MB for MacOsX is dreaming wide awake, Tiger weights alot so don't expect it to be that small even compressed.
:)
What I mean is that all those article you read about osX being pirated are wishfull thinking, which is then used as a fun opportunity for malware writers.
If you want to create a buzz about osX on x86 this is the worst way, wait till you have actually found a working copy, personnaly found it, not being told about it and then talk about it. Right now those stories are pissing people off because all they get is a wide opened ass or an interminable wait... and I really don't understand how can this help Apple sell more MacOsX or create a buzz before releasing it. If you want this type of marketing to work don't spoil it before it happens because once the good copy is out there people will be very hesitant to get it... and the marketing tactic will fail, and we don't want that
No, your statement was not a flame. There are several "incidents" that have helped to solidify Microsoft's dominanace, and piracy can most certainly be attributed to that.
The aformentioned incident about Windows 3.1 is most certainly valid. Look at how many people pirated numerous versions of Windows since the early 1990s. This allowed people to become familiar with the operating system. Then, when it came time for people to purchase a new system, what operating system do you think they would have gotten with it (assuming that they had a choice)? Some operating system that was unknown to the general populous, like OS/2, or something that they already knew well because they had been using a pirated version? Since the operating system came with the PC, Microsoft got a fee for that PC sale. So, whereas MS didn't profit from the initial piracy, they still made a sale later on and further addicted the user to Windows.
I still firmly believe that the "crack" for the Kinko's version of MS Office several years ago was planned. For those who don't know or don't remember, U.S. printing franchise Kinko's had a "special" 30-day, full-usage CD for MS Office (I forget the specific version) for something like $5. Shortly thereafter a crack was released that broke the 30-day protection. The change was a simple modification to a DLL file and a huge nuber of these discs were sold. I'm generally not a conspiracy theorist, but if there was a lot of concern for the "protection" of the "demo" software, Microsoft would (or should) have made it more difficult than a DLL file for protection. I also heard nothing afterwards about prosecuting the one who released the crack. So, for a few bucks per cracked disc, Microsoft snared how many hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people into Microsoft Office. I'd just about guarantee that the vast majority of those people are still using a version of MS Office. Whether those versions are pirated or not is another matter, but I'll bet that many of them are not.
I really would like to know how much of Microsoft's current dominance is due to past piracy. I'll bet that Microsoft would not be anywhere close to where it is now if there was no such thing as software piracy.
And how many of us have pirated a number of games that we otherwise would not have bought but were so impressive that we purchased what was downloaded and/or purchased any of its sequels or expansion packs? I would think many of us.
I honestly think that there can be an argument made that piracy can under certain circumstances make a product more popular, and Microsoft's dominance is certainly what should be offered as proof of that. I would be willing to bet that Apple would be in the same situation. I know a number of people that I work with (myself included) who would love to work with OS X but are not willing to purchase an additional piece of hardware that we might not be interested in afterwards. But we'd be glad to try it out on one of my Athlon XP/64 systems.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Apple is also a hardware company, they make most of their money by selling the only computers that can run the software that they sell (by my estimates Apple currently owns, oh, about 100% of the Macintosh market).
Open-source OS X and you not only lose your OS Revenues, you lose the hardware monopoly.
What's left? iPods and iTunes downloads? Hard to afford the Steve's Gulfstream on that revenue.
A lot of code that we think of as OSX lives in things like Aqua, above the kernel level.
Exactly, above the kernel level... where it is already abstracted from the hardware.
Somehow, I doubt that OSX will be available on ordinary PCs. Ther is SUCH a variety of PC hardware, this would be unlikely.
Gee, you have a nVidia card? OSX only supports ATI.
Whoops. nForce chipset. Sorry.
Looks like your Athlon 64 does not support SSE3. Now, you software will crash for your amusement. Enjoy!
