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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.
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...
But it won't be a Mac. It'll be OS X running on a PC, which is entirely different.
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.
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
Yes, it's called OS X. It's the new version of Linux that everyone will be running in a year or two.
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?
Wow! They showed us photos of a motherboard, a video card and a monitor displaying windows XP.... I've never seen that before!
Entirely different? How so?
That's right; the PC would be lack the requisite Lucite case.
You answered your own question.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
Well by your logic you can build a Dell. But of course you can't, only Dell can Build a Dell! ;-)
So, the Grandparent was right. You'll be building a PC that runs MacOS.
Umm, the MAC is a bog standard computer, it's not just the same bog standard. Mac is not going to use OEM boards, you're not going to see a Tyan motherboard in there.
They don't throw shit on the motherboard that they don't need just to rice it out, Everything on your motherboard has a reasom for being there, and all of it is designed similar. Windows has to install on a lot of different flavours of hardware, so there's no big shocker when it installs on this one.
Especially the "Windows XP installs without a hitch " makes me think hard. That means there is a normal BIOS, that also means segmented memory, thaold 640k limit A20 gate, realmode bootup, completely messed up ACPI implementations, no relible and stadrad way to get hardware information from the firmware...all doors for all the Problems we all so love with our Wintel machines are open.
... Apple basically gave up building good harware.
Just as I said before
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
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.
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.
The only difference I can see is that Apple 'enthusiests' may mock you for paying too little for your computer, even though the only difference will be a missing chip on the motherboard.
But just how "normal"? Sure, it's enough to get NTLDR going, but can you install DOS on it? I didn't think that the NT/2K/XP boot process used too much of BIOS functionality. I'm pretty sure that once the kernel is loaded, most or all of BIOS is ignored.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
This is Slashdot. The number of people who use the word `Linux' to mean `open source,' `free software,' or `UNIX or UNIX-like,' means that almost anything can be described as Linux around here.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apple Files for Mactel Trademark but the public seems to prefer Macintel.
I agree completely. I remember back when OS/2 Warp came out and we used it to run Windows 3.1 software(some 3rd party display program that overlaid text from scanners on TIFF's of boilerplate documents) because the app was more stable on OS/2 than 3.1 at the time. We kept asking for an OS/2 native app but never got it. Eventually 3.11 came out and, poof, no more need for OS/2.
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
Conversation between software developer and customer:
Customer: Your application doesn't work on the Macintosh.
Developer: Just buy our Windows application, dual-boot the Macintosh into Windows, and run it.
Customer: Bugger that.
Sales: 0.
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. ;)
Bad analogy -- one of the key selling points of a Ferrari is the engine, which is analogous to the CPU/mobo, and there's unlikely to be a big difference there.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
What you mean moving from one thermonuclear device to another [that is slower even!] isn't a good move up for Intel?
At the very least they should have considered AMD in the picture. The AMD64 [while still clinging to the x86 ISA] gets a much higher IPC than the P4 design.
And barring that Apple should have pushed for an EM64T based PentiumM. That core is at least more cycle efficient than the P4 cores [and draws way less power].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
So how long till you post your results? Do you want an ftp server you could store the file in? :)
Gravity Sucks
You're assuming they have a choice between buying OS X for $150 and d/l pirated OS X for free. Right now, Apple is saying no one will have that choice - so even if someone gets it running on non-Mac PCs, it will be a choice between spending several hundred (at least) on a Mac and the pirated version. People who might be willing to spend $150 may not be willing to spend $500 on a mini.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Fully agree: Free as in Bootleggers. I've never seen a post from anyone espousing the paid-for distros. I definitely believe that people prefer beer to speech, which kind of fits the demographic too.
Porting costs money, after all.
I don't know if you saw, hear or read ANYthing about Steve Jobs' announcement on this, but I don't think checking an extra box to support both platforms is going to cost money.
Just my $0.0000001
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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!
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.
No, the world is chock full of engines that are equal to or better than the Ferrari. What the Ferrari has is an unequaled package, a balance focused on a single purpose.
Besides that, of course its a bad analogy, they are always flawed. The only good analogy is something like "Peas and carrots go together like peas and carrots"; which is really useful as an analogy...
My other car is a Popemobile
What's the incentive to port an app when you can tell the user to run it under these applications?
The incentive is that Mac users want Mac applications and will tell you to get stuffed, then go buy software from a company that makes what they want. I have no doubt that some software vendors will try this. I also have no doubt that within a year they will have exited the Mac market and a competitor will take over their former share.
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
And here's my answer: Show me an app that I have to run under Windows emulation and a slightly inferior one that's native to OS X, and I'll buy the native one. Plain and simple. The fact that the other one runs in Windows brings it down enough that small inferiorities in the native app are balanced out.
Why?
Because I own a Mac because I like using OS X and don't like using Windows. What would be the point in even having a Mac if everything had to be run under Windows? Just to use iPhoto? Please.
