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PlayStation 3 Could Support Mac OS X
ucahg writes "Sony's website has a press release stating that they will release the PS3 in 2006. The most interesting part about the page, though, is the last sentence which reads: 'The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger).' Is this what Steve Jobs was talking about when he said Apple and Sony looked forward to cooperating more in the future?"
If this is true, I don't know what the hell Apple is thinking. The word on the street was always that Apples were built to last. You had to accept the higher price and less popular OS to get it, but you did get the increased quality as a trade off.
Sony, in my estimation, is the the new Packard Bell or Gateway. Where quality is job 3, maybe 5. Well, I'm sure they will get around to it sometime.
Seriously, Sony is a company that is renowned for its lax quality control. Why the hell Apple would want to associate themselves with Sony is beyond me.
what are the main reasons people list as reasons they can't/will not buy a mac?
1: No games. not if sony releases PS games for mac
2: No multi-button mouse. weak reason but now with "mighty mouse a non-issue. Not that you couldn't go third party anyway
3: Macs are too expensive. With the mac mini and potential price drops with soon to be intel CPUs - a shrill cry
Looks like all the reasons to not go with mac are evaporating. I won't even mention the traditional windows problems...
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Assuming they did in fact manage to get a version of their OS to run on the Xbox 360, they'd run into the problem that eventually someone will get Linux running on the console. Considering Microsoft can't afford to sink too much money into the console in building a solid OS that runs fast, whatever they manage to port will likely be just as flawed as their regular operating systems are. Given a choice between Linux or Windows, I think that a lot of people would tend to choose Linux. Not all of them, but more than in the computer market considering there are more tech savvy people purchasing consoles.
In short, Microsoft even trying to get Windows onto their new console is most likely going to be the biggest flop they've had in a long while.
Considering that each cell has a PPC core, it's plausible to a certain extent that OS X could be made to run on a PS3 with some changes to take advantage of the cell's abilities and the lack of AltiVec (I'm not even sure how much OS X uses this to begin with), smaller cache, and other changes made to the PPC chip on the cell.
Sony stands to benefit from this deal because they get a solid OS available to them to run on their PS3. This allows them to say that the PS3 can be used as a computer as well (just make sure to buy our $100 hard drive and the $100 software). They get to sell some accessories, which they seem to love doing considering the amount of stuff (memory cards, multitaps, network adapters, hard drives) that you could use to upgrade your PS2. It's likely they'd also get a small amount of money for each copy software sale Apple makes.
Apple tends to benefit if they handle things a little more carefully. If they start giving PS3 owners the full version of OS X then the whole clone problem that Apple had in the past rears its ugly head once again. On the other hand, offering a stripped down version of the OS for the PS3 that doesn't have all the bells and whistles attached could easily pursuade more consumers to purchase Apple computers. It would be very similar in result to Windows users purchaing an iPod and deciding to try an Apple computer. Considering that the PS2 has sold over 80 million units world wide, it might be tempting for Apple to give more people a small taste of what they have to offer considering the potential amount of users the PS3 can reach.
What I really think this is all about though is that Sony wants to get in a little closer with Apple. Sony has wanted to get into the online music business for quite some time now but has found itself falling flat on its face. Apple's iPod and iTunes have been dozens of times more successful than whatever Sony has had to offer. If OS X or some varient of it is ported onto Sony's console you can bet it will have iTunes on it that will be featuring Sony's songs (and maybe eventually movies) available for download. Not only does it give Sony a way to start selling its music through a venue that many people already know, trust, and use, but it will give Sony a digital media box that can do everything a console, computer, and home entertainment center can do. This would be widely popular in Japan where living conditions are more cramped and people would welcome having one box that can do everything.
Having accomplished what Microsoft has been wanting to do so badly, get into the living room as the media centerpiece, Sony would be able to one up them in a sense. Microsoft has been designing the Xbox 360 to do exactly this. If you don't believe me, consider all the features it has built in that allow it to link to a Windows PC. Apple and Sony could team up and accomplish the same thing in an effort to drive Microsoft out of the console business. Considering the amount of money Microsoft has lost with the Xbox, and it likely to lose early on with the Xbox 360, they can't afford to trail so far behind this generation. If Sony can out-do Microsoft in almost every aspect, they could easily accomplish the feat. I'm quite sure that Apple wouldn't have much of a grudge in hurting Microsoft either.