It is not that Apple could NOT support all of those devices. It is just that Apple is not likely to put the work into it, because they want people to buy THEIR hardware. I suppose that you MIGHT be able to build a PC made just to run OSX (using the components that have drivers), but that would have to be deliberate. Or, you could get lucky and have just the right hardware, but that would be unlikely.
Oh, one more thing. Don't expect 3rd party drivers for mobos. If it is impossible to buy OSX by itself, no mobo manufacturer will support it. Video cards MIGHT be another story. I can imagine nVidia and ATI writing their own Mac drivers if this x86 thing takes off.
Of course, this is just my opinion. I could be VERY wrong about this whole thing.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
The bundled apps like iPhoto, iDVD, iCal or iTunes make the system useful, out of the box, to your average Soccer Mom or Nascar Dad.
Funny - Don't they call that "anticompetitive behavior" when Microsoft does it?
But all the porn files on torrentspy come as .exe's....
Are Alliterative Headlines Hopelessly Hokey?
Search your feelings, Slashdot editors.
Yes, when a convicted monopolist bundles software as a tactict to further consolidate their hold on an industry, it is called "anticompetitive".
If you aren't a monopoly, you can bundle 'till the cows come home.
That's because Aple doesn't command the large share of the market. If Apple had 90%+ of the market, then it would be anit-competative behaviour. Like it or not, the rules change when you become the dominant market force. It was the same for IBM in the 60's and AT&T in the 70's
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
If we take the experience with the IBM PCs in the 80's as our template I think it is easy to see that cloning and piracy don't contribute to the success of individual hardware companies.
IBM owned the PC market up until the late 80s but the evolution of cloned hardware destroyed their business. It was Microsoft who made their fortune from cloned hardware not IBM. Microsoft may have benefited from software piracy but they held a unique position of being able to get reliably paid for their products by large institutions like OEMs, corporations and government entities. Pirated copies of their software didn't effect their principle revenue streams because MS didn't have a reliable mechanism for getting people who did pirate to pay in the first place.
I don't see Apple benefiting from clones (de facto or formal) or pirated software. Cloned hardware would cannibalize Apple's own sales. Clones would not functions as well as real Macs which would damage the brand. Trying to recoup by selling the OS and other software like iLife would require serialization and all the headaches that entails in addition to support issues.
Perhaps Apple could gain an edge by capturing the small but influential "hacker" market. People who enjoy futzing with Linux might be willing to suffer the headaches of running MacOS X on unsupported hardware. Beyond that, however, I don't see much advantage.
The same rationalization is floated at all the warez and P2P sites, and it just doesn't hold water. The network effect may be real (up-front loss in sales yields free advertising and subsequent monetary transaction), but it is neither as large or as desirable as they make it out to be. First, if you can download game ABC from the network, play through it in 2 weeks for free, what incentive do you ever have to buy it down the road? What is the point of letting 100,000 people get your game for free only to convert 1,000 of them -- when it's more likely that 5,000 would have forked over the cash had it not been so easy to Google or torrent? Productivity and utility software is a little harder, because its long life usually means that there are several upgrades/updates that invalidate a pirated code, and give someone another chance to "go straight", but there are no hard statistics either way. No, the "lost sales" never quite jive with the numbers the BSA always publishes, but you have to be naive to think that warezed software is anywhere close to effective in getting users to fork over money.
Next, the software industry does not rely on piracy to sell product -- the argument is crap. There are plenty of ways to leverage the network effect without shooting themselves in the foot: time or feature limited demos, shareware, light versions, free framework/pay-for plugins, competitive upgrades, bundling, educational discounts, site licenses, support contracts, etc. etc. These companies desperately want to put their software in front of you, they want you to learn it, love it, advocate it, but they aren't dumb enough to give you the keys to the store without something in return. Adobe Photoshop will still be king even if it wasn't splashed over all the P2P networks, because it's a professional tool and businesses will still fork over the big money to buy it -- regardless of whether Jimmy warezed it or got the $50 version at the campus bookstore. Jimmy isn't the market, and he's deluding himself if he thinks he's doing Adobe a favor.