My personal guess is that there are plenty of Mac users who feel the same way. Yes, Mac users are a pretty small segment of the computer using population, so maybe some companies would rather lose them altogether than deal with them. But they could have done that long ago if they were going to do it.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Not hard enough, apparently (see below). That means there is a normal BIOS, that also means segmented memory, thaold 640k limit A20 gate, realmode bootup, completely messed up ACPI implementations,
32 and 64 bit x86 chips no longer have segmented memory (at least from the programmers perspective, which is what I care about). I don't think there'll be any problem with BIOS issues (rumor has it that Apple will use the next gen BIOS implementation). ACPI may or not be an issue, however I'm pretty sure Apple and Intel will be able to work any kinks out soon enough. Power management is a huge topic going forward. Also bear in mind that Apple will most likely not use P4/Netburst chips and will stick to desktop oriented Pentium-M designs.
no relible and stadrad way to get hardware information from the firmware...all doors for all the Problems we all so love with our Wintel machines are open
Hardware detection already works quite well in both Windows and Linux. The next-gen BIOS mentioned above can only improve things. Further, Apple is already using PCI and PCI expansion cards. I seriously doubt any of your doom and gloom has validity.
Lets see pictures of it then - sheesh!
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
Just as I said before ... Apple basically gave up building good harware.
Steve made this very clear:
"It is a development platform only. This is not a product. This will never be shipped as a product. It's just for you guys to get started in development. And actually, you have to return them by the end of 2006 because we don't want them floating around out there. These are not products."
Dual booting is a tremendous pain in the ass. I don't know why more people don't see this. Given a choice between "double-click the app" and "wait a minute or two, have every single thing about your computer change completely, then double-click the app", most people would pick the former every time.
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!
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!
However If the Mactel hardware is reasonably priced and the just make using white box hardware technically difficult (rather than legally perilous) then I will be more inclined to continue purchasing Apple products.
If somebody sells a white box PPC for a reasonable amount of money I would be interested. If someone sells a Cell box that is really fast at doing the sorts of things I do, I'd get it. Bottom line... I'm not really an X86 fan, I am really, really sick Microsoft's laundry list of technical & moral issues, I'm sick of Linux distribution and applications sporadic non-usability issues, I'm over the computer OS fascination I had as young man, and I just want a very, very fast computer that will allow me to do new interesting things without having to get a PhD in esoteric inner workings every time I change a configuration or install a program. I also want an OS that does not treat my like a suspect every time I have to do an update or something. However I don't want these things so bad I'm willing to fund Apple's path to the "Dark Side"
On a side note, As a paying Apple customer I would like to on record and say charging for QuickTime Pro for OS X is fucking stupid (It has got to be the biggest gateway to pirating application of all time) and If .Mac came with free updates to the OS and iLife I'd pay 125 euros a year for it.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
No kidding. Before I bought my Mac, I had a machine that dual-booted Linux and Windows. I only used Windows for my digital camera, which at the time had no drivers for Linux (that I could find). I wound up not using the camera much, because it was just such a PITA to boot into Windows and back.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Having used .Net and Cocoa I can say that I much prefer Cocoa and its integration with the Mac OS, but that's beside the point.
Macintosh users care about applications that work well on their platform. Things like Applescript support and user interface guidelines mean something to a lot of users. Emulated Windows applications will not have that and that means that a lot of Mac OS users will reject the application just from the screenshots.
My bet is that there will continue to be more Cocoa developers producing outstanding shareware and keeping the market very healthy. If things start going backwards, look for the Cocoa frameworks to reappear on Windows.
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
Again, this is just a dev machine to kickstart the conversion process not an example of likely shipping hardware. AMD do not have the shipping volumes of CPUs to cope with Apple's demands. Lets see what Intel have to offer when the time comes for the Mactel to go on the shelves before we judge the CPU.I have no doubt it will be something special
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
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
As others have already pointed out, your argument doesn't hold a whole lot of water. Bear in mind that Mac users out there right now (and for the past 20 years) have chosen the platform because they like and prefer how things are done on it over other platforms (notably Windows). Interface consistency, usability, and the general feel for how it all works are part of this. If someone comes along and tells them to "just use the Windows version," Mac users will tell them to get bent. Remember, they're a very picky and quite vocal bunch...
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
From the top of my head, I see the following problems
- BIOS: Windows/DOS/Linux translates a lot of system calls into BIOS calls (including for translating HD sectors, interrupt handling, PCI assignments etc. Chances are the BIOS on a intel based MAC would be radically different. You may be able to build a intel based MAC but would need this special BIOS and probably the MB as well
- North/SouthBridge: These chipsets are also tied to the MB and are used by the OS. Apple may choose to use a different architecture internally. Again, windows may or may not run on this hardware, but OS/X likely would not
There are probably manu more such differences that would prevent from OS/X and XP from inter-operating. Of course, we can have a software solution (like virtual PC/VMWare) which provides/emulates these hardware functionsI booted one from a Fedora Core 3 disk at WWDC. Didn't install, but it booted.