Eventually this will hurt Microsoft more than most people would think at first. Considering that Sony is likely to use OpenGL (can't recall where I read this) which Microsoft dislikes because it's an open source standard competing with their proprietary one and that more and more games are being made on consoles rather than on the PC, ports of widely successful games would be made with OpenGL as well.
Now that I've gotten everyone who hates Microsoft with a passion hopes up, I will kindly point out that none of this is likely to happen. Considering the egos of the two men whose cooperation would be necessary to pull this off, it seems unlikely it will ever come to pass. Conspiracy theory that sounds good on paper, yes. Accurate prediction of future events, no.
I will agree that Apple went to Intel for primarily financial and business reasons rather than the technical merits/demerits of PPC v Cell v x86.
It is hilarious(and sad) to think of all that hardwork Apple engineers went through to be ready for media processing monster chips like Cell
The problem with this argument is that only a small percentage of Apple's business is related to high-end, specialized media-processing. Apple primarily markets general purpose computers to consumers. And even then, Intel provides enough raw oophf to handle most media tasks with ease.
It was funny how the first comments about the Intel Macs was how fast Safari was. The fact is that competitive Integer performance much more important to the general user experience than obscure encoding tasks.
They went your route with the G4 -- you ended up with a computer that was fast for playing videos and 3 photoshop filters, and dog slow 99% of the time. Not to mention it was much more complex and expensive to program for. The bottom line is that Apple doesn't have the market or developer support for something like Cell. I'm sure the 12 people who buy Sony's machines will enjoy them.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
He Mac Mini isn't cheap, except as a Mac. It's at least $150 more expensive than a comparably crippled entry-level PC. It's only "cheap" because that's less than half the "Mac Tax" you'd have to pay on anything else.
Does that include the OS? Because OS X costs almost all of that $150 dollar difference, and Windows costs more.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
Along these same lines, wasn't there a story/rumor a few months ago about possibly having a copy of the iTunes Music/Movie Store on the PS3?
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2005/5/http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000020043386/
That looks like it goes back to May 2005. Stranger thing have happened.
Argh. The laws of science be a harsh mistress.
Wrong. The PowerPC part of the cell is quite stripped down compared to the CPUs found in Macs. The bulk of the die is taken up by the SPEs. These are the components responsible for the Cells "insanely fast" numbers. While some parts of OS X can make very good use of the SPEs, the work to make that happen is far from trivial.
Actually, I think this could work in Apples favour. They can release OS X for the PS3, it won't be very fast, but it'll give people a taste of OS X, and maybe they'll buy a Mac.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
The Cell front end processor is PowerPC. With the right drivers it probably could run OS X. That said, it won't because Apple doesn't want to support OS X on someone else's hardware and Sony doesn't need a general purpose OS.
The OS X userspace is nice but a bit redundant for a machine that only needs a few utilities and games. The OS X OpenGL implementation isn't the fastest, and the spiffy display technologies (and they are spiffy) aren't necessary. Sony just needs a subset of OpenGL but it needs to be fast.
The Darwin kernel isn't the fastest either, and Sony can do a lot better whether or not they're willing to pay for it (Linux or NetBSD on the free side, any number of real-time kernels on the other side).
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
no chance in hell of this happening. if you notice, they managed to state trademark information for their products mentioned in the article, such as the PSP, but gave no "Tiger is a Trademark of Apple Computer" or whatnot anywhere. this was just to show that it is capable of running the OS. just because it's capable doesn't mean that it will. x86 boxes are capable of running OSes such as linux or Apple's Tiger (for x86) but does that mean that apple is releasing OS X for whiteboxes? only if you're a naive newbie who is sitting there going "oh sweet! tiger for x86 and ps3!", instead of someone that actually pays attention to news and trends.