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..."

Comments

OS X on a PC

[LittleGuernica]

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.

Re:OS X on a Dell

[numbski]

People people people....

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 /etc/rc.

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. ;)

Re:Strategy?

[pedantic bore]

A simpler explaination is that Windows XP has already been ported to practically every x86 chipset and common peripheral, so it's no surprise it works.

Re:Why have apple just built a PC?

[Have Blue]

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.

Ludicrous?

[Paradox]

All the bugs listed there are patched.

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.