Make that I didn't install it, I saw no reason why it wouldn't of worked.
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've heard this rhetoric before and I just don't buy it. Linux as a platform is dependent on itself for applications and not 3rd party commercial suppliers, because on a desktop basis Linux is still more or less a hobbiest OS. Now don't get me wrong, I love my linux boxes, but to doubt the maturity level of Mac OS X over say the Linux 2.6 kernel, Xorg, and KDE 3.4 is just silly.
Mac OS X is, however, a commercial OS. It may not be the most popular OS on the market, but it has a level of clout in the desktop/laptop market that can't be ignored by other commercial developers. So, now that I will be able to run x86 code at native speeds on my Mac will Adobe and other software behemoths expect me to reboot into windows to run their apps? Not if they want my business.
Software developers who have always been serious about developing for the mac platform will most likely continue to do so- I couldn't see Aspyr suddenly demanding that mac users boot up winex or reboot into the windows partition that just every mac user will have.
This processor change is really a lot more minor than people are making it out to be. Nothing is really changing at all-- Apple will still be producing proprietary high end computers and running on it will still be the mature OS that most have come to love.
The intel switch may have been a shock, but its not a paradigm shift by any means.
transmission_err
So let's get this right: you believe that nobody will make OSXi versions of their software because it's easier to tell their customers to boot into Windows on their Macintel systems rather than waste time porting?
First off, what about all existing Mac software? Seems like Steve did everything he could to make it easy to port OSXp to OSXi. If only the existing software were ported, the customer base is at least all the people currently using Macs plus the people who now might buy now because of the dual-boot security blanket, some of which might prefer the Mac environment more.
The reason why Macs have survived for so long in spite of their smaller market share (although their user share is significantly larger than 3%, more like 10-15%) is because the OSX user experience is compelling enough that people will pay extra for it. These people will not be happy with a software company that recommends booting into Windows to use their product. If there's a competing product on OSXi, the first company will suffer.
Conclusion: porting costs are low for existing titles, no worse than before for new titles. Titles that run natively will always do better in the Mac marketplace than ones that ask you to dual-boot, and that Mac marketplace will be bigger because of the dual-boot backup option.
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.
Then why is it still around? Considering that you cannot get rid of it altogether after load, that you cannot really call BIOS functions without switching to real mode, that the IRQ setup is still done in the BIOS and fixed (no matter how many transformations Windows does with it afterwards...another source of endless joy in finding errors). Sure-Big parts get unloaded after bootup. Nonetheless we still have the whole lower 1MB of system memory cluttered up with memory areas that cannot be used and cannot be moved with some stripes of virtually unusable free memory inbetween.
If they scrap the BIOS and do all the dirty things the x386 architechture requires in the Firmware, and the OS diesn't have to deal with that in the first place we might get a more reasonable system. But that also means you cannot use unmodified standard hardware you put in any Wintel machine in there.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
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.
Frankly I'm in agreement with you. FWIW I feel no sense of style from these pictures. Nothing that makes a Mac a Mac. Maybe it's just because these are developer systems - who knows.
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.
I'm still kind of mystified that they didn't do something like switch to Power chips. Those would have been just as powerful as PPCs and IBM is ramping up production of those anyway so the shortage issues would have disappeared after not too long a time. Though admittedly there would be more development costs in it for Apple since it's not like x86 where they already had it running in house.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Well since the hardware used in the article is a friggen Dell, I'd consider the Mactel machines to be closer to the VW Bug kit car end of your analogy.
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!)
Well, Technically Macs already are PC's, seeing as PC stands for Personal Computer. Additionally, You can make a "Windows box" and a "Linux Box", so couldn't you make a "Mac box"(just a machine running OS X)? And "Mac box" just doesn't sound right, and the educated few would understand what you meant by just the shorter "Mac"
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.
You're not supposed to be moved by this system. The whole move from PowerPC to X86 isn't about progress, it isn't about making a better system, it isn't about excitement. It's a business decision, that's all.
That really sets it apart from the earlier transition from 680x0 to PowerPC, and the transition from Mac OS to Mac OS X. Those were both about progress, they were about making a better machine. Developers were crying out fro Mac OS X, or something like it. Nobody was crying out for X86.
supply and demand.
If apple went to AMD and said "here's a billion dollar contract" they'd be like "new fabs coming up!".
Self-fullfilling bullshit like that just pisses me off. AMD is small so don't invest in AMD...
How the fuck did Intel get so large?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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
I expect I'll buy a new "Macintel" system . . . . eventually.
I'm sitting here with a Power Mac G5 right now, and I expect it to last me A While. By the time it's due for replacement, Apple should have completed their whole move to X86. Assuming they haven't screwed it up somehow, then I'll go for one.