No, Apple isn't going to rely on warezed versions of the MacOS to build marketshare -- they already have iPods, iTunes, pretty iMacs, and plenty of rabid press to remind people how user-friendly the Mac is. They will produce consumer-friendly x86 iMacs, they will continue to make great laptops, and they will continue to push the MacOS against Longhorn. They will probably license the MacOS to bundle with other x86 computers (HP, Sony) to get even more people on board (but not for free).
Now, the technical hurdles involved in tying the hardware to the OS and vice versa are pretty large. In the end, Apple will be unable to stop people from running Windows on their Mac-branded hardware (Apple still gets their hardware cut) or from running the MacOS on their commodity hardware (Apple still gets a software cut) -- Darwin and Windows hackers will see to it. It doesn't mean they will embrace it, let alone turn a blind eye to piracy as a way to build marketshare, but they will pick their battles and make sure to grab a little revenue where they can. Ideally, when Longhorn ships, people will go to CompUSA or Fry's, and see it sitting next to Tiger on the shelf -- they will think back over all the virus/trojan/worm hassles they've had with Windows, and then decide how to spend their $129. Now thatis the network effect in action.
Think about iTunes -- it's a pretty good solution that makes it easy to find, try, and buy cheap music. Apple has put up reasonable barriers so that they can still get the music industry on board without alienating users. You can certainly buy an album on the cheap, burn it, and give it to your friends or post it to P2P -- but how many people actually do that? It's not worth the hassle for moderate quality music. Sure, the freedom is there to reassure users, but Apple sticks to the corporate line that piracy is bad and easy/cheap is good. Now, the MP3 market may have been forged by P2P, but Apple has done a pretty good job making it profitable without giving away the keys to the store.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
I do remember BeOS R5 PE. I installed it on my PowerComputing 150. The problem with their business model wasn't that they gave away a version for free. I think the problem was that there weren't a lot of compelling applications available for BeOS. It was way cool. It did real multitasking-- that was the big 'gee-whiz' for me.
This situation with Apple is different. They've already achieved a critical mass of applications for MacOS X. If people were to install a free version, they'd recognize the credibility of the OS in day-to-day use. BeOS just didn't get over that hurdle.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
More than visibility ... Apple is plenty visible. Matter of fact, Apple's rep has traditionally been higher among non-Mac users than among actual Mac bigots. Let's face it, Windows 3.1's success was due largely to mouse pointer envy, which is kind of like penis envy but not. DOS users wanted a mouse and some nifty icons and that's pretty much all Windows 3.1 gave them. Genius, really, when you think about it: Microsoft's marketing team managed to convince untold millions of lusers that that fifth-rate DOS shell called "Windows 3.1" was functionally competitive with a Macintosh. They did it again with Windows 95, and then again with Windows 98. Mindblowing.
... well. Goody for us, I'd say. I'd be more than willing to pay Apple for their operating system, I just never wanted to pay the premium for their hardware.
In any event, what Apple wants is so-called mindshare, where people get familiar with a product at school or at home. Once they get used to it, they then pressure their workplace to let them have it there as well, which is what Apple (and Microsoft) desperately need because the corporate market is where the big bucks are. Nothing more than a page out of Microsoft's book (as so many others have commented) and it's perfectly legitimate (think of it as we'll-look-the-other-way while you try-before-you-buy). I mean, one can choose to accept a certain degree of infringement of one's IP rights before releasing the lawyers. That is within a software vendor's rights. Sorta like shareware but not.
And this is a perfect example of the difference between true piracy and simple copyright infringement. Apple may (or may not) be willing to turn a blind eye towards individuals illegally copying it's software, as a business strategy intended to gain future market share. But you can bet your bottom dollar that a pirate outfit burning OSX discs by the hundreds of thousands and selling them for profit would attract a degree of legal lightning that would do the RIAA proud.
