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First Look at Apple's Intel Developer Macs
xyankee writes "Think Secret is reporting that developers have started taking receipt of Apple's Intel-based Mac kits. Along with some specs and photos, the site reports that Windows XP installs without a hitch on the systems and that casually trying to install Mac OS X for Intel on a Dell doesn't work... yet..."
the site reports that Windows XP installs without a hitch
Perhaps this is part of the strategy? I wonder if they could run Windows on one core and OSX on the other.
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A first look at Apple's Intel Mac (with photos)
By Ryan Katz, Senior Editor
June 22, 2005 - Apple's Intel-based Mac development kits have started trickling into developer's hands, Think Secret has learned.
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The Apple Development Platform ADP2,1, as the systems are officially designated, features 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processors with 2MB of L2 cache operating on an 800MHz bus with 1GB of RAM.
The Intel systems run Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger identically on the surface as ordinary Macs, with the exception of a modified Processor System Preference (from Apple's CHUD tools) that allows the user to toggle Hyper-Threading on or off. Apple System Profiler includes a new line under Hardware listing CPU Features; for the 3.6GHz Pentium 4 this comprises a rather lengthy list of technical acronyms: FPU, VME, DE, PSE, TSC, MSR, PAE, MCE, CX8, APIC, SEP, MTRR, PGE, MCA, CMOV, PAT, PSE36, CLFSH, DS, SCPI, MMX, FXSR, SSE, SEE2, SS, HTT, TM, SSE3, MON, DSCPL, EST, TM2, CX16, and TPR.
Apple's System Profiler reports the graphics card as an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 800. Inside the Intel Mac, DVI support for the video card is provided by a Silicon Image Orion ADD2-N Dual Pad x16. Oddly, neither Silicon Image's Web site nor Google turns up much information on the latter card, the latter yielding a single link to a recent Dell support forum posting.
The motherboard on the system is unmarked except for the word Barracuda. The system's internals are housed inside a case similar to Apple's Power Mac G5 systems but with a different configuration of fans.
Running Windows; Mac OS X on other PCs
Along with running Mac OS X, Windows XP installs without hitch on the Intel-based Mac, just as it would on any other PC, and booted without issue when installed on an NTFS-formatted partition. The only misbehavior sources encountered involved the video card. Initially, Windows refused to budge from an 800x600 setting on a 23-inch Cinema Display. Some prodding managed to get the screen to 1600x1200, but sources were unable to get Windows to take advantage of the entire screen.
Apple alluded to developers at its recent Worldwide Developer Conference that Windows should be able to run on Apple's Intel Macs.
As for installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, attempts to boot from the included Mac OS X for Intel disc resulted in an error message on both a Dell and off-brand PC. The message states that the hardware configuration is not supported by Darwin x86.
Sources have indicated that Apple will employ an EDID chip on the motherboard of Intel-based Macs that Mac OS X will look for and must handshake with first in order to boot. Such an approach, similar to hardware dongles, could theoretically be defeated, although it's unknown what level of sophistication Apple will employ.
Also uncertain is whether the Intel-based development kits seeded to developers already feature the EDID chip or whether the installation disc contains a less sophisticated installation check that simply seeks out one particular hardware configuration--the one given to developers--and will not install on other configurations.
Does the reality distortion field still work?
Now that Think Secret has confirmed that developers have the Mactel machines, will it only be a matter of time before OS X leaks out onto the Internet? Perhaps the previous stories were a little premature, but as soon as the protection mechanism on these machines is understood, it's only a matter of time.
where's the torrent for OSX Intel Edition?
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
I worked one over at WWDC for 2 hours... our stuff doesn't need six or 9 months to port, as we mostly have Java or Cocoa Obj-C code. However, we do need it for a short period of time for testing. It would be nice to be able to ARD into a Macintel for testing, but $999 for a 1.5 year lease is a bit steep when we won't be able to effectively use the box for very long.
Eventually someone will come up with a way to install OSX on any Intel processor. I can't wait to build my own Mac.
Does it run Linux?
There might be some simple (or complex) mechanism for locking the OS to the Apple/Intel system, but even if this is broken, who is going to write all of the drivers for that Dell that everyone keeps talking about?
I'm gonna need a spec.
Nowhere did Apple say x86, they just said Intel chips! So maybe there is a brand new chip that Apple will use from Intel.
Now the truth: Apple did say x86 and that, if you are interested in which specific Intel x86 chips Apple will use, check the Intel CPU roadmap for mid 2006 to get an idea.
Just trying to be efficient...
Other versions of Darwin will run on that Dell. I'm not familiar with OS X innards, but couldn't someone figure out how to replace the handshake-enabled Darwin with the Dell-friendly bits?
I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
Ok , apple wanted to use the (allegedly) superior processing power of the intel CPU , but does that mean they had to carry over all the antiquated baggage of the generic PC design with it? Could they not have come up with a 21st century for a computer that just happens to use intel rather than do a Me-Too and just create a bog standard PC that simply has an extra chip in to allow MacOS/X to install? Seems to me a very lazy and uninspired way to get a few more MFlops. Has Steve Jobs lost his way perhaps?
Can't wait, though. Triple boot PC! Or if a decent OpenSolaris distro comes out, tetra-boot! After that, no one on Slashdot can trash my OS anymore...
Bored? Browse Slashdot with a +6 modifier for Troll comme
No doubt that they will eventually get OS X to work on a generic PC clone. It will probably take some serious work around and then you have the driver problem. nobody can get an airport extreme to work on a mac right now with any version of linux, so driver's are goign to be a problem.
But since Apple won't officially allow it to install OS X on any other computer but a mac, nobody will ever be able to sell a computer with OS X pre-installed. So it will enver get mainstream and i'm sure Apple will have few sleepless nights because a few geeks have it running on their generic PC box.
"Windows XP installs without hitch" but it also says "Some prodding managed to get the screen to 1600x1200, but sources were unable to get Windows to take advantage of the entire screen." Isn't it unlikely they'd be keen to make it work, given that if the hardware's was any good and priced competitively, people would buy them and run Windows ?
I reserve the right to be wrong.
I think you're missing the point - this is a developer's model. It's sole purpose is to enable developers to transition across to Intel based macs. Lets just wait until Apple start releasing actual Intel based products before complaining about the hardware?
and maybe itsjust because the hardware is just hte developer version... but it just looks kindaplain and ugly to me.. just seems outof place in that case.
Wow! They showed us photos of a motherboard, a video card and a monitor displaying windows XP.... I've never seen that before!
When you look at a PC under the hood (not literally, but from a system architecture standpoint), you really do see twenty years of computing history, from a time when DOS programs manually invoked the PIT8253 timer to invoke timing interrupts, 16 bit code, the BIOS, and all of that junk. Yes, in a perfect world, it would be nice to wave goodbye to all of that crap.
However, the laws of economics say otherwise.
The reason that it is hard to dump them is because it doesn't really cost anything to continue to support them. You cannot buy an Intel processor that does not support 16 bit code. Antiquated timers like the PIT8253 are supported in the chipsets. Unless the legacy parts actually take up physical space on the motherboard (like ISA slots and the physical parallel port itself), it is much easier to buy an off the shelf chipset that supports everything. The alternative is to make a custom chipset that may be cleaner but have less volume.
You would be paying extra so that CGA doesn't exist. Thats just plain silly.
Looks like the server is groaning already, so here:
6 intelmac.html
http://www.thinksecret.com.nyud.net:8090/news/050
Ok this may have been suggested before, but:
If wine runs on all x86 unix-like OS's, and OSX is unix-like, will wine run on OSX-86? It would open up a very large market for apple without having to invest too much money. They will need to do some tricks to get it to use native widgets and stuff, but that's not impossible to do.
The downside is that the better wine works, the better the adware/spyware works on it too. I am probably not the only one to infect my wine IE install with ad/spyware.
What works for OSX will maybe also work for linux. There are already ABI's to make use of executables compiled for *BSD, so maybe OSX-86 binaries will run on linux soon too.
(yup wishfull thinking and pie in the sky...)
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
I doubt Apple would care too much. They make money selling hardware. If you bought an Intel Mac just to run Windows on it, it's your loss, not Apple's.
Even so, Apple probably won't do anything to make it easy for those who want to run Windows on the MacIntels. They've said that they won't prevent, it either.
It's probably simply not an issue.
The reverse though, running Mac OS X on PCs, now there's a subject they probably worry about a lot :-D
Too bad it is still a PC-style computer. Does it have PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports? ;-)
I hope Apple will build a legacy-free x86 box for the real ones.
Yet, I think installing Windows on a Mac is one incredibly dull idea. Why would you ruin a Porsche by putting a Yugo engine inside?