But, buying the first X86-based Mac that comes out is something I'd be wary of -- even if it fit into my schedule for a new computer, which it doesn't.
I don't see this move to X86 as being a big deal for me. I'm over on the sidelines watching with amused interest, but the direct, practical impact on me looks to be quite small.
> I don't know if you saw, hear or read ANYthing about Steve Jobs' announcement on this, but I don't think checking an extra box to support both platforms is going to cost money.
Two words : little endian. This alone will require (comparatively) much more work than checking a box. Not to mention programs that use optimized ASM routines to speed up processing, and we could go on and on. Jobs' box-checking gimmicks notwithstanding, I would be extremely surprised if a sizable development effort was not required, like it's the case currently for people going multiplatform on $insert_your_unix_clone_here...
Xenu brings order!
Why would the choice of processor compromise this? The operating system will still be Mac OS X, will still be immune to all the Windows viruses, will still be running a Unix underneath it all, will still Just Work (tm). Relax - Apple have a reputation to defend, and they know that'd be a painful thing to lose.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
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
I think Bugatti would differ with that "unequaled" bit, but I totally agree with you.
:) It's like I told my oldest kid: girls aren't really into expensive cars, they are into guys who can afford expensive cars, and therefore can afford the lifestyle the girl aspires to.
;)
A Mac is a Mac the same way a Ferrari is a Ferrari. It doesn't have to be the fastest, the coolest, or the most expensive. It's the reputation combined with the overall experience that make it cool.
Heck, you can put a porsche engine in a bug, but that won't get chicks the way a Ferrari does.
Mac users (stereotypically, at least) want the Mac "Package"... the perception is of a whole computer that works just the way a certain artsy-elitist set of people want it to. It doesn't have to be true, it just has to be a perception. Linux has the same perception, but Linux is for "elitist-nerdy-schmucks" (to quote Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie). Windows of course, is for everyone else. It's like buying a Saturn or a beige Toyota Camry or whatever. Mac users are partially the ones who want the VW New Beetle or the BMW Mini Cooper. It's a way to be different, while still getting something halfway decent.
Of course, those who truly want to be different run a custom, handmade OS and drive a large hotdog, but that's beside the point
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
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.
Not once they've gotten past the bootloader, they don't.
You're not a professional software developer are you? It aint that simple, no matter what Steve happened to say on stage.
Power chips are datacenter chips. they put out assloads of heat. The G5 was derived from the Power4 so apple could have a fast chip (for the time) that would put out a reasonable amount of heat. Using power4 chips directly would not of worked.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
Actually, if Apple wanted they could use Intel's VT to run Windows XP as guest OS.
OS/X would own the hardware and the XP kernel would think it owned the hardware, but would actually be running a virtual machine. With VT, it's quick too. All the instructions that you need to trap to virtualise Ring 0 code can be trapped and emulated. Most of the emulation is trivial - added offsets to page table bases and so on. There's no need to patch the guest OS or single step through bits of it. Interestingly, they could run Linux in the same way, at the same time. With a bit of tweaking, you could imagine having Windows applications appear on the Mac desktop.
Whether it's a good idea is another question - it wouldn't certainly put people off porting their applications.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
...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.
This is of course mindless conspicuous consumerist drivel. Ferrari's are not at all remarkable for their given price class and not even necessarily competitive against much cheaper competitors.
I think it was Forbes that had the article about working yourself up to 200mph on the autobahn.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Power chips are datacenter chips. they put out assloads of heat. The G5 was derived from the Power4 so apple could have a fast chip (for the time) that would put out a reasonable amount of heat. Using power4 chips directly would not of worked.
;-)
I suppose you're right there - Power does put out substantial amounts of heat. Still, if Apple had pushed IBM for a switch to Power I can't help but think that the double push for low-power from both inside and outside would have made IBM move quicker in the R&D area. After all - with lower power/heat CPUs IBM could put more in each supercomputer/workstation.
All this of course makes me wonder why IBM wasn't pushing for Apple to switch to Power CPUs and pushing itself to produce more efficient/cooler Power CPUs at the same time. Not that the supplier usually pushes the buyer to make major changes that is...
"Bah!" - Dogbert
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.
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.
Pretty much every aspect of how to run a company differs between a hardware-focused company and a software-focused company. OS X is a differentiating factor for Apple's hardware which allows them to stay out of the price war Dell and all the other commodity hardware producers have to engage in. OS X, in turn, is funded by the hardware sales. Apple would not be able to do further innovative research and development on OS X without the high margin hardware sales.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Hey man, if you would carefully read the story, you'll see that they've managed to install XP on that machine. It means that there's no technical incompatibility on the hardware side on BIOS calls between OSX and XP.
And those machines, being given to developers as reference machines, I don't see too many chances that Apple will make incompatible changes to the final design, your second point.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
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.
The cases are the same as used in the G5s. How is the style any different?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
the key here is that the Power chips power some of the highest margin systems that IBM sells. That is why IBM didn't push for them to be used in Apple computers.
