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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..."
Probably not; you'd need some kind of arbitration, otherwise the cores would interfere with each other's communication to the rest of the system. A 'virtual machine' approach would be much easier to accomplish.
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.
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.
People people people....
:)
/etc/rc.
;)
We're all unix geeks here, right?
**crickets**
Okay, well even if not....
Go to the Darwin site. Download Darwin for x86, install it. Ta da! We have the BSD Subsystem.
Okay, get your shiny new developer mac, place it side by side with your Darwin machine. Check the passwd file, the passwd entry in netinfo, and groups. Make sure the uid's and gid's generally match up.
Export for nfs from you dev mac:
/ --alldirs --maproot=0
Now, mount that someplace on your darwin boxen.
Use cp -pr anything of interest to the darwin box. I would take special note of anything in
Kick the darwin box.
I filesystem comparison between a clean dev box and a clean Darwin box might me useful, diffs on text files to go along with it.
Provide me or any good hacker that, and we'll have an installer out in no time.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
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.
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."
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Really? That's almost exactly the opposite of what most people say... "Oh, I love the UI and OS, but I'm sure not paying an extra [$100 / $500 / $1000] for their hardware!"
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.
So, would someone pay an extra hardware fee just to have a funky looking hardware design that runs Windows (gamerz not withstanding; I guess they've demonstrated that people will, but we're talking mainstream here.)
I doubt it. If Apple chucked OS X into the bin and just started shipping Windows boxes, they'd stay in the computer hardware business, oh, maybe 14 minutes. No "true" Mac person would buy one, out of righteous indignation, if nothing else, and the snobs out there who would be willing to pay a premium for what would amount to nothing more than a cool looking beige box would be too few in number to keep it going long.
Apple's strength is indeed in design, but that's bolstered by a great software product holding it up. Without OS X, Aqua and all the doo-dads that you show off to your friends, it's just a pretty looking box.
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?
Just the way I mock those people who paid too much for their Ferrari's. I built mine with a VW Beettle frame and a fiberglass kit I ordered from a magazine. Man those "Ferrari ethusiasts" look down their nose at me because they paid too much for their cars. I laugh and laugh at them!
w00t!
My other car is a Popemobile
Keep in mind that the developer evaluation machine is not a product, or even a prototype.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How many times does it have to be said? These machines do not represent the final products Apple will put up for sale to the public. These are a quick hack to get developers working on the Intel platform, nothing more. The real Intel Macs will use 2006-era processors and chipsets, will be legacy-free, and will almost certainly not use BIOS (the best possibility is EFI), and will probably feature some custom Apple logic on the motherboard somewhere to head off all the problems you're predicting.
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."
Not trolling, just my thoughts:
Hmmm... Sounds like trolling, but I'll bite.
What's the incentive to port an app when you can tell the user to run it under these applications?
Well, for one thing Mac users are fanatical about the look/feel/integration of the entire OS. This is largely why such cool technologies as Fink, and Darwin ports haven't taken over more on the Mac: The look and feel isn't the same as native OSX apps. The GUI/widgets are different, they don't share data off the clipboard in the same way that the Mac does. They don't support standard OSX keyboard commands, instead defaulting to the same shortcuts and such as their x86 counterparts.
Another great example is Open Office - It's no longer being ported due to the low number of users. Instead, NeoOffice was born from the ashes of OO, and is rapidly gaining in popularity due to it's native look/feel, and it's overall integration as a native OSX app.
Running Windows apps under OSX (emulated, or via a virtual pc, such as vmware)will meet some people's needs (read this as potential switchers), but the diehard Mac users will still demand native apps, and an OSX look/feel.
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
I disagree... There's a helluva lot more apps written for Windows than there is for OSX. And a lot of the apps for Windows duplicate a lot of the other Windows apps that are out there. There's a lot of very similar programs, doing very similar things on the Windows end of things. I personally like to find the best tool for a job, when the need arises. On the Windows end, this means constantly evaluating a lot of different, but similar programs to find which meets my needs/wants the best, and there's constantly more apps coming out that need to be evaluated.