As for installing MacOS X on generic x86 boxes, that should not be that hard at all, nothing that hasn't been done with XPostFacto - I doubt Apple will take the effort to lock it down as the only ones who will use it will be the very same pirates that made Windows a de facto standard. Piracy, in their case, may very well help sales.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
You know, outside of a few Slashdotters who desperately want to run OS X on their pimped-out x86 boxes, there's probably not a lot of people who give a darn about this. Apple makes Macs, and as long as they provide a reasonably complete spectrum of systems across the price band, there's going to be zero measurable demand to defeat Apple's tying and install OS X on a generic PC. Zero. The biggest reason Mac cloning worked in the market for a few years last decade was that Apple wasn't providing the systems that the Mac marketplace wanted to buy. Even then, it cost Apple a lot more money than they ever expected it to, because even with the licensing fees it didn't make up for the lost hardware margins. Apple needs a lot more base market share before they can stop worrying about cannibalization.
Sure, somebody'll figure out a way to do it - every DRM scheme devised thus far has been cracked, pretty much - but what do you get after cracking OS X? You get a unsupported OS on your PC that may or may not work right with the combination of cards, chipset, and BIOS you happen to have. Do people really think that there's going to be any enterprise demand for that? Really?
Bottom line: Macs are Macs, PCs are PCs, and despite the change in architecture the twain are not going to meet any time soon. Stick to Windows, Linux, or xBSD on your generic PC, and run OS X on your Mactel. You can probably expect Apple to give up a little bit of their price delta now that the hardware is directly comparable (and the hardware superiority image is gone), but not all of it - after all, Apple puts a lot more engineering into their boxes than the typical PC vendor does. And when you're running your Mactel, you can look forward to emulation that's finally less crappy than what Virtual PC gives you. Yippee!
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
This article, which is an opinion piece, brings up some insightful benefits of Apple reinvigorating the "Red Box" project to allow full compatibility between OS X and Windows apps.
Seems to fit with this whole Intel dev edition story.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Coral Cache of the link
Take-off every
I still read that as, "Who would Darwin Curse?"
-1, offtopic
I forget what 8 was for.
I'd like to see a /. poll about reader's intentions towards OS X Intel:
/.ers to have anti establishment views of Microsoft and want to steal XP ISOs because of the monopolistic hold MS has on the software industry. But that becomes a thinly vailed disguise when confronted with the opportunity to pay for OS X Intel or simply download the torrent.
/.ers are less idealistic and more just plain cheap that I used to believe.
- Don't care
- Will buy a new Intel Mac
- Will buy an OS X Intel for my Non-Mac PC
- Will steal an OS X Intel ISO first chance I get
It is one thing for
I think that
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Most developers use High Level Languages such as Java and C++. A good compiler will hide most of the CPU details. I hope Apple optimizes the machine code in its firmware. But even so, 2005 CPUs are ten thousand times faster than those used in the original Macs and this may not be as important.
Square and greenish, there's a big circular fan hiding the CPU.
3 PCI slots, with one being used by the video card.
A few capacitors & ICs spread all over the place.
Oh it has a cell battery for the clock & bios, that's soo cool !
All in all, looks like a plain MB, hope the final version will look more flashy than that shit.
I'm a mac supporter, a mac user, a programmer, and definitely a fan. But the bottom line for me is this: This x86 Mac doesn't excite me. Not at all.
Don't get me wrong.. I'm glad they switched away from IBM (though the Power chips make me drool)... and I agree that Intel can provide the products and capacity IBM wouldn't.
But I'm simply not moved by this system.
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
Not trolling, just my thoughts:
I have been thinking about this whole Apple on Intel thing. Here are my thoughts:
I believe the move to Intel chips will mean the end of the Mac OS as a distinctive platform. Let me explain: By moving to Intel, Apple has ensured that all but the most die hard Mac developers will soon stop making Mac applications. Why? This is why:
Apple on Intel means that Windows applications can run via emulation at full native speed. Just look at Linux where Windows apps can be run via VMWare or Wine. What's the incentive to port an app when you can tell the user to run it under these applications? Further, Apple has said, it wont stop people from putting Windows on their Macs, which I think is a mistake. Don't have that specific application? Boot into Windows or run it via emulation. There might be a flurry of initial porting to mac/intel but after a while I think it will peeter out. I might be wrong, I hope I'm wrong, but that is how I see it. Want an example? Look at Linux. A few die hard companies make Linux games, for instance, but very few. That's the future: A widespread OS with no nifty applications.
On top of this is cost. if you are a small developer, can you afford to have a powerpc and intel Mac, and optomize your application for both? or do you not develop for one of the platform? Porting costs money, after all.
Thats my 2 cents.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
How does stuff like this get modded +5 insightful? Are you people really that uninformed? Give me a break. I thought this was "News for Nerds". As if drivers for one SCSI card will work with another SCSI card from some other vendor? PCI is PCI regardless of the platform? That's the funniest crap I've read all day.
Apple Files for Mactel Trademark but the public seems to prefer Macintel.
Just trying to be efficient...
I think you mean just trying to be useful.
Does anyone have any doubt that this is going to happen? Instead of being able to purchase a copy and run it on my computer I'll end up downloading a cracked pirate copy and running that.
I can't help but wonder if Apple is throwing away potential customers by not allowing everyone to run OS X. Sure, they're primarily a hardware company, but I don't think it would be difficult for them to transition to a software company... they've certainly got the software to compete with anybody. And software has higher profit margins.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Mack? MacHack? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
How hard were you thinking?? Or maybe you haven't been paying attention? Apple has said, and its been repeated time and again, that these aren't production machines. There's no guarantee whatsoever that the "real" Intel-powered Macs will look anything like this. That could mean no BIOS, no segmented memory, no A20 gate, and so on. These are just preview machines to give developers a head start while Apple finishes the real Intel-powered Macs. If they were going to use off-the-shelf components in the real thing, and they already have a functional PPC emulator, why would they wait a year to release new hardware?
Fact is, neither you nor I have any idea what the real thing will look like, and neither you nor I have any idea whether Apple has given up building good hardware. I've got my money on my take, though. ;)
So how long till you post your results? Do you want an ftp server you could store the file in? :)
Gravity Sucks
Why are so many people excited about this? It is very early hardware (perhaps commodity motherboard?) with very early software. The release product will not be anything close to this.
Also, if I were apple, I would use this box to test my copy protection measures (like Xbox 1). When the real software and hardware ship, they will be locked down tight enough to discourage all but the most determined hacker.
I keep screaming, but no one is listening...
That is the same exact same reason Linux will do so great on that new Apple hardware!!!!
fsck you Dvorak, you are a hack
Get your Unix fortune now!
lets see the benchmarks
dbench would be intresting so would Bonnie++
on MacOS intel and linux
lets see photoshop reality distortion at work.... Hmmm me thinky not work so good
regards
John Jones
I have a PC. I'd be _very_ tempted to buy a copy of OSX and dual-boot it so I could try out this fabled Mac user experience, but I'm not buying a Mac in order to do so.
My Journal
Woulda, coulda, shoulda...
IMHO, if Apple hadn't fired Steve, NeXTSTEP wouldn't have been around to save Apple from oblivion. Apple would have vanished while trying yet another OpenDoc, Pink, or MacApp on top of the same old outdated OS.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Get your Unix fortune now!
Many devices (think graphics cards, sound cards, IDE/SATA cards) support standard interfaces for basic functionality and do not need explicit support for a given vendors hardware (sure you won't gain access to some of their advanced features without explicit support for a specific device, but your very likely to still get basically working functionality out of it, not least because of the limited number of core chipsets, and how similar in design many of them are, often with regard to an initial reference design).
This is not true of all devices (e.g. SCSI cards, which typically have do have vendor specific drivers), but it's true of a significant majority of hardware. PCI cards intended for x86 systems can of course be used in PCI slots on other platforms, such as PowerMac, PReP or CHRP boards, without any modification (though their can be alternate Firmware versions for the different platforms).
OpenStep (which became Rhapsody, which became Mac OS X) ran fine on a wide variety of hardware without explicit support for a wide variety of devices (and that was without freely downloadable kernel and driver source), so baring the presence of something like crippling DRM in the consumer 'Mactel' hardware, the likely hood of Mac OS X running fine on generic x86 PC hardware is very high in my estimation.
Where's that jerk As Seen On TV? All this interesting Apple stuff happening and he isn't here to spout off about it. Could it be that he was silenced, or even better, sacked?
Lasers Controlled Games!
What about games? as a Ubuntu/winXP unenlightened dualbooter, i'd be pretty turned on by an Apple annoucement that they support some kind of Cedega like system allowing access to most of the windows game library under OSX.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
One of the things I thought was really nifty about my iMac when I bought one a few months ago was how the inside looked. Anyone who's seen the interior of any Mac will tell you the layout of the hardware, and the hardware itself, is pretty spiffy looking.
Now I know the pictures in TFA are of a developer's kit, but I'm hoping the hardware for the release models looks a hell of a lot better than that. It's entirely disorganized, especially the cabling (when compared to current Mac models). I'm hoping this isn't a side-effect of the Intel switch.