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
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
In case you're not joking, Windows NT ran on PPC around 1995; MS dropped it in 1996.
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
The cases are the same as used in the G5s. How is the style any different?
;-)
There's more to a good computer's style than just a good looking case. Apple has for years been producing some of the most innovative works of art the computer industry has ever known.
Truthfully a good computer platform should be:
1) Do what the user needs the system to do. (I'm not talking about "wants" here I'm talking about needs.)
2) Efficient.
3) Easy to use/Easy to maintain.
4) Be a good balance of internal and external structure.
Number 4 can easily interfere with the other three and thus needs to be considered in the design. The "whole" not just the parts needs to be considered and balanced.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
the key here is that the Power chips power some of the highest margin systems that IBM sells. That is why IBM didn't push for them to be used in Apple computers.
:-)
This makes much sense unfortunately. Gotta feed that big blue elephant I guess...
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Whoa, wait a minute, where did you read all this??
All I've heard from Apple themselves is simply that OS X won't run on regular beige box PC's.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
yup; but conversely, it's still true
...)
that if darwin-x86 doesn't run on
some machine then OS X-x86 won't
either.
all the people who're saying "*once*
OS X-x86 comes out someone'll hack it
to work on other machines" aren't
really paying attention - if you want
OS X to run on other machines, you
should be making Darwin run on those
machines *right now*, because that'll
certainly be a prerequisite for OS X
running. (and FWIW Darwin's x86 support
is currently limited to a pretty short
list of hardware so there's quite a
bit of work to do
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.
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.
How so? It would be trivial to build a machine that uses all the same exact components as a Dell. :)
...
Is it?
When people say this what they REALLY mean is "it is trivial to find a manufacturer who makes a MoBo that is similar" -- but there are probably not many on Slashdot that can build a MoBo from scratch.
If this were the case, one would have to ask "why has someone not reverse engineered the ORIGINAL Mac?". After all, IBM doesn't care who they sell G5's to!
I would LOVE to see someone reverse engineer one of our FPGA's
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
I'm not going to get into OS X Intel until it's been around for a while (I've got a bad case of dotzerophobia). I may buy a copy of Leopard and try and hack it to run on a Thinkpad just because I hate the Powerbook and iBook physical hardware... but if Apple produces a laptop with a decent keyboard, two mouse buttons, and a high resolution display that might be my first Intel Mac.
Be my guest :)
I've never seen a post from anyone espousing the paid-for distros.
I've bought Suse, FreeBSD retail box, and I've got half a dozen Red Hat Enterprise systems getting ready to go out the door right now.
I've also bought separate copies of Jaguar for each of the Beige Powermacs I've installed it on, even though Apple doesn't support them and I had to use XPostFacto to get it to run. Right now OSX is my favorite commercial distor based on Free UNIX by far.
Your overconfidence is your weakness...
Apple on Intel means that Windows applications can run via emulation at full native speed.
If all I wanted to do was run Windows applications at full native speed, I can buy a Windows box to do that right now. It's CHEAPER to buy a Windows box. Even if you already have a Mac it's cheaper. Virtual PC costs more than a refurb Compaq, a KVM, and a copy of Windows XP Home.
If people running OS X were happy running Windows applications instead of OS X applications, they'd already be running Windows applications. If they have to run a Windows app they'll do it, but, sheesh, when I'm using Camino - a native port of the Gecko engine to OS X - and it's obvious when I'm in the Gecko engine rather than the native wrapper because stuff that I use all the time, like contextual menu plugins and many services, don't work. They do in Safari.
I can't imagine Windows apps being anything but steerage-class citizens under OS X.
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?
You are so wrong it's not even funny. Do 4 or 5 years of actual OS Development on the x86 and you'll see that your first paragraph alone contains so many errors that I'm actually having a hard time of where to start.
Modern operating systems RARELY use the BIOS. In fact, a protected mode operating system has ZERO need for it. The only reason a modern operating system would ever have for using the BIOS is during development when protected mode drivers have not been written for all devices yet (and you have chicken or egg issues). Stop spreading FUD, please! The BIOS is for backwards compatibility (yes, you can still install DOS 1.0 on any modern machine and it will work fine -- VERY FAST -- but fine) Further, IRQs are handled by the LAPIC and IOAPIC (Local APIC (on chip since Pentium) and IOAPIC (usually present in newer Intel systems and all MP systems for several years)). Your logic is as it related to the 8259 PIC chip (which is still the default at bootup, but is disabled by most modern operating systems soon thereafter). Sorry, but your comment about transformations is simply wrong. Windows (and Linux, *BSD, and I'm sure OSX too) all do these "transformations." It's called using the modern facilities present in the IA32 (and x86-64) architecture for controlling hardware interrupts, non-maskable interrupts (NMI), software interrupts, call gates, and task gates. There is no sham going on, it really is different.
