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Apple to Lock OSXi to Apple Hardware
spac writes "It seems that Apple has chosen to use the Trusted Platform Module chip to ensure that Mac OS X can only run on Apple Hardware. The report from vnunet states that the chips contain a unique identifier, which can be used to determine the manufacturer of a PC as well as facilities for data encryption. "
Apple, might be changing their system design , but they are CERTAINLY not changing their business model.
Were there any people out there with a clue who DIDNT think this would happen ?
Expect software workarounds (Darwin is OS afterall) or "Mod Chips" about 1 week after release.
while this is true, the single biggest reason for this obvious move is this: apple is a hardware company.
since the mac came out, and even before, apple has been using revenue from hardware sales to support os development. if millions of home users stampede to emachines discount boxes for their os x platform then, apple's real source of revenue will dissappear.
and then there'll be no os x.
2 1337 4 u!
All three seem reasonable to me. The combination would definatly stop the casual users (until someone figured how to simulate it all in a VMWare type environment, which I would think would take awhile).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
In my opinion, I expect that there will be some contingent of shady users attempting to hack OS X to run on commodity hardware. I actually look forward to this, but I think that Apple will care little about this because of the small number of users who will bother with this. If installing OS X on commodity hardware is possible, but non-trivial, Apple stands to lose very little (and perhaps even gain a tiny bit more market share from the /. crowd).
Apple isn't grossly overcharging for most of its hardware. This is a myth. Yes, it is more expensive, and you can dig and find some dirt cheap-ass PC to compare it to argue how horrible the pricing is, but the reality is that Apple's prices are fairly competitive, when you factor in not just a barebones system, but the software and additional functionality .. especially in the mid-to-high end of the market.
And if you don't like their prices -- don't buy a Mac. What? You want the full Mac experience but don't want to pay for it? So you want the full BMW M6 driving experience, but want to pay the cost of a Ford Focus? That's your problem, not Apple's (or BMW).
I really don't consider the Apple pricing to be unreasonable considering the fit and finish of the components. The pricing of Powermacs is in line with Opteron and Xeon workstations, but is generally quieter.
The Powermac's case uses 1/8" thick aluminum sheet for the side plates, 3/32" thick between them. Heck, even the Mac mini uses a pound of aluminum. The components inside these things look top-notch to me, without the corner cutting known to the budget PC industry.
apple is a hardware company
Apple is a platform company. Apple brand is based on a user "experience". Both the hardware and software are designed as complimentary components to an integrated platform. Seperating the hardware and software will hurt the Apple brand as a whole.
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I suggest maybe you spend some time in the trenches of the software industry. You statement is laughable on it's face.
]additional[/i] software sales is if they sold the software for less than the price of delivery
Wrong, just plain wrong.
Software today has a cost that grows with each copy sold. Software today is virtually never "done".
Prime example: you have 100 users of a software package, and you sell it. A user finds a security bug. You fix it in a few days, test it, and e-mail the users the fix. Problem solved. No extra cost. Now, you have 8 million users. A user find a security bug. You fix it in a few days, and 8 million users download it from your site. The patch is only 250K, small by most standards, that's a big chunk of bandwidth. You are obligated to support that patch. It breaks some stuff. Your phone lines are jammed. People are pissed. But still, it cost you nothing other than a few bucks in bandwidth and maybe a little goodwill.
Wrong in both cases. In both cases the person doing the fixes lost the opportunity to do other work. The time spent on the fixes is lost forever to the engineers. If it is a really significant bug it could take dozens or a hundred people to prepare the fix - from programmers to testers to QA to legal to webmasters to documentation experts to channel partners to vendors to hardware suppliers to PR. All of which has a significant and non-trivial cost. Meanwhile, while your users are calling support - even if rare - your phone people are denied the opportunity to help another user which has a ral cost.
"Pure profit minus distribution" may have been true when software was updated once every 2 years, if that. But today, between bugfixes, securtiy updates, feature "fixes", etc software is not "done". It is very much an ongoing effort.