Admittedly this is a bit of a silly gripe, but Apple's philosphy to date has to been to have a very definitive style for their systems, for both their hardware and software. I'd hate for them to become just another PC hardware supplier with a nifty OS.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
SInce this whole Intel/Mac thing started its a little scary. I use Windoze. And its a Goddamn nightmare, drivers this, virus that, oh shit a new trojan, will this work? will that run.... oh no BSOD, wrong driver installed, time to reformat. As for the mac... IT WORKS. Plug it in, and it works. Why dont I own one? I like to enojoy some gaming in my spare time.. I dont do any publishing, video editing so a pc "works" with firewalls,anti virus, anti spyware and 20 gigs of other tools to allow you to boot. I'm afraid for the mac. Higher Prices on hardware, Sleek design, quiet, BUT TROUBLE FREE is priceless.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
will a intel mac run longhorn? Apple probably doesn't care if it will run XP since that will be old news by the time the entire apple line is converted to intel
If Apple had opened up the Mac early on - or, better still, given the Apple II line the attention it deserved and opened that up - we might never have seen an Intel Mac.
There were Apple ][ clones - the Franklin and the Laser 128. (I think there were others in the overseas markets.) However, they were both clean-room designs developed without help from Apple. IMHO, Apple's biggest failure in that era was a poor transition from the ][ series to the Mac. The two machines had nothing in common except a serial port (and a 3.5" floppy on later ][ series).
I can't decide if this post is interesting, funny, insightful, or flamebait.
I think that a lot of people have forgotten that Intel didn't really have a plan to get anywhere. Shrinking the process doesn't buy you the world, and that was all they were doing.
Intel has ditched their own 64-bit platform in favor of AMD's, they have essentially reached many material limits in their process, they backpedaled to the PIII for the current Celeron and Pentium M designs, and their fake-dual-core designs are pretty lackluster also.
Apple has problems with IBM advancing the PowerPC and producing enough of them to give Apple a very good image in the processing power area. Sure...the PowerPC might have a lot more room to grow (and other such arguments), but if you can't get them fast enough for demand...you have a problem. And with Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony looking to the 970 and the Cell for their new consoles...supply wasn't looking better for Apple.
Intel is gaining new life with dual and quad-core designs that Apple has property rights over. Intel is also getting new VPU designs. Lo and behold they have already announced new processors with some of these design changes in them, and I bet Apple will use them in their new machines.
Apple get a product line that doesn't have the shortcoming concerning clock-speed envy. They get Intels successful marketing. And Apple gets a company that can meet processor supply demands. In addition Apple has a very smooth transition plan with fat-binaries for new applications, and Rosetta to run old binaries on the new systems.
They have obviously had this on the back burner for a long time. I personally think this is win-win for both Intel and Apple.
And additionally for us consumers and professionals, we may get a slightly cheaper machine...but will definitely get lower cost items like video cards, controllers, etc. that don't have to have special firmware for PowerPC platform.
The interface is simple and easy to learn
It is secure (security from obsecurity maybe...if it gets more popular...we'll see)
BUT.....average Joe doesn't care or even want to care. If Apple don't start selling these things (PPC or x86) in department stores then average Joe will still buy Windows boxes. I really hope they take a page from the iPod success story and let all and sundry apply to be an "authorised Apple retailer" or whatever they call them these days.
If the development version gets hacked then it may expose the OS to a few more people but not as much as letting anyone sell 'official' Macs. When you showcase a OS X and Windows together, Windows looks like a wet smelly sock and becomes just as appealing.
As for the dev system..the mobo looks almost identical to the intel mobos we used to buy for work.
Actually, the hard-core hacker and enthusiast types who would force OS X to run on their non-Apple branded PC are simply helping legitimize OS X and drive more customers to Apple's products in the long run.
(Your "regular users" might see Joe Hacker's slick little modded installation of an unsupported version of OS X on his clone PC and say "Wow, that's a nice looking operating system. How can I get that?" When they learn all the "catches" to doing things Joe's way, they'll pass on it. But they'll give some real thought to perhaps buying an Apple machine next time too.)
It seems to me, too, there's the potential of locking things down so tightly, it's not worth the effort to crack OS X to run on non-Apple hardware. Judging from the industry's track record at "copy protection measures", I'd say it probably won't happen. But people probably underestimate the *potential* to make it really difficult.
(After all, DirecTV still has nobody who's been able to successfully crack the encryption scheme used for their current "P4" satellite cards - and this is an application where a successful hacker can literally make millions of dollars off his handiwork!)
The Franklin was not legal, though the Laser was since they reverse-engineered the ROMs. Regardless, Apple never made a conscious, substantial effort to have the Apple II series cloned and become widespread commodity hardware.
There will be a chip on the motherboard that you can query to ensure that there is only Apple -approved hardware.
Let me say that using a different name:
There will be a chip on the motherboard that you can query to ensure that there is only MPAA -approved hardware.
So there you have it, trusted computing coming from Apple.
Apple can then go out and say windows is only used by pirates, and anyone that wants to be legit has to buy OS-X.
http://appleintelfaq.com/
What did Apple announce at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 6, 2005?
Apple announced that it is transitioning from PowerPC processors provided by IBM and Freescale (formerly Motorola) to x86 architecture processors from Intel. The first Intel-based Macs will ship before mid-2006, and the transition will be complete by the end of 2007.
Where can I find out more official information about this announcement?
Apple press release
Intel press release
WWDC keynote address (Transcript)
Why did Apple make this change?
The following scenario likely contributed to this decision:
IBM has been unable to meet its performance commitments for the PowerPC 970 family (G5) processors. In mid-2003, IBM promised 3 GHz G5s to Apple by mid-2004. As of mid-2005, 3 GHz G5s are still not available, over two years after the initial announcement, and over one year after the promised delivery.[1]
Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that IBM will make 3.2 GHz triple-core G5 derivatives available to Microsoft for Xbox 360.[2] IBM is also concentrating efforts on chips for Nintendo Revolution and Sony PlayStation 3.[3, 3.1] With IBM concentrating on expensive high-end server class processors and the console and embedded markets, and with Apple at less than 2%[4] of IBM's PowerPC business, it was clear IBM's priorities were focused elsewhere.
Apple is also less than 3%[4] of Freescale's PowerPC business, with Freescale focusing on embedded, communications, and automotive markets. The priorities of IBM and Freescale do not coincide with performance and other needs of the traditional desktop and portable computing marketplace.
What has Apple done to prepare for this transition?
Apple has been publicly maintaining the core OS of Mac OS X, Darwin, for both PowerPC and x86 platforms since the release of Mac OS X. Internally, Apple has been secretly maintaining Mac OS X in its entirety and all Apple applications for both PowerPC and x86 for over 5 years, since before Mac OS X's public release.[5] Mac OS X's predecessors also ran on x86.
Apple has made available Xcode 2.1, which adds the capability of creating PowerPC/x86 universal binaries. Xcode 2.1 can be used on either PowerPC or x86 systems to create universal binaries. Application developers already using Xcode in most cases need only recompile their application with an additional checkbox adding x86 architecture support.
Apple has also licensed[6] QuickTransit from Transitive Corporation for Rosetta, a realtime binary translation system to support PowerPC binaries seamlessly on x86 hardware. The current performance of Rosetta
This doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter as far as the computer industry and networking is concerned. What Apple does in its own little world doesn't matter, and still less what kind of layout it has adopted on its advance development systems. This is like being stuck in alt.politics and wading through endless posts by people obsessed with Trotsky. Or Bukharin. Or some other irrelevant minority historical figure. And having them explain that the real choice we face is between the Democratic Party and Bukharinism. Or Republicanism and Troskyism. I don't know when exactly it happened, but at some point in Apple's loss of market share over the past 10 years, this thing ceased to become people buying computers and became....something else. Something very very weird.
Hold the delete key down at boot. It's a Phoenix Bios!
Now if you want to get really freaky, go into the 'boot' menu and turn off the quick and silent boot options. This will display the bios information at boot...
The bios at boot will display the same serial number that is on the chasis sticker, and another secondary id string. It also indicates the system as a Apple Transition Dev system.
Now on the first time you boot it, for 2 seconds you will see 'Darwin x86' on the screen - but we all figured that out all ready.
What if one tried installing on a machine with chipsets supported by Darwin x86, e.g. something already running Darwin? I'm curious if it's actually a Darwin issue or if it's some other check that the install does.
GET YOUR WEAPONS READY! --DR.LIGHT
There really is no application for work that you need, outside of office, that doesn't have some type of replacement on Mac. Eclipse runs fine on a Mac. So, if I was Apple and decided to make the switch to Intel hardware to go head to head with Microsoft once and for all, I would probably pretend that I was going to closely hold the idea that I still want to control the computers. This way Microsoft is kept happy and will develop office for the new platform more readily. Once they are done a version for the new Mac, then go into overdrive developing drivers for the new Mac and the war is on, with the critical app already developed.
...watch aqua completely and totally fail to start because there is no Quartz driver for your video card.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Speaking of apple intel and dell...
run osx under a highly modified coLinux (to run freebsd instead...)