Apple is not going to use something that is non-standard because it is not cost effective. Why continue to design chipsets and motherboards when they don't have to? Why do redundant R&D? Asus has made Mac motherboards for years. Apple has no fabs. It only costs them money (of which they could never pour in as much as the Wintel PC industry). Apple isn't doing these things because Apple has engineers that understand the PC platform, understand the progress it's made over the last 20 years, and are not running around like chicken little talking about OpenFirmware, BIOS, EFI, Itanium, and all the other nonsense being spewed forth by Mac users who just don't understand that the arguments they were fed for years about the PC Platform simply do not exist anymore (or only exist in legacy and/or compatibility configurations).
Breathe guys... Everything will be fine!
I wish I still had the source. (Ironically, I got the link from a Slashdot post.) I think it was the article where they were talking about Apple being Intel's shoow pony. Whatever. It said that Apple was telling their developers to avoid BIOS and OpenFirmware specific code because they were undecided. EFI was mentioned. You can scan through those posts if you want.
As for Virtual PC, I've bought it and am having all sorts of trouble getting it to work with any of the programs I'm trying to run.
PCs have and always will be about the "killer app". If Apple or MS manage to make it so that Windows can run in spearate memory space like classic in OS X right now, then I can see many people getting Apple hardware because they want Mac OS X but are required to use certain Windows apps. You can buy cheaper Windows hardware, but for professional useage, people rarely do because they want power and reliablity backed by a name brand warranty. As is usually demonstrated an equally built Apple and Dell are close enough in price that its not going to matter to a professional buyer.
This is not true of all devices (e.g. SCSI cards, which typically have do have vendor specific drivers)
SCSI cards are not much different to IDE in this respect. They both have generic (BIOS) and extended specific abilities. The difference is that IDE is more common and thus better supported without having to source specific drivers. As if the extended abilities of certain IDE chipsets and compatibles have become "generic".
It is true that there are SCSI cards without BIOS, but these don't tend to be wonderful cards (better suited to scanners, etc) and although can work with disk are not very useful if not bootable. I would excluded those cheap nasty cards from use with disk and thus from the IDE - SCSI comparison.
Any half decent SCSI card does have basic functionality through BIOS.
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.
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).
Sometimes the alternate platforms are shipped with cards that have x86 firmware which just never gets used. Instead getting platform native support through motherboard firmware for example. I've found some Sun Microsystems workstations with SCSI cards which when placed into a PC, had x86 working firmware. They were standard LSI SCSI cards with the Sun logo and part numbers stamped on them.
Support for them resides in Sun motherboards Open Firmware.
Interestingly, you can also add firmware and thus BIOS support to cards which ship without x86 compatible firmware (or any firmware at all) if you have an x86 motherboard with AWARD modular BIOS. With these BIOS, you can add firmware images to the BIOS image and boot from it by choosing to boot either from SCSI or LAN. Assuming you can find a compatible firmware image for your firmware-less card. I know this works on some older 440BX boards, since I've added netboot ROMS to my motherboard BIOS for Tulip NICS which had no boot ROM on the actual cards. Don't know about more modern boards though.
KeS
Windows already runs on PPC, in fact it runs on G5's. They're called XBox 360 development systems. Like Apple, Microsoft also has a codebase that will work on a different CPU.
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'll most likely buy one as soon as they come out, and it will very likely be my main box.
I'm happy with the multi-boot system I use right now, with one exception. I still have to keep a second fucking machine on my desk to run OSX. I'm not a big gamer, and while I do appreciate fast machines I'm not a performance junkie. I typically upgrade processors about every 2 years.
If the initial boxes have reasonable performance, and will allow me to triple boot between OSX, XP, and Linux, I'll be all over it.
(Plus, their Intel desktops should be coming out right about in the timeframe that I'll be due for an upgrade anyway.)
What the hell are you talking about? How does "ease of use" have anything to do with "style"? And how does switching to x86 change anything of the things you mentioned. What sort of "balance" are you talking about anyway? It sounds like a bunch of fluffy nonesense.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
No pics of the case when closed?
If you can't convince them, convict them.
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.
now i can my bios settings on a mac! score! wait....nevermind
What the hell are you talking about? How does "ease of use" have anything to do with "style"?
Ease of use has everything to do with style. A well designed piece of equipment that is suited to a particular task or set of tasks is by definition designed to perform those tasks with a minumum of fuss and confusion for the person using it. Are people comfortable in badly "styled" chairs? Keyboards? Mice? It matters in more ways that you think.
And how does switching to x86 change anything of the things you mentioned.
Compare the development system pictures with pictures of the current G5 towers. What do you see? When you look at the G5 it looks complete. It looks like a fully filled out system with nothing out of place. Everything is tied and routed nicely and looks clean.
By comparison the Mactel system looks empty. It's wires are strewn around the case loosly. Not well routed.
What does this have to do with "style" among other things? Simple - perception of the user.