The mere thought of having to compete with a MacOS on a cheap Intel platform has given Hell, Gates & Co. nightmares for years. If it actually comes to pass
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Every development build for OS X ends up getting published on p2p networks within days. If Apple was cool with this, they wouldn't have a NDA covering access to development builds, and they wouldn't have sued the guy who obtained developer access via a real developer so that he could give Tiger away.
p g
But the Intel version isn't a DVD - it's only available as part of a $999 "package" that includes a PC mobo in a G5 case, that Apple is demanding back at the end of the year.
It's pretty hard to track a DVD sent to thousands of developers, but if Apple is charging developers $1000 each for access to the Intel hardware, it would be rather trivial to give each copy that goes out a watermark, so that if it gets released, it would be very easy to see who leaked it.
And since developers are in a special agreement to participate in the Intel dev package, Apple could very easily add substantial financial penalties to the contract if their copy got leaked.
Movies have similar watermarks to identify where pirated films are getting copied, but it would be so much easier for Apple to hide a chunk of code in each DVD to identify the very developer involved.
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After Intel based Macs are available, the majority of users will find that modern Macs are not commodity PCs just because they share the Intel processor, and give up trying to install OS X after their PC fails to boot it from BIOS.
Even if Apple made Mac OS X very difficult to install on PC hardware, it seems like it would be fairly trivial to create a virtual machine for PCs that could run it. Such a product could not be commercial, because Apple said they wouldn't allow it.
Somewhat ironically, Apple enterprise tried to sell OpenStep for Intel and OpenStep for Windows for some time in 1997 after first purchasing NeXT, and couldn't find much interest. Of course, at the price they were asking, they are now basically throwing in a Intel Mac for free!
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/images/openstepcd.j
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The few l33t haxxors who get Mac OS X running on a PC will have little effect on Apple's existing market, either in 'loss from piracy' or in 'viral spreading of OS X to create new demand.'
The Mac Mini, iBooks and PowerBooks are all quite popular among those who have bought them, including Linux users who buy them for their hardware features rather than the integration with OS X. All are running proprietary hardware unable to realistically run Windows today. If new versions also allow users access to the only reason wintel PCs need to exist (PC games), buying actual Apple hardware will be even more compelling.
Why buy a Dell system when you can get an Apple Mac that runs OS X for about the same price, and still run your old Windows software in a VM?
Anything authoritative will be covered by NDA, and Apple will likely not release specs of the Developer Transition Kit, since it doesn't represent a shipping product anyway, and for various other reasons.
But the BIOS version has been posted around publicly on forums; also, note http://macintouch.com/macintel04.html:
MacInTouch Reader
In response to the BIOS statements, the Intel Developer Transition Platform is NOT a "PHOENIX BIOS". PHOENIX is a specific BIOS maker, and this is not a PHOENIX BIOS. It is an Intel BIOS.
Further, it's no mystery how to get into almost any BIOS under the sun: just hold F2 at boot (F2 and alt-enter cover the vast majority of PC BIOSes). However, this means little, since this is merely a developer testing and transition platform only; the developer systems also don't have FireWire 800, or Bluetooth, or AirPort.
Does that mean that final products won't have these? Of course not. The transition platform's BIOS also has floppy support. Does that mean that Intel Macs will have floppy drives? No. The point is that the developer platform does not represent what will - or won't - be in shipping products. To see what Apple will be shipping with Intel processors in a year or two (or longer), look to Intel's roadmap. To see what technologies Apple will include, look to Apple's history and the current products: shipping Intel-based Macs will have all of the Mac features and functionality we have come to depend on.
Further, Apple has not forgotten about the 64-bit marketplace. But let's take this transition one step at a time.
Now, of course, MACs are quite good, but back in the day their hardware was always screwing up for seemingly random reasons. It made a lot of people curse Apple to the ends of the Earth.
So, if you try this as a company, make sure your product doesn't suck.
Similar to the upcoming US election results