...would be havening ironical.
net start osx
or
net start tiger
I suppose that's the whole point of the switch to Intel, huh?
http://mirrordot.org/stories/6d8de1cb49228270967f7 9754bfc836d/index.html
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
Aesthetics being the usual culprit, it's amazing that Apple's more "unique" designs, like the original iMac, appeal to people despite the fact that the machines are really kinda marginal.
iMacs with each freshening have been re-situated at a tier and a nudge behind a power/graphics user's level -- which is to say as a decidedly middle-class system. "Marginal" isn't the word for that. They're middle-class appliance computers. Actually as each generation of iMac has come out, Apple watchers have wondered whether the top-of-the-line models were being undercut by them on performance-for-price. The iMac G5 models were no exception. As they came out, /. types were anticipating new tower G5s, because otherwise that line almost didn't make sense any more.
And if said box is stuffed under your desk and the only entry to it you have is through your monitor, who cares what it looks like?
And again, iMacs are designed precisely for people who do not NOT NOT want to dedicate a hutch shrine to their tower down in the basement. Desk? Who wants to dedicate a whole desk in some extra office in their house? That's exactly the model that Apple was tilting against. Note the emphasis on low footprint, from the first CRT models on. This is for people whose response to a tower under the typical chintzy computer desk is "ugh" (and to some extent for schools with limited space or spots on a long counter).
(Personally I got an original Rev A CRT iMac gratis, and it grew on us a ton. There's a lampshade 17" version on the narrow kitchen counter now. The machine's lasted for years now, so if it was marginal when it started it must be positively archaic now -- despite being quite capable of handling Tiger and everything else I've had to touch on it. And it's displaced the [more recent] Wintel boxes in the house, despite my being required to keep those up for work reasons. They're in the basement corner for over a year now. The kids liked the iMacs far more.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Yeah, that should work great! I bet the Apple folks will really be kicking themselves when they realize they put all of the lockdown mechanisms in the Darwin layer, completely forgetting that they already have an open version of Darwin running on x86.
Unless of course they didn't put the lockdown code in the Darwin layer because they aren't brain-damaged. There are all kinds of critical OS X components above the Darwin layer, without any one of which you've just got Darwin and a lot of extra crap that won't run.
People have come to think of OS X on intel as some dramatic change. It's not. The only thing that is different now is that the proprietary UI and random Apple code (quartz, etc.) is now ported to x86/intel. But darwin has always been a cross-platform OS. I think people still have this idea that the change is so dramatic because they have the tendency to look at it from the classic Mac OS perspective. OS 9 would have been bizzar to put on x86 because everything would have to be re-written. But every good *nix user knows that architecture, for the most part, doesn't matter. Sure endian changes here and there, certain instruction sets that exist on one arch but not the other, but how many linux programs (for example) do you know that really give a sh** if you compile them on PPC SPARC x86 or Alpha? Most programs don't deal with assembly level code like that.
People are failing to realize that changing from PPC to intel/x86 with a *NIX (BSD, to be specific) subsystem is less dramatic than switching from 32-bit procs to 64-bit procs. The only major change between OS X PPC and OS X intel is switching from OpenFirmware to a PC standard BIOS, especially concerning the boot process, whereas the general arch (proc, etc.) is pretty secondary.
I think this will be an incredibly interesting transition, as people will really see the versatility of OS X, as the possibilities will be pretty endless. People, IMHO, will really get to see what a constrictive platform windows is and what mobility Apple OS and hardware really has.
PS: Has anybody tried a 'dd' clone of an installed OS X intel system? or maybe a net-boot image? Maybe trying those with a standard dell (etc.) would be a possibility.
I think apple should make profit from various cpu and motherboard makers. They can sell the rights to make a mac compatible motherboard or cpu. In that way people can chose to pay a little more to get a mac compatible hardware but still the companies will compete against each other. AMD Athlon 3800+ (mac compatible) or Intel P4 3.6 Ghz EE (mac compatible). The lock is fairly easy to make so the CPUmakers won't have to much development at all, they will still get the profit and if people want it they pay to apple too. Pretty much as AMD compatible memory modules but this is on a lot higher level. Apple will never have to worry about not having the fastest computer around. People still buy dell, hp etc because it's easier than building one from parts. People will still buy from Apple and if they don't Apple will still make money. I know i'd buy such hardware.
run osx under a highly modified coLinux (to run freebsd instead...)
OS X is not FreeBSD. The open source Unix-like operating system you would have to modify coLinux to run is called "Darwin". The two share a common ancestry, but they have been evolving in different directions for about seven years now, and they are no longer the same thing by any means.
Note that even if you modified coLinux to run Darwin (and Darwin to run in coLinux - yes, the OS has to be modified too), there would be no guarantee that OS X itself would run in that environment.
Codeweaves (who does Crossover Office (which lets Linux run MS Office)), has announced that they will be supporting OS X on Intel
Yeah but, we've got a year to figure it out. After all, these "development Intel Macs" need to be capable of running the final release operating systems as well, or they'd just turn into junk when the retail Macs become available. Steve Jobs wouldn't let that ever happen...would he?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
That's one of the reasons people like to say Apple is secure. For remote exploits, they have a fabulous reputation of quick patches. For local exploits, they have an average (good, but marred by a few bad apples, like the sync bug).
But, MacOSX has always defaulted to all-services-off. So, you wouldn't see a worm targetting the AFP server making it very far on the net.
Apple's security is on par with most Linux distros. This does not mean it's OpenBSD. It means that it does have some bugs, but is highly resistant to most attacks. Apple has been able to be more lax about buffer overflows because of the PPC's architecture, which makes a classic buffer overflow more difficult. When they switch to Intel, we'll probably see them step up their local security policy to compensate.
And your comment, "Most of these are ludicrous! Look at how many remote vulnerabilities there are! Some are absurd! Didn't apple do ANY checking?" That implies that you are not a security person, don't really understand the vulnerabilities listed, and are trying to spread FUD. I count 5 exploits that are triggerable remotely (even if they are not going to disclose data and permissions remotely). Of course Apple does checking. That's why the thing isn't riddled with bugs, has awesome security features like a time sensitive, integrity-checking Keychain, and generally has a good set of secure, default settings.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
I sense someone is due to be sued, sacked (or both) by Apple.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The fact is though, Linux has come a long ways in the last few years. It runs great, looks good, has lots of nice software now, robust, free, etc. I'm pretty content to stick with it now.
I just can't see myself switching to OS/X anymore unless it became the new commercial PC gaming platform of choice. Otherwise its just a somewhat shined up version of the same thing that I'm already using: a unix-like operating system with a windowing system. Granted, Gnome isn't as pretty as Aqua, but its not too bad either. A little playing around and installing some fonts and themes and it looks pretty nice actually.
Clickety Click
The Mac would probably have been a dead end. Apple would have seen their sales of the Apple II line as their primary source of income. Now, in fairness, the GS adopted some Macintosh technologies, running a reasonable facsimilie of the user interface and moving to 3.5" drives. So what we saw in Mac wouldn't have been completely lost.
Commodore would probably still be with us, as owners of the 6502 (They bought MOS Technologies back in the seventies, IIRC)
The PC would have been an even bigger hack than it is now. If you think Pentiums supporting the old 20-bit segmented memory map of the 8/16 bit 8088 was bad, imagine what something based on the 6502 would be like. The device was entirely 8 bit. Even addressing was 8 bit except for one instruction, meaning you had to hardcode the other eight bits of any 16 bit address in your code.
It's kind of scary.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
OMG Mac is going to run on Intel? Let me guess, next Windows is going to run on PPC!
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Is this machine supposed to be representative of what Apple will be selling in a year? Are game developers supposed to get one of these and write a game for approximately this much CPU and Graphics Card ability?
Start Running Better Polls
Yeah, because using open source software to increase the popularity of yet another closed source operating system is an EXCELLENT idea! Just think of the benefits to the open source community to have another large monolithic anti-open source corporation controlling what we can and cannot do with our code! You are BRILLIANT!
From Fortune.com " One reader mused that, regardless of whether he licenses to Dell, Jobs may want the potentially huge volumes of chips available from Intel because he has a "killer app" up his sleeve. Such a piece of software could be so popular that, like the iPod, it becomes a must-have for whole swaths of contemporary consumers. "I wonder what such an app could be," he continued. "Could it be a true digital hub to manage your entire house, including the TV with hundreds of channels?" I think that the intesting thought is in this line: "Jobs may want the potentially huge volumes of chips available from Intel because he has a "killer app" up his sleeve. Let the speculation run riot!
setenv NUM_MOUSE_BUTTONS 1
Apple ships powerpc boxes with Radeons. So there's a driver for the big-endian Radeons that will allow them to work with Aqua on PPC motherboards using OpenFirmware. Those drivers will be useless on little-endian, BIOS-using, x86-based macs.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
$999 -- otherwise known as the cost for two and a half basic Dell Dimension computers -- for a system you don't even get to keep. Jobs is one hell of a salesman!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I hope this means I will soon be able to get Final Cut Pro without buying a seperate computer for it.
Therefore it is entirely possible lots of people will pay extra for hardware, expanding Apple's hardware base. You disprove your own argument here
You're getting hung up on semantics and missing the point here. It's also entirely possible for a car to fall on your domicile today. Likely? No.