Anyone who's done any sort of user support or helpdesk or field service of PCs knows that perception is everything to a user. Sad but true. This machine in it's present form would be percieved as "messy", "empty", and "confusing" just by looking through the side plastic of the case. Users 99% of the time don't like "messy" or "confusing". I can tell you from experience that this will cause all sorts of user issues with the machine. "I paid $big_dollars for that?" is just one reaction right off the top of my head.
What sort of "balance" are you talking about anyway? It sounds like a bunch of fluffy nonesense.
Proper design is a "balance" of all the factors I mentioned and probably quite more that I can't recall at the moment. I am not a designer of anything but my own systems at home. I have however watched system design change inside and outside for the last 15+ years. I've seen all manner of things that don't work. The current Mac designs are some of the best ones I've ever seen. They achieve that balance I spoke of earlier. These development systems - if they represent something close to the final product - IMHO do not.
Oh, and just because you can't see the "whole picture" of something does not make it "fluffy nonsense". Why don't you check with some "old school" techs and see how many times they made nothing but a perceptual change that made the user feel better about the system. I'm betting that you'll find most of them had little or no support issues with the user after that even with repeated contact with them.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
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...
Well for one IBM does not seem to want Apples business enough.
The Power systems are used for high end IBM systems. It might have flown for the high end PowerMac and Xservers but not for the IMac, Mac Mini, or notebooks.
The lack of a good notebook / low heat chip is starting to hurt Apple in the low end. I kind of wish that Apple and bought Transmeta. Could Transmeta have made a low power PPC chip that would be competitive with the Pentium M line?
The Cell and the XBox360 chips do not seem to lend themselves to use in general PCs. Too bad really I was dreaming of a Cell based Mac.
Now the PPC goes into the land of the embedded cpu along with the MIPS and the ARM...
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
FWIW I feel no sense of style from these pictures. Nothing that makes a Mac a Mac.
Well, I don't think that's what makes me feel like there's nothing special about this system. If it runs Mac OS and Apple's designing and QCing the hardware, it's a Mac (walks like a duck, sounds like a duck...)
Now that I think about it, I know why I'm not excited. I feel like a little bit of "Think Different" will be shoved aside by simply using stock-PC hardware with some cheapo brand-detector for the OS.
I understand that "Think Business" comes before "Think Different" and I agree... 'cause I want to keep seeing Apple innovate. But as a programmer and former CS student, all the wave-of-the-future awe over RISC and pipelines and next-gen processor bus design is being discarded for the status-quo.
But on the flip-side... think about Linux... Linux *could* have been designed from the ground-up with all the wave-of-the-future next-gen microkernel hird-of-unix-replacing-daemon design... I think you all know where I'm going with this.
But, wouldn't it be cool... hurd-of-intel-replacing-penguins...
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
Nobody was crying out for X86.
Indeed. We were crying out for more, faster, cooler RISC processors with stellar branch prediction and elegant processor busses and zippy, short pipelines... o! so many pipelines... *droool*
But here I am, out on the street-corner, jonesing for another hit from the SJ Reality-Distortion crack-pipe long after the dealer's moved on...
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
Ease of use has everything to do with style. A well designed piece of equipment that is suited to a particular task or set of tasks is by definition designed to perform those tasks with a minumum of fuss and confusion for the person using it. Are people comfortable in badly "styled" chairs? Keyboards? Mice? It matters in more ways that you think.
You're playing word games. "Style" refers to look. When you talk about the "styling" of a car, you're referring to looks. You said the Mactel systems have no style --- the words you used referred to its look. You can't go and try to add terms to the definition of "stle".
Compare the development system pictures with pictures of the current G5 towers. What do you see? When you look at the G5 it looks complete. It looks like a fully filled out system with nothing out of place. Everything is tied and routed nicely and looks clean.
Anyone who's done any sort of user support or helpdesk or field service of PCs knows that perception is everything to a user. Sad but true. This machine in it's present form would be percieved as "messy", "empty", and "confusing" just by looking through the side plastic of the case.
How can something be messy and empty at the same time? There is no mess in the ThinkSecret pictures, empty is right, but a stark, empty interior fits quite well with Apple's overall style. Besides, how many Mac users look inside their case?
Proper design is a "balance" of all the factors I mentioned and probably quite more that I can't recall at the moment.
The fact that you have to put "balance" in quotes implies that even you don't know what you're referring to.
Oh, and just because you can't see the "whole picture" of something does not make it "fluffy nonsense".
It's fluffy nonesense because your logic is completely convoluted. You're conflating "style" (which, from your average user's point of view, refers to the exterior since they never open the case) with "usability". You're referring to some "balance" between elements that you cannot define. "Balance" is something that exists between things, but you can't name what those things are. Worse of all, you're treating an early developer's kit as a final product!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
$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.