On the Mac end, there's fewer programs, but they're usually of a much higher caliber, and they're way more integrated with the OS look/feel than Windows apps typlically are. As opposed to you, I think that once Windows users start checking out OSX and seenig what can be done w/it, these same people will begin looking for native apps to replace their Windows apps, rather than running them emulated, or rebooting into Windows. Keyboard shortcuts are a great example! Will the average switcher want to remember all the OSX commands, in addition to all the Windows ones, or will they just prefer to memorize one set of commands for all apps? I personally think it'll be the latter, but time will tell.
One quick note about the above: The one app that I use regularly on Windows, which has no Mac counterpart yet is Homesite! There is no Mac editor that will allow me to highlight code the way that Homesite will. Specifically, I'm referring to letting me mod the foreground AND the background colors, based on code syntax. Very disapointing, and I'm a very visual guy, and being able to do this is very important to me. Dreamweaver MX allows me to do this, but it comes with so much bloat that I really hate to use it when all's I really need is a decent editor. If BBEdit allowed me to do this, my life would be much happier! But I digress...
A few die hard companies make Linux games, for instance, but very few. That's the future: A widespread OS with no nifty applications.
I think the difference here is the number and type of users. Linux users tend to be few in numbers (compared to OSX and Windows users - Although that is slowly changing), and of a much geekier variety than the average Windows user (I'm not counting the users of very dumbed down Linux distros, such as Linspire and such... These people are typically the point-and-click, email and web users types, and never stray too much from these basic tasks.). Several companies have tried to make a living out of writing native ports of Windows games for Linux, and you know what? They al
"The soul of the Mac is the operating system" - Steve Jobs, at the very end of the WWDC keynote, right before he says "thank you". And look at their front page today, which features a Fox Trot comic strip that plugs the forthcomming "Leopard" version of OSX. I think they're moving tap into a high-margin software revenue stream.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
Yes, you get whatever version of the OS is on the box at the time you bought it. It's not different than the PC market in that regard. The point was, software upgrades are not free. They're not in the PC world either, but in the PC world the software comes from a different company than the hardware (Microsoft, usually). That's what I mean by double dipping: they make money on their hardware AND the software that runs on it, and of course, since there are no clones, they can leverage one over the other.
Yes, well, so what? Linux already works moderately great on current Apple hardware, and it works great on existing x86 hardware. Yes, you probably will be able to run Linux on the Apple/x86 hardware, which probably will be pretty "sexy" as far as x86 hardware goes. But being able to run Windows on that same hardware is a much bigger deal for most people. OS X already is a very capable Unix-like niche operating system - but it's not very good in some aspects that Windows is extremely good in, mostly this comes down to the application support.
Or in other words: Hardly anybody cares about running Linux applications on an OS X platform because many Linux applications have been ported and run just as well on OS X. The same isn't true for Windows.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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.
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.
I think the 2nd option is more likely. It's exactly what Apple has been doing with OS X for years. When you buy a Mac you get an install CD which is exactly like any other except each model comes with a "supported hardware" check as it installs. The eMac install will not work on a Mac mini, nor the iBook install on a Powerbook, etc... They all have a list of chipsets / CPU's and other hardware built in that they use to identify which system it's running on. (That is, assuming you don't have OF as these x86 Macs won't) All Apple has to do is keep doing what they've always done and you're pretty much locked into Apple hardware, I suspect they'll simply include drivers for their own chipsets and motherboards and tada... everyone is already locked out. There's no need to add extra hardware components simply to identify it as a Mac when Apple is the only one using a certain Mobo.
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
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
Vander may have some performance issues though since much of the memory management is done in software.
AMD pulled an ace on Intel with x86-64 and it seems AMD will also have the better deal on virtualization with more of it being transparently handled by hardware.
To me, it seems Intel severely dulled its edge on the P4 anvil. I wonder how many years it will take for it to be solidly back on tracks... I am guessing 3-5 years as a minimum unless something truly ground-breaking failed to leak through the usual rumour channels.