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Mac OS X Running on Non-Apple Hardware
MacBeliever writes "Inevitably, Mac OS X for x86 has been hacked to run on a non-Apple PC. Is this the beginning of the fulfillment of the Dvorak prophecy?" RetrogradeMotion also writes "The OSx86 Project has posted a how-to guide telling how to run OS X on any Windows or Linux-based PC using VMWare." Not 100% corroborated, so ingest with salt.
FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, SWEET FUCKING CHRIST!!
Can we postpone these stories until the production runs of both the boxes and OS X comes out? Please? All these stories in the past few weeks have read like the following and have steadily decreased in poster IQ:
Apple: Wild speculation abounds on developer-only releases of software, hardware OMGWTF
Apple: Apple may/may not use DRM, based on developer-only releases of software and hardware OMGWTF!!!1
Apple: Teh interface is pretyOMGWTF!!!!!11eleventyone
Anonymous Coward writes: i am LOVE MY MACCY from BITTTORRRENT!!! I kissed it becos it tastES LIKE CANDY!!
Calm down, people. I'm not saying these things will or won't come to pass, but everybody assuming that a developer-only release will be anything like its comparable production release -- not to mention one that won't be available for a year -- is silly.
Disclaimer: Mac user at home.
People like Mercedes, BMW, Volvo etc sell cars at a premium because they are good quality and have nice design. In fact I bought an older Volvo precisely for that reason. It was a quality vehicle with the luxury and safety I would expect from the manufacturer. Apple is the same. Yes, may be you could run OS-X on a cheap clone PC, or one made of bits, but I bought Apple after years of such machines, because I wanted a quality machine with nice design and nice construction. Anyone who thinks this will hurt Apple's sales to a great extent is sadly mistaken.
Not impossible, but it would be a tricky transition for them.
Apple charges a very very large markup on their hardware, I don't think the margin on their software would be nearly as high.
Beyond that, one of the advantages of them controlling hardware and software is the fact that they can do more rigorous quality control, because they KNOW the configuration your machine will be running. This leads to the disadvantage of having a limited and more costly hardware base, but that is why Apple products "just work".
Personally, I think moving Mac OS to mainstream machines with unpredictable hardware would dramatically lower the quality of the software, and I would hate to see that. I would much rather have an Apple piece of hardware that I know was tested well with the operating system on it.
I suppose that viewpoint will put me in the minority here.
1. Apple would have to support a massively larger amount of hardware. 2. there would be a loss of branding and a lowering of the quality associated with OS X. 3. there are plenty of games on the Mac, but if you want the very latest cutting-edge PC games you'd never be satisfied anyway since you'd need ATI/nVidia making their latest cards in Mac versions too. 4. if you DO want games, why do you want a Mac? if Windows works, use it. 5. what is happening to the PC game industry? is it growing/shrinking? will PC games be so important when the latest generation consoles are out? 6. given PC games makers moves to absurd copy-protection methods (drivers), will either the makers or Apple allow the other to do what they want to "secure" the computers?
Aside from that, I really don't think Apple cares about the gaming market segment, i.e., teenaged-or-twenty-something males.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
But, on my x86, I can choose any ATI Card or Nvidia card and I most certainly will not have XP update issues.
Apple "controlling" their hardware market is unfortunately limiting your choices for no good reason.
No...you already admit to pirating the OS and building the PCs. I'm not sure how you can recommend buying stock PCs if you build them...but...whatever. It's a lot more likely that it goes like this:
Next month your parents decide they want to upgrade their PC and come to you for advice (because you built their last PC). You tell them to order OS X compatible parts, and you install your pirated copy of the OS on the machine after you build it. Apple gains market share and makes no money.
Your grandfather, a year later, decides to upgrade his PC. He comes to you for advice because you built his last PC. You tell him he should run OS X. He talks to your parents, they tell him they love their OS X compatible PC. He orders OS X compatible parts, and you build the machine and install your pirated copy of OS X. Apple gains market share and makes no money.
Soon your aunt wants to upgrade, repeat above story. Market share continues to grow, but people aren't actually purchasing any Apple products. Rinse and repeat for your entire family. I doubt you build your friend's computers, but if you do...or your friends are similar to you (i.e. technically savy and have copies of OS X) rinse and repeat for them. In 5 years listen to all of the "Apple is DYING" trolls on slashdot because Apple is a hardware company and isn't selling any hardware. In 10 years your son asks you, "What is Apple?" and you tell him, "Oh we're running the last version of their OS on our Dell. Great company, too bad they went under."
OSX offers no compelling advantages, and many disadvantages, as a platform to game developers.
Actually that is mostly untrue. You don't think Carmack develops on a mac because he's a moron do you? The dev tools are very very nice and free.
Heh, I had both a mac and a PC back in the day when doom came out. At the time when many people were playing Doom 1 and 2, I was playing Marathon 1 and 2. It made all the PC users green with envy. The marathon games were so much better there was no comparison. Good sound, better graphics, better story, multiplayer in teams, voice chat with your team... all this many years before anything comparable was available on the PC. Sorry, but what kept games off the mac was market share, not graphics or device support.
Currently, a typical Mac gamer owns a PC to play games on.
No they don't. Currently, the extreme gamer who uses a mac for work, etc. owns a PC for games. The typical mac gamer owns a console and/or just plays games on their mac. The typical gamer does not actually need to play every game 3 months earlier and does not spend tons of money upgrading their machine every year. You've mistaken yourself for a typical gamer when you are, in fact, quite atypical.
On the plus side as far as you are concerned, Windows will run on your x86 mac, and if you don't like rebooting, within a short period of time it will probably run at near real speeds in emulation. Of course being an extreme gamer you probably need that extra 5 FPS so you will probably reboot it anyway. Good luck.
So you are paying for a complete experience. Which I can get from Dell or something similar.
/. readers can take it from here...
Yeah, I love the full Dell experience. You send them money, then weeks later you get a laptop which comes complete with:
1. A battery which breaks within 3 weeks.
2. A CDROM drive with a dodgy eject button and requires a "right click -> eject".
3. Keyboard marks rubbed onto the screen.
4. A floppy drive which goes out of alignment after you first use it (two weeks after the warrantee ran out, because you don't use floppies that much). They demand money.
5. A trackpad/nipple which have you chanting, "The power of Christ compels you!..."
6. Flimsy build.
7. Poor performance (compared against other x86).
8. Non English speaking support, once they actually answer the phone.
9. An OS made by someone else, with drivers made by yet some other people again. Install media if you are lucky. Roll-your-own if you are not.
11. Anti virus software which takes the performance down by about one hundred annoyance notches. Only to be bothered for money 3 months later.
12. Lots of half baked software which is designed to get you to "upgrade to the pro version which actually works" with yet more money.
13. One hundred and fifty three billion different services installed and set to run by default, with a systray that goes half way across the screen when maximized.
14. A system which could come with any combination of a number of different parts. SOE hell.
15. A lesson in appreciation of quality over barrel bottom scraping "value".
16. I'm sure other
I support lots of Dells. The desktops... work. But the laptops are not built well enough to be used as laptops in my opinion.
My *opinion* is, that there never has been a Dell laptop which could compare with an Apple Powerbook for build quality or overall system quality. The overall Apple experience is nice. I could never say that about Dell. BTW, I say all this typing from a Sony VAIO.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?