The 'pretty looking box' examples you brought up are grotesquely expensive status symbols. Sorry, but mentioning that you own one or more of those items will likely get you laid. Telling a girl that you've got a dual G5 at home to show her will likely not work so well.
There are more than adequate numbers of sexy PC cases available, and any self-respecting overseas case manufacturer could clone the Apple case design in a matter of days. Apple's key marketing strategy is to associate their brand with a stable, user-friendly product--chiefly due to their OS. Lose that, and Apple's luster would be quite tarnished.
And PowerPCs will have the Hypervisor so you can . . . Oh yeah, never mind.
Apple moved to Intel to get decent chips in PowerBooks, which is where the future lies. AMD is simply not up to Intel in the mobile processor arena. Also, perception-wise, among the general public (you know, the 98% of computer-buyers that don't even know what Slashdot is), Intel is a recognizable brand, while AMD is just another TLA.
...but what's the point of running a Windows MS Office suite if Apple's already got a MS Office suite of its own, which is better than the ones that run under Windows?
OK, so the developer MacTels run OSX and the developers have found that they can install Windows XP with no real problems. All the buzz right now is about how can Apple can't stop people from putting OSX on Dell boxes. How this will kill Apple (yada, yada yada. I've even read an article on geek.com saying that Apple will get out of the hardware business entirely and focus on software. Apple is going to go head to head against Microsoft. (????) Apple's strategic shift is clearly about the hardware. Apple clearly makes the best hardware around and the public at large is finally getting this message. The sucess of the iPod coupled with the rollout of the Apple stores has pushed this perception. It's well known that that Apple makes the majority of its money on hardware sales and that it's laptops and desktops are the most profitable in the industry. I believe that Apple's long-term strategy is to sell more desktops and laptops by going after users who appreciate the fit and finish of Apple's hardware, (and will pay a premium for it) but still want to use Windows (for what ever reason, real or perceived). Here's the situation that Apple has created. An Apple desktop/laptop that runs OSX and Windows efficiently. Apple doesn't realy care which OS you use the most, as long as you buy their hardware. Apple's going against Dell, HP and all the other windows-only box makers.
now it's being amplified by Intel chips.
That increases the RDF by many orders of magnitude. Hold onto your hats, you're in for a wild ride!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But your basic point is right, nobody uses Objective-C.
No, the point was that everyone uses a HLL. That includes Objective C which just about every Mac developer uses to some extent. It's just far easier since it's what XCode likes to work with, and it's a pretty good langauge anyway. You C# people wouldn't recognize that though coming from a language that's already a shdow copy of another...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're right, but Codeweavers Crossover Office does more than that. It's an enhancement to WINE, and supports a whole lot more than just Office. I've used it to run Photoshop, Explorer, and several other things in Linux. They also do browser plugins.
Your overconfidence is your weakness...
t. Even addressing was 8 bit except for one instruction, meaning you had to hardcode the other eight bits of any 16 bit address in your code.
6502 addressing was pretty snazzy for its time. Perhaps you're thinking of the zero page or relative address modes rather than absolute?
I dont use and have no desire to use any "windows" apps... whatever that means. I use mac native apps (final cut studio, motion, soundtrack etc) Adobe CS, Cinema 4D and Maya - for major apps - very little else. You may mean games... or M$ office, but Im not a gamer and though I have office, I havent used it since I started trying out star office/open office (mostly I just use InDesign or Illustrator and recently iwork, ilife). For what I, and most people I know - there isn't anything else to need, not counting some shareware, plug-ins, utilities and god bless Radio lover. Thats not everyone but its a decent crossection of Macusers.
Developers spent more time previously porting to Mac than they will need to now, it's only a checkbox, and nobody wants to pump out a product that will be seen as "second rate" vs. other apps where the developer simply took a few minutes (checkbox) extra. And for such a small effort, who wouldn't want their previously windows only app to run properly on a box that doesnt go down with the associated windows issues?
Business stays in business by finding more and newer business -not by refusing to participate in an emerging market. If I were a developer I would see this as a new market, an opportunity to make a move, not something to shy from. Its almost easier to see the opposite of what you say happening, more developers starting to write for the Mac - because its simple, because they can and because it can pay.
Linux is a different issue
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
I understand there is a microswitch on the developer boxes that can be puched by inserting a paperclip through the grill and hitting the switch. What does it do?
Perhaps this is part of the key to an Apple hardware only OS??? Try pressing the button while booting!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Motorola got it right with the 680x series, which had proper sixteen bit index registers (which is what the 6502 should have had in the first place.) My recollection was that the MOS Technology engineers were trying to improve upon the original 6800, which had a single 16 bit index register, IX. They thought it would be a great idea to split it into eight bit registers.
The result was so mind-boggling awful, that Steve Wozniak actually felt obliged to put a VM in the original Apple II ROM to make programming easier, and to this date, nobody has written a C or Pascal compiler for the 6502 that didn't use a VM abstraction rather than raw 6502 instructions. Z80? Dozens. 6809? Plenty. 6502? Ha.
I remain to this day baffled that anyone could like the system. Wozniak chose it for the Apple I not because it was good, but because, despite being largely compatable with the 6800 in hardware terms, it was an order of magnitude cheaper. Commodore followed suit, eventually buying MOS Technologies, but never actually bothered to release a usable version. Acorn was clearly interested in it for its buzzword compatability (obvious in the original Acorn Atom manuals, which talked excitedly about its pipelining features.) (Anyone who's seen the memory map of the latter machine, incidentally, knows it wasn't technical merit that had a hand in it. This thing had RAM before and after the ROM and display memory.) So far as I can tell, its fans really only like it because it was the first CPU they were exposed to, and it was more efficient than the Z80A, MHz for MHz.
Geez, that probably comes across as a big flame. Don't take it personally, it's not you, it's that awful CPU. It makes as little sense as the segmented 808[68] CPUs (Why, Intel? Why?!) which also, for some reason, had excited fans too. There are so many absolute bodges that have come into existance in the computing world and hogged the limelight far too long. The 6502, in the field of personal computing, was arguably the first.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
KeS
let me throw this idea out...
What if Apple sold a "kit" that included an Apple motherboard and a copy of Mac OS X?
Maybe you're right. Maybe Apple would be dead now if Steve had kicked Sculley out.
On the other hand, maybe, with Steve on the helm all the time, the Mac could have had evolution rather than revolution; maybe the Copland/Gershwin project would have turned out right; the Mac clones would have never happened; or the idea would have turned out so right, Apple would be just an OS developer now; maybe OpenDoc would have been far more successful, and now we'd be using Cyberdog rather than Safari.
It's like those "What If?" comics. But, unlike Uatu, we can not be sure. It's not like engineering - if this sprocket hadn't failed, the engine wouldn't have failed. We're talking about countless people over the course of two decades. There's no clear answer to "what if" here.
Circumcision is child abuse.
i think one main point that people rarely hit on about apple, is that it just works. it is a closed platform. when you hook up a camera, it works. when you hook up almost any approved monitor, it works. the hardware is the best part of apple. they do not let in the evolution of hardware, so things are built to work, and they work almost flawlessly.
i think that is really the major reason that i like using my powerbook over my old windows systems. Things may not be as fast and as "techie" feeling, but sometimes you want to turn on your computer and use it without having to do maintenence or remove spyware all the time.
slashdotters may not believe it, but sometimes simpler IS better.
No pics of the case when closed?
If you can't convince them, convict them.
In that case they will loose because apple hardware isn't the best nor is it in the top three nor has it ever been the best ever.
Ask any honest apple user and they'll tell you horror stories about dead macs dead laptops and apple refusing to replace them. Of course their have been problems with intel and even amd hardware but not any worse than apple. But at least people didn't have to go to such lengths to get such problem hardware fixed with intel or amd hardware.
Really about the only saving grace for apple has been their OS and it's a good thing to since because their hardware certainly isn't up to par. I have heard more than one person with apple exerience saying that it would be a mistake for apple to lock it's OS down to a limited set of hardware in this move and that apple would hemeradge even more money as a result and that it may even lead to apples death if they don't finally wake up and relise that their only hope is in becoming a software only industry.
Personally i hope they don't as apple has always locked software programers and software companies into being forced to cater to their whims if they want to write software for apples platform and that wouldn't change if they just become a software only company. Other companies would still have to get licensing from apple to write for their OS and apple has shown vividly how they treat software writers and companies who want to write programs that apple doesn't like or doesn't want.
Personally im actually glad Apple locked it's OS to these mactels it just means they may still die off as a company like i have hoped and dreamed they would.
Now I just have to hope that MS starts making the foolish mistakes that apple has made for the last 13 years. Then maybe they will end up on the ropes and we can celebrate MS's iminente demise.
If you couldn't tell i hate Apple and i hate MS both are the same face of evil and only deserve distruction.
Bingo. Add to that, Apple isn't going to introduce a machine that can't be sold as "the BMW of computers." Apple probably has already struck a deal with Intel that will allow Apple to be the first to include "The Newest Latest And Greatest CPU EVAR" (for the next two or three months) into their initial offering.