Apple is a software company who makes money off their hardware.
are we honestly saying that software should have an inflated cost because they didn't finish the process during the beta stage. I understand that you can't find every bug, but claiming that developers are LOSING something when they debug is bunk. Developers often spend many hours debugging code, and it's not time that should have went elsewhere.
Remove *your pants* to send me email.
Yet one key aspect of that "interface" is the scroll wheel, which is hardware, just as one key aspect of the original Macintosh GUI is the hardware mouse. I find these hardware versus software arguments silly, because to me Apple is a company that is able to solve problems either in hardware or software. Therefore they are both.
Microsoft is a platform company. Microsoft brand is based on a user "experience". Both the browser and OS are designed as complimentary components to an integrated platform. Seperating Internet Explorer and Windows will hurt the Microsoft brand as a whole.
Oh, the irony.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I wonder how many people will buy Apple hardware to run Windows (1%, 10%?).
I actually think it would be much higher, if you consider people wanting to dual-boot. I personally have been interested in getting an OS-X box, but can't really leave Windows behind. I see many people dual booting their machines. Look at how many Linux people keep their machines dual-booted for games, or [insert use here]. Now look at how many people don't use linux because its "too hard to use". Now, look at how many people would like to have a stable user-friendly Unix box, but need windows for something.
There have been "licensees".
There is a huge difference.
When IBM lost the clone battles Phoenix & everyone else were free to offer reverse-engineered work-alike PCs. Not just "mostly alike", just alike. Buy the same MS or whomever OS, install the same Lotus 123 or whathaveyou, it's all a commodity.
IBM later tried to recapture the market by redefining it with MicroChannel, their proprietary & well defended next-gen bus architecture. But the ISA market was too big and had enough momentum that IBM's efforts were doomed and look, 25 years later they're out of the PC market they helped create not having made a profit at it in years.
On the other hand Apple, after a few early skirmishes, never lost control of their products. Their architecture didn't lend itself to easy reengineering and there was rarely an eager alternative OS vender around to make non-MacOS boxes viable. Be, Yellow Dog, etc. never were more then novelties.
What Apple did do was, under contracted terms, sell their proprietary system ROMs & MacOS 7 to third parties for a licensing fee and per-unit compensation. The idea was that these nimbler & more aggressive partners would expand the Mac into markets Apple wasn't interested in or where it was unable to compete effectively (usually cost or distribution-wise).
However instead companies like Power Computing turned around and cannibalized Apple's domestic bread-&-butter Mac market by offering similar systems at price points slightly below Apples.
A few did expand the Mac into new markets - high-end multi-processor, etc. but by-and-large it was a financial disaster for Apple. They were already suffering from extremely poor supply chain management, a shrinking market, and high R&D costs; to then start supplying direct competitors with products that undercut their own was disastrous.
So when the opportunity arose with a new MacOS to change terms Apple did - they bought back their licenses and shut down the program. Most folks agree if they hadn't the company wouldn't have lasted another year.
What has changed since then? Not much.
Apple now does charge for their OS upgrades, but makes no effort to enforce this. They've leveraged their R&D by adopting more standard components, adopting & using some open source code & development, and now moving to Intel-associated motherboards & CPUs. But to date they make their profit on selling the hardware & the rest is mostly part of the package.
So, Mac-clones?
Probably not. Apple is unlike Wintel - they sell the hardware and the OS: There's no advantage to their opening either end to competition. Heck for protection they could build their OS so it does something as trivial as look for an Apple-encoded string in a system firmware and sue the bagoobers outta anyone who tries to fake that.
Beyond that Apple has a long history of innovating in fundamental ways. While the development boxes they're shipping out now may be based on plain-jane Intel tech there's no promises that substantial parts of the Mactels won't be something fresh 'n funky - clever memory architecture, bus design, whatever - intractable hardware/OS interactions that homers & cloners can't easily reverse-engineer.
Time will tell, but Apple, it's officers & engineers, aren't stoopid; they're likely not looking to start giving away their crown jewels and undercutting their fiduciary responsibility no matter how many geek fan-boys want MacOS X on their hopped up Athlon-with-fins box. Me, I'll be looking forward to buying a Mactel someday, and not giving a damn what's inside of it as long as it-just-works.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.