You're playing word games. "Style" refers to look. When you talk about the "styling" of a car, you're referring to looks. You said the Mactel systems have no style --- the words you used referred to its look. You can't go and try to add terms to the definition of "stle".
Style - definition number 2
Design - definition number 6
See the connection now?
How can something be messy and empty at the same time? There is no mess in the ThinkSecret pictures, empty is right, but a stark, empty interior fits quite well with Apple's overall style. Besides, how many Mac users look inside their case?
Unkempt wiring == messy. Big unfilled space == empty. As for people looking in their case - c'mon! It's got a frigging clear window on the side!
The fact that you have to put "balance" in quotes implies that even you don't know what you're referring to.
I was using the quotation marks to highlight the word not to indicate it was something less than actual. Perhaps that was a poor choice on my part so I will explain. Balance is not always a hard and fast thing and in this case I was referring to the balance between the four factors I mentioned before - functionality, efficiency, ease of use/maintenance, and balance of internal and external structure. I'm going to assume you're complaining about the last one in that list. What I meant by that was not having too much or too little inside or outside of the system. The G5's have just the right amount. The internals of the system are complete but not overfilled. The developer system is by contrast strikingly empty. Remember that perception is everything to a user - "Awfully little in that case for $1800."
It's fluffy nonesense because your logic is completely convoluted. You're conflating "style" (which, from your average user's point of view, refers to the exterior since they never open the case) with "usability". You're referring to some "balance" between elements that you cannot define. "Balance" is something that exists between things, but you can't name what those things are.
As you see above I have adequately named those things I'm referring to as well as defined the connection between style and design. You seem intent on attacking my verbage rather than my arguments.
Worse of all, you're treating an early developer's kit as a final product!
Of this I am guilty. But often the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree in my opinion and I will be happily surpised with a revised design from Apple that fixes these problems.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
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 /.?
If all I wanted to do was run Windows applications at full native speed, I can buy a Windows box to do that right now. It's CHEAPER to buy a Windows box. Even if you already have a Mac it's cheaper.
Here's a counter-argument. If you're someone who likes using a Mac and likes playing games then, like me, you own both a Mac and a PC/Console. In my case, even though I use a Mac for paying work, I end up upgrading my PC more often. So in a typical three year period I might buy 2 PCs and one Mac.
Now I can just upgrade my Mac every two years and be ahead.
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.
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!
However, for their professions, there are certain programs that only run in Windows and they have to use Windows.
I'm not sure what your point is, here. Have a look at the message I'm responding to. The poster is arguing that switching to Intel eliminates the demand for Macintosh applications because people will be able to run Windows applications under emulation at full native speed, and so will be entirely satisfied with the Windows version. Not only that, but he's assuming that people will be satisfied by rebooting into Windows just to run an application!
So, I'm talking about whether people who buy a Macintosh are satisfied by running a Windows application rather than a native Macintosh version. Of course they aren't... the fact that the Windows application runs faster still doesn't make it the equal of a native Macintosh application, because many of the advantages of Mac OS X over Windows XP are only available within native applications.
You're talking about whether it's to the user's benefit to be able to run Windows applications on their Mac when Mac versions aren't available. Of course it is, but if there's a Mac application or a Windows application that are otherwise comparable they'll still buy the one that's available for the Mac over the Windows one. In fact, I'm pretty confident that they'll choose the Mac version even if the Windows version has a longer feature list so long as the Mac version satisfies their requirements.
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.
.... 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/
AMD do not have the shipping volumes of CPUs to cope with Apple's demands.
I don't believe that. Look at how many machines Apple sells. Now look at how many AMD based machines eMachines/Gateway sells. No comparison.
The main reasons I see to go with Intel is the Pentium M (which is clearly superior to any of AMD's laptop chips), and the fact that Intel has been flirting with putting DRM in their chips.
Something that many people seem to miss is - why didn't Apple go with both AMD and Intel? Most PC manufacturers sell both Intel and AMD systems (the only major players in the PC market that I can think of that don't is Dell and IBM), so why not Apple?
My bios can shut off my computer for example if my cpu fan fails. ALso it monitors my motherboard and cpu temporature and assigns irq's to devices for the OS to use.
Maybe I could be confused with the functionality of a chipset, but a bios would be needed for low level things still like what I described above as well as a bootstrap loader to load the OS.
I do admit a real OS hardly uses the bios at all compared to CP/M and does. Even simple keyboard input under DOS was handled by the bios. Dos was barely even an OS at all.
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.
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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.
No. You can make a machine of the same spec as either but it will never be an OptiPlex and it will never be a Mac.
So as stated before might be able to build a PC that runs MacOS but you can't build a Mac.
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.
Did you even read my post before responding to it, moron? I'm saying it doesn't matter who builds the machine. A Windows box is a box running Windows, not a box made by Microsoft. Thus, a Mac OS box would be a box running the Mac OS, not a box made by Apple.
Also mentioned... a Mac IS a PC. (PERSONAL COMPUTER)
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 #!