What would be nicer is if Apple took Xen and ran OSX on top of that Virtualization platform. Then moving forward it would allow users to transition from an old Apple OS release to a new one, but running them in separate VM spaces. Additionally, it would allow one to have any Microsoft OS in a VM partition, and of course any variant of LINUX up and running.
It would be, the best of ALL worlds. You could run OSX, XP/2000/Longhorn, Linux (SUSE/Fedora/Red Hat/Knoppix/Other). All on the same box all at the same time! Or even multiple copies of OSX on one box.
Apple could essentially do, what they did with Safari, use Xen as the basis for their own virtualization product. The only work to do things better would be in support of Video drivers to run to their full potential.
One machine to run them all.
They could then do the same thing on their server offerings as well. Performance sucks for running MySQL on OSX? Run it under Suse on the same box!
Intel Macs will not use OpenFirmware.
They didn't say what they will use though.
now i can my bios settings on a mac! score! wait....nevermind
There used to be a company with the mactel name. They had something to do with cellphones if I remember correctly. To try and refresh my memory I went to ebay and did a search for mactel and it 'corrected' it for me to mattel :) Such a similar brand name might make for an interesting attack between rival factions of lawyers, so it may not be desirable...
$999 -- otherwise known as the cost for two and a half basic Dell Dimension computers -- for a system you don't even get to keep. Jobs is one hell of a salesman!
First of all, $999 is pocket change to any company that would need these machines. Apple just doesnt want to ship every joe schmo with a ADC membership their own machine.
If you are thinking twice about ordering one of these, then you dont need it. In fact, the whole point is to make you think twice...
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
Once upon a Time all Macs had onboard video by default before the the Power Macs (G3 towers or the G4 towers) shipped with a PCI video card). You could always upgrade video and sound as long as you had the PCI slots to do so.
The internals of a future Mac 'board are more than some DRM chip or funky modified bios.
Unless Apple opens up the boxes to ship with Creative Labs product in the PCI slot, Apple will probably keep the sound card as a part of the logic board. That also allows Apple to control external input/output placement on the logic board. So, you have all USB/FireWire/ sound and video jacks in a nice little row instead of expecting the end user to rely on the PCI card area of the box. The interior design is really vital to the external design and how a user interacts with the box.
Apple's logic boards may be mother boards by any othername without Freudian overtones but they are very specific to what Apple wants for the box design and for the function.
While I haven't used Virtual PC in years, does it still rely on Quicktime translation for sound card emulation? Surely, there is software translation for that feat and not direct access to hardware?
Unless Apple's Core Audio opens up 3rd party sound card options, Apple may still keep the sound chips close to its vest. The same goes for some other functions.
There's a good possibility that all the Core Stuff (video/image) may be a Holy Grail for transitioning to more 3rd party HW options, but, I doubt it. That's a guess on my part. But, The Core Stuff seems more about easing Development and improving performance than opening up to a commoditized, almost generic PC schema.
One final thing to keep in mind is that Apple is a "forward thinking company". Does anyone expect Apple to discontinue trying to implement new tech in their boxes? Just because the company is going the Intel route don't expect commoditization.
The reason Microsoft is pushing toward "trusted computing" is to gain control over the chaotic PC hardware platform. Microsoft only controls the upper software bit of things, so nothing they can do can stop pirate copies of Windows, and they have to compete against Linux being installed instead.
Since they lost their previous business lockout practice of threatening to yank licenses from hardware manufacturers who even thought about bundling non-microsoft software (Linux, any other commercial OS, no OS at all), they had to come up with another way of ensuring that 1) every PC in the world automatically sold them a copy of Windows, and 2) defended against competition from Linux being installed on server hardware where Windows Server and all the related CALs could instead be generating Microsoft income.
Incidentlally, they can also use Trusted Computing hardware to lock down the media market so that all copyright material can be tied to the sale and use of WMP.
The only way for Microsoft to accomplish these goals is by gaining control over PC hardware, which they currently lack. Microsoft can't do anything to lock down a generic PC. They need Trusted Computing hardware to restrict what gets installed, and to tie their software and media control to additional profits. If Microsoft suddenly stops selling a copy of Windows, the CALs and all the other automatic sales for ANY new PCs, they will be making less than they are now.
Apple has none of these goals in common. Yes, Apple is interested in making all the money they can. But since Apple makes money in hardware and controls 100% of Mac hardware, and does NOT risk losing any automatic sales on third party hardware, Apple has NO need of Trusted Computing inititives.
Apple owns the platform! They could have added their own version of trusted computing to Macs for the last decade that Microsoft has been thinking about it. They also own a similar platform in the iPod. But as everyone knows, Apple doesn't care if you plug in your iPod and copy off the hidden music files.
They aren't interested in DRM beyond the "consumer guideline" steps of making it less obvious how to create more than a handful of open CDs to share, or otherwise use and share music you buy from iTMS.
Why? Because Apple is making their money in hardware sales, with some software sales to boot (OS X, iTMS, iLife, Pro software). Their software sells their hardware.
If Apple were interested in putting a serial number on each Mac (they do by the way; every Mac can tell you when it was built, and its hardware serial number; PC's can't do this) in order to create a locked down DRM system, they sure as hell don't need Intel technology to do this.
Anyone repeating the story that Apple ran to Intel to get ahold of a scary DRM platform control is ignorant, seriouly lacking in basic logic skills, or spreading FUD.
> Sources have indicated that Apple will employ an EDID chip on the motherboard of Intel-based Macs
> that Mac OS X will look for and must handshake with first in order to boot. Such an approach,
> similar to hardware dongles, could theoretically be defeated, although it's unknown what level of
> sophistication Apple will employ.
Makes sence. Apple has always sold average hardware at well above average prices. Why should they stop now just because they switched to Intel? PowerPC or Intel. They are not going to make money on the hardware. At today's market prices, hardware is sold in bulk in order to make a descent profit (ie. DELL). Today, money is made on the software. Why do you think there are so many software patent lawsuits? Besides, most people just don't care whats in the box. However, they will care if you rape 'em for three times the price of a normal PC. Do everyone a favor Jobs, quit playing games and sell your systems at normal prices. Better yet, just sell the stinkin OS by itself and let people choose their own hardware. We all know Apple is going to do that eventually anyways.
Man, I'm sick of hearing this rationalization. Wrong is wrong, no matter what the monetary results. I really hope some scientist doesn't discover that the health of the software industry is somehow correlated with the forced sodomization of squirrels. Half of the /. regulars will quit posting to devote themselves to squirrel fucking. Richard Stallman will give up writing emacs (which, in an ironicly recursive way will turn out to be the central element of the scientist's thesis) and form the non-profit FSFF.
I wonder what color they'd use for the "Your Squirrel Fucking Rights" section of /.?
Does this mean we could run the Hurd on the coming Mactel PCs?
I'm a sci-fi vegan: I don't want the aliens to think we have as much right to live as the fried chickens we eat.
https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?de ptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27
ATi has been supplying add-in video boards for Macs for years. Don't expect them to stop now. A Mactel OS X driver will be available as soon as necessary.
Even more complicated would be using a single NIC to connect two operating systems to the same network. Unless someone came up with a clever solution, each OS would need its own IP address. However, routers and switches outside the computer would become immensely confused when a single NIC and a single MAC address belong to two IP addresses, since most routers/switches only have a one-to-one correlation between MAC addresses and IP addresses.
Since when! Even my little 5 port dumb switch can handle 1024 MACs, and unless it is a very expensive switch the concept of a switch even being concerned about IP addresses is a little off. Consider that current off the shelf infrastructure easily handles things like Cobalt RaQs where you can have dozens to hundreds of IP addresses for the single MAC address. No problems because of it. Routers are only concerned with the MAC an IP came from so they route the packets back the correct path, they don't really care much (for basic protocol handling) about the actual original MAC. MACs don't exist once you transit off ethernet anyway in most cases, so IP over WAN routes to local ports (in normal cases) based on where the traffic came from. There are also alternative protocols of course for load balancing and least cost routing as well.
The easy way is to virtualize all the hardware in a hardware abstraction layer. NT and later (muddied a bit in the graphics area, but that is DirectX at work) already have this on windows it would be easy to target one to a single virtual machine instead of the generic chipsets or in addtion too them. In OS-X86 just do this at the interface to BSD (OSX is BSD over MACH still, right? Not teasing legitimate question!) So in summation, the network stack of ech OS would communicate to virtual virtual hardware and the software implemented virtual hardware talks to the real interface. It is really not a complex deal.
More likely however would be a micro kernal (like MACH) that supports SMP running the OSes as privledged tasks. And ideal would be to sandbox them as much as possible so a blue screen of death would not kill the OS-X86 task. Reinvent some old Apollo (now HP BTW) technology where the display manager allowed emulation of multiple varieties of Unix interfaces and systems simultaneously. The industry already has virtualized the display technology in enough ways to be useful. You do have some unique issues with UI though, as Mac OS has a common top of the screen menu bar and users might be confused when it winks in an out as you select a Mac OS hosted window then switch between that and a Windows window. But solutions exist for that too. Of course you could just write a Windows NT style HAL and run Windows as a task under Mac OSX and be done with it. Conceptually it is not that hard, it just takes time and good design.
