Slashdot Mirror
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?"
What kind of a company would put out a $200 game console running Windows? The Microsoft tax would contitute nearly 50% of the console's cost. Any company unwise enough to try that deserves to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.
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.. BeOS! .. OS/2! .. iTron! .. ???
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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.
There is a partnership between sony and apple regarding HD Video. Maybe that has something to do with it...
Fleur de Sel
It sounds more like some idiot typing copy for the website didn't realize that OS X is/will always be tied to Apple hardware.
If that IS a little revelation, it's awfully quiet and fanfare-free.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
We've known that the integrated Cell processor could support OS X since we learned that it had a full (if relatively slow) PowerPC core. This is not news. Whether the other hardware in the PS3 will be supported by OS X, and whether OS X will be licensed for the PS3 is still unknown.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Perhaps the writer tought that Linux and Darwin would compile fine on the machine but this does not guarantee that Apple will port (recompile) the GUI layers of OS X. Just as Darwin compiled fine on Intel, before Apple ported the closed source party of OSX to the Intel architecture.
If on the other hand, the rumor is true: this would be a great leap forward for the PS3 as well as for Apple / OSX
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
I would have dismissed this as complete bullshit had it not been on Sony's own PR. What an odd thing to mention. I mean, It's not unknown for PR's to "name drop" in order to more likely appear in search engine listings, Sony doesn't have to resort to that sort of thing because their PR's are widely disssiminated by the media anyway (especially PS3 related stuff).
While Kunitake Ando and Steve Jobs were making complimentary (if somewhat guarded) comments about the two companies early in 2005 (was it at Macworld or something?), steve has been less upbeat about Cell.
If you take the statement at its fact, its really just saying that the cell is general purpose enough to handle any OS. In fact, there's nothing incorrect or even exaggerated about the statement: The cell could certainly support OSX in the same way that PearPC enables a x86 to support OSX (i.e. emulation) but it would be slow as hell. Whether Sony means anything other than that is another question.
Curious, but I'm leaning towards dismissing this as PR hubris. But give it a couple weeks - if the media get's into a froth about it I'm sure Apple will speak up or Sony will clarify one way or the other.
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.
by macworld dude
The Admin and the Engineer
Only some Dreamcast games used WinCE, and those that did included it on the disc; it wasn't preinstalled on the console.
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
Wow.
Just, wow.
Take a slashdot article.
Add some slashdot readers who don't read the article.
Add some games.slashdot.org Xbox fanboyism.
Watch people make idiots of themselves as they dismiss information taken straight from an official Sony press release as speculation by PS2 fanboys.
The parent to this comment is hands down the most blatently stupid comment I've read here in a long time.
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.
That's it. That's all it said. "The operating system has also yet to be clarified. The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple's Tiger)."
The companies (MS, Sony) know their machines are being hacked to run Linux and such. Those two sentences up there are worse than the rumor sites and the speculation is even worse. Of course it could run an OS. That's a no brainer. It could probably run any flavor of Mac OS X (being UNIX-based) and also Linux. So...what's the news? It's speculation, hype, and a bit of marketing to get all the geeks all giddy, wondering what Sony has up its sleeve.
What DOES Sony have in mind? Have you noticed how many commercials for the PSP aren't specific to the gaming platform but more to the video capabilities? Or new videos released "available on DVD and PSP"? Match that with Sony's pissiness about being manhandled by the iPod and it only makes sense that Sony will do what it takes to get itself in the limelight. Mention Apple and heads will turn...
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
This is so stupid, it's hard to imagine how it got into that press release. It's so stupid, it's even hard to imagine how it was considered Slashdot-worthy.
Yes, it's a PPC chip, so Apple could release Tiger for it. No, they're not going to do it.
Let's consider the facts:
Sony simply wrote about what their processor could do, not about what they're going to do. Linux? Maybe, they did it before. Mac OS? Definitely not.
I'm guessing with all of its added features that have nothing to do with video games, it will just be a POS.