While you may like the concept of thinking of multi-core chips as SMP on a chip, in a lot of cases teh designs don't allow the OS to set affinity for a particular core, the hardware on the chip decides which core executes a particular instruction stream. So it is better to use hardware virtualization if available of support it in software. Otherwise you may be tied to a specific chip family, or chip, or maybe even stepping of a particular chip.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
If Apple switches to "ctrl-alt-delete" I'm going to shoot myself.
Any word on graphics cards? I guess it's just an integrated system with onboard graphics, but doesn't that suck?
It ain't a nothing but a development machine, not a "real" product.
A sideshow curiousity for those who "must see" the hi-way petting zoo.
Actually, the Xenon processor in the Xbox 360 is not a G5 derivative at all, though it shares some pedigree in common with the G5. Each Xenon core most closely resembles the PPE from the Cell processor. The similarity between the G5 and the Xenon core is that they both support the PowerPC instruction set and they both are 64-bit capable. That's about it. The Xenon cores support SMT, whereas the G5 does not. The Xenon cores also lack out-of-order execution logic, which the G5 possesses. You can find out more about Xenon at ArsTechnica.
This is false. The PowerPC can't emulate the 680x0 instruction set on its own; the early PowerMacs were shipped with a sophisticated piece of emulation software which allowed "context switching" between running PowerPC native code and 680x0 code. (You may have heard the term CFM, or Code Fragment Manager.) This facility was necessary because many Mac toolbox routines had not been rewritten in PowerPC-native code, and many libraries and other pieces of the OS were similarly only available in 680x0 code. In fact, some toolbox routines were supplied in both PowerPC versions and 680x0 versions, because there were cases where emulated 680x0 code needed to call upon a toolbox routine, and the context switch from emulation to native PowerPC and back again was worse than just running the toolbox routine under emulation.
Anyway, bottom line, the PowerPC never had built-in 680x0 emulation. The design win with PowerPC was that it could be made with the same bus that the 680x0 processors used, allowing Apple to retain much of its existing hardware designs. It should be noted that before the PowerPC was decided upon, some folks wanted Apple to go with the Motorola 88000 series of chips -- these were Motorola's first stab at RISC, and had the virtue of being pin-compatible with the 68000 series. I've seen some Omron workstations that used 88000 processors, but I don't think they ever got a lot of traction in the general market. At least one history of the Mac that I've read indicated that the 88000 was seriously considered within Apple before PowerPC was decided upon.
Not all G3-based systems are unsupported in Tiger. I believe G3-based iBooks are still supported, for example. Of course, "supported" doesn't mean you get all the eye candy, but that's true for some lower-end G4 systems as well.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=redundant
.... swipe the hard drive out of the mac and stick it into your pc and boot!
:-)
Image it later.
Of course there may or may not be a handshake chip like another poster mentioned but if not then you are set.
http://saveie6.com/
Can anyone who's gotten their hands on one of these tell us a bit about the BIOS?
I know that we're losing some of the Open Firmware features, but nobody has mentioned if we're losing Firewire Target Mode. Hope not, I use it all the time.
And I know this is silly, but what is the boot like? Is it "mac-like," or are we treated to flashing screens, memory counts and hardware charts?
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
...and each of those products you've listed have native Apple ports. Apple, unlike Linux, doesn't really have a reputation as a bunch of hackers, and since the public thinks hackers=crackers, they're afraid to create official ports for Linux. The main thing that Windows has over OSX is the games library. For nearly everything else, there are Apple versions. Granted, not every application has a port, but nearly every subject has an Apple version that you can get official support from, rather than forums.
I just wanted to add a comment to get the total up to 666... seems fitting.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
I was thinking the same thing. It would make a lot more sense if this was coming from Transgaming. I don't see what Codeweavers version of Wine will have that will have over the official Wine release. I'm happy Codweavers will be working on the OSX-X86 Wine port, but I just don't see what they will get out of it.
It's possible they are just planning on selling a polished installer with a couple of their extra DLLs, which would sell well to Mac users as long as it was under $20.
However it does put Apple in an interesting position. Given the three above having any particular consumer:
1. Pay for OSx86 (moral)
2. Pirate OSx86 to run on my white box (not moral)
3. Not run OSx86 at all (moral)
I would guess that Apple would rank them according to prefence in exactly that order. So while it isn't moral for me to pirate it, that doesn't mean that Apple will strongly condemn it, at least at first.
Also note the story from a few days ago that anticipated that since the dev release isn't TPM enabled it will be widely pirated and then when the real thing arrives it will use TPM, making it harder to pirate. Does Apple intend this to have an informal "try it before you buy it" effect? They'd never admit to it in any formal way of course, but it might be a brilliant strategy.
In my experience, even those that are very nervous about trying out OS X end up being comfortable with it very quickly. Afterwards they wonder what it was they feared. Maybe Apple knows that just getting people to try the software is the way to get them to buy the hardware/software combo.
Personally, I think they make nice stuff, so I wish them well and I will continue to buy their products.
Lasers Controlled Games!
I agree with your analysis. I have to admit I'd be very tempted to give it a go if the dev release were to make its way on to the net.
...but what's the point of running a Windows MS Office suite if Apple's already got a MS Office suite of its own, which is better than the ones that run under Windows?
Reason 1: Windows Office != Mac Office - you're missing Outlook and Access, both of which are hugely important. (No, Entourage is not a full replacement for Outlook.) Other apps worth considering are OneNote, Project and FrontPage - yes, it's far from a great web tool, but if your entire site is built in it then abandoning it isn't an easy option.
Reason 2: User may have a Windows Office licence already. Crossover Office is much cheaper than buying the whole of MS Office again.
If you couldn't tell i hate Apple and i hate MS both are the same face of evil and only deserve distruction.
Hey, thanks Tips. It's also pretty obvious that your grasp of punctuation and spelling are fairly lacking.
Anyway, it's a cute pipe dream you have. Since you hate MS and Apple, I shall assume you are an OSS dreamer.
Don't get me wrong, I happen to like Gnome, but the reality is that both Apple and MS have Gnome whipped when it comes to usability. They both have the money to toss into making an OS that works.
Like you said, Apple has hardware problems too. Course, I've never had a problem with getting Apple to replace something. I shall assume you're just making that bit up.
I'm not sure where you came up with the idea that Apple hardware is sub-par. It might not be 100% 1337, but it's not bad. I'll admit, I was pretty suprised to see a big "Crystal" chip when I opened up an old iMac but, whatever, the thing works.
You need to check your facts before you troll, though, writing silly phrases like "hemmorage even more money" just makes you look like a moron when one takes into account that Apple makes money.
Yes, okay, bad examples. Here's a better one: Company wants to migrate Apple desktops. Company has internal apps developed for Windows, for which there are no Mac ports. Company could use WINE, but chooses Crossover for its usability improvements and GUI tools. Either option is more feasable than re-writing said app(s).
Another example... Yes, Explorer exists for Mac. But many plugins are Windows only. The company I work for uses a massive, custom, in-house developed Oracle Forms app. It's web-deployed, Java, but dependant on a plugin called Jinitiator. Now, I don't know if this exists for Mac, but suppose it doesn't. It certainly doesn't exist for Linux. Crossover Plugin is the only way I can use that app from my Linux workstation and I suspect I'd have to do something similar if I wanted to use an Intel Mac.
I believe there are many more good reasons for Codeweavers and/or WINE to support these new Macs, and the sooner that happens the sooner they'll become a viable option for a lot more people and businesses.
If I could run OS X on an x86 system, I would give it a go. I have wanted to tool around with it for sometime, however there isn't a chance in hell I am going to shell out the cash for a mac.
The 6502 was certainly my favourite 8-bit CPU, and I recognise very few of your complaints.
There was never a case of "supplying the other 8 bits". The index registers offset from a full 16 bit address. There was no instructions that combined both X and Y. The reason for the two was that it made source and destination block operations quick.
In practice it was very rare that you needed more than 8 bits to index with.
I never used C on the 6502, but a quick Google shows Small-c and Cc65 available. Both of which appear to compile to 6502 machine code, not a VM. Don't know about the ATOM memory map, but the BBC Micro memory map was perfectly logical, and technically was an excellent machine for it's time.
Bottom line, the 6502 chip was elegant in my view. I completely disagree with your sentiments of it as a "bodge". I'm with you on the 8080/86 though. Yuk.
BTW, the 6502 was used in an awful lot of different arcade cabinets right through the 80s, and a variant was used in the Gameboy in 1989. I don't believe that was because they were cheap, or because there weren't newer processors around. But because the two index registers and useful and consistent addressing mode made then excellent for shifting blocks of memory around for games.
The MP3Concept was an application with an MP3 file icon... If you did a get info on the file it would show "Application". Just like any trojan can do on any OS.
.zip or .sit format to be shared or transfered on the internet to work and Mac users are not used to get MP3 files in a compressed files. (It had to be a double fork file)
.app extension (even with extensions turned off), if you double-click the fake MP3 file, the OS will warn you about running an application for the first time. An alert like "The Application: All you need is love.mp3.app will be run for the first time..." would surely be an obvious sign that something is wrong...Then if the file wants to install in a permanent manner or want to erase/access files outside the user folder, it will need to ask the admin password.
Ok the file would also play in iTunes when you dragged the file onto the iTunes icon. But the file had to be compressed in
Now try to download and run the MP3Concept now on Tiger... First Safari will warn you that the archive contains an Application and give you the opportunity of canceling it. If you accept you get a file with an
This is a lot of hoops to get through... If someone jumps through all of them to play an MP3 file... well what can I say... (I don't like the idea of saying that non-techies deserve to get viruses.)
Don't forget the NES :) and the SNES which used a 16-bit variant, the 65c816.
although she insists she can gte by with the gimp... ...as an ex-photographer myself - yes you can get by with the gimp.
You can get by with gimp? Though it's been about two years since I used it back then it didn't come close to the capabilities of Photoshop, and though I'm only an amateur right now I too am a photographer. As I told my professor, I'd like to do some photojournalism.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yellow Box is what became the Cocoa API's and all that is needed to run the Cocoa apps (like Quartz etc.). Essentially it's now Mac OS X minus Carbon and Classic (and other non-Cocoa APIs).
In the days of Rhapsody, Apple announced that they would maybe port the Yellow Box to x86. Guess what is Mac OS X on intel?
Apple stopped using the term Yellow Box the same day they started talking about Cocoa, Carbon, Mac OS X and Classic (Called previously the Blue Box).
So the term Yellow Box is not relevant anymore.
Perhaps you meant the Red Box? In Apple's plans, the Red Box was the Cocoa API's (and friends) running inside Windows, enabling people to run Cocoa apps "natively" on Windows.
Visio, Access, Outlook, Publisher, Infopath.
IBM will also produce a special northbridge chip, which was designed by Apple, that links the processor to the memory subsystem and I/O. The processor will be able to send and receive data to this chip through its front-side bus interface at 1-GHz, six times faster than the front-side bus for the previous G4 processor. (Source: EE Times)
I hope you know what a 'northbridge' is, and why it's called a 'chipset'.
Somebody please mod grandparent up, instead of the parent.
It was immensely difficult to write clean, maintainable, code in the 6502's model. Yes, you can probably find ways to reduce the amount of 16 bit pointer arithmetic in your code, but that's really the point. You're having to code in fairly arbitrary restrictions to ensure your code is relatively clean for the architecture. How often do you have a variable amount of data where you can be sure it's not going to exceed 256 bytes in size? The screen is bigger than that. Arbitrary bitmaps generally will be. Strings? Urgh.
Ok, that's a foot-in-mouth thing on my part. I need to check what's new in the last ten years before making such comments.It's worth noting that a great deal of C is about pointers. Some very simple stuff involving pointers is going to compile into a lot of code on the '02. "while(*d++ = *s++);" is relatively trivial on most CPUs. An automatic translation of it to 6502, which requires that the compiler cannot make assumptions a human would (eg "I know I'm copying a string, I'm happy with making sure it's less than 256 bytes in length at most") is going to look pretty ugly.
The BBC Micro in many ways was the Atom done properly. The point about the Atom was that it was Acorn's first 6502 based machine and it didn't exactly demonstrate an affinity with elegance on the part of the designers. With Apple and Commodore chosing the 6502 when it was a sixth of the price of the 6800 and 8080, their motives were obvious. Acorn's motives are less obvious, given the machine came out in 1980, when the Z80A was already on the market and even cheaper.I'm just baffled that a chip without proper 16 bit addressing would get the following it has. Every chip has limitations, but I think the 6502 was one of those where programmers spent time redesigning the algorithm to fit the CPU rather than as efficiently as possible designing code to implement the best algorithm.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"To arrive"? Interesting use of Latin. A company, particularly a tech startup, whose name actually means something is refreshing.
I'm glad to see someone's decided to make a business out of porting, as that'll make things go a lot quicker.
But only a $100 flat fee for a Cocoa port? That seems cheap for porting; of course, Apple has made this pretty easy to do, and I guess Advenio is banking on the facts that:
(1) A lot of their business will be for the $500+ Carbon ports, since you'd want to get a developer kit to test the Advenio port anyway.
(2) Most of the Cocoa universalizations won't be a hassle -- like Mathematica, a few hours' work.
If they get a lot of orders for tough universalizations of Cocoa apps, you'll see the prices change dramatically.
From what I've heard, you absolutely lose target firewire and any other OF-related goodies (C for CD, cmd-opt-P-R for PRAM zap, etc). However, that only applies to the final product if they stick with olde-skoole BIOS. There was some talk that they might be looking at an EFI-based board too.
More info on EFI can be found here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20050524/
Visio was originally a cocoa app. What comes around goes around.
The index registers offset from a full 16 bit address.
;-)
That's "supplying the other eight bits".
No it's more than that. It's providing a full 16 bit base address to index from. Compare with segment registers that don't allow byte aligned base addresses. Yuk.
How often do you have a variable amount of data where you can be sure it's not going to exceed 256 bytes in size?
All the time. Back in those days, no-one expected a string to be longer than 255 bytes, and sprites always had maximum sizes that were less that 256 bytes wide, lookup tables were nearly always 256 bytes or less because the key value was a byte. etc. Tables with a full 16 bit key were not possible with any 8 bit micro because the full range would exhaust the entire memory map.
It's worth noting that a great deal of C is about pointers.
As was BCPL which was available very early on for the BBC Micro. Pointers weren't fundamentally difficult. You just used the available page zero memory as pseudo registers. Yes, it was a memory access, but that wasn't such a slowdown in those days, particularly as the 6502 used less cycles for instructions than contemporaneous CPUs. It was very much the forebear to the RISC concept.
I found the 6502 more natural to program for that the Z80. There was a consistency to the instructions and addressing modes that meant that the way to do something just came naturally to mind. And there were plenty of people that felt the same way.
Clearly you had another favourite CPU. Such things are what advocacy was about in those days.
I've seen it. It happened. Here's how far it got...
Booted, from install DVD, including white apple screen...
the bootup is graphical.
Got to Windowserver/Systemstarter phase...screen turned blue, then Beachball.
This machine has an Intel builtin Vesa 3.0 compliant GPU, tho it appears any Vesa 3.0 card may work.
It appears, at least with dev version, the *installer* is what stops the process from continuing...not the kernal. A remote debug session is in order.
It has been theorized that one could install onto a drive in the dev machine then move the drive to this particular Vaio...but that step has not yet been taken.
I hope you know what a 'northbridge' is, and why it's called a 'chipset'.
Mod up the Grandparent if you want, but the post totally MISSED my point. I don't care what chipsets Apple engineered or assisted with.
My point was this, Apple is too use to using off the shelf technologies, even if they do some internal engineering, most parts inside a G5 have NO apple innovation. There are things like the memory bus adaptation to improve RAM speed in the G5, and there is Firewire, etc...
However, my argument is that Apple is getting to use to taking off the shelf technology and using it, instead of innovating, even the OS.
Apple should of took the G5 processor technology, fully extended it to the 3ghz range, and even adapted it to tri-core instead of waiting on IBM to do it for them. Microsoft easily did this, and this was JUST for the XBOX 360 gaming platform, let alone something as important to Apple as the central CPU in its entire product line.
So thank you for the post, but I kind of understand the difference between a CPU and Chipset, probably a bit more than I should even let on.
As a tech who works on Macs and PCs, one of the reasons I absolutely hate the latter is because it's such a bitch and a half to troubleshoot a non-booting PC-- you can't simply plug in and boot from any old hard drive with Windows loaded on it and start digging around under the hood of the ailing, primary boot drive. IME it's been more work just getting the friggin' things to a point where you can attempt to troubleshoot them than it is to actually fix the problem once you find it. Having to whip up some Linux boot CD or make a bootable USB memory key with the appropriate device drivers and the ability to read/write NTFS is a bunch of hooey.
Target disk mode and the ability to boot from any attached hard drive with an OS on it are IMHO two of the most ridiculously useful features of the Mac from a hardware standpoint. It would be a foolish move indeed for Apple to drop them. The only reason they'd need to stick with the creaky old BIOS would be so Windows could run on the Intel-based Macs. But since Apple's position is that they will not support the installation or use of Windows on those machines, my hopes are high that they will in fact adopt something newer and a little more versatile.
~Philly
That does depend somewhat on Steve never having the product management authority that he wanted. If he had had free rein at Apple, it's likely his product design would have gone down a similar path to NeXT (internal politics aside). The abortive software projects (AFAIK) were initiatives of other colourless execs at Apple. Steve would likely have deep-sixed them (as he did the clone licensing program, later).
I agree that the whole process of being pushed out of Apple (after attempting a coup), cashing out all shares but one to $400m, and being highly "motivated" to try to beat them at their own game, probably contributed to the no-compromises purity of the NeXT direction. I am convinced the NeXT machine was on some level Steve's vision for the "next Apple" and several models designed after his return bear this out (not to mention the purchase of NeXT and NEXTSTEP).
you had me at #!