Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X x86 Put To The Test
stivi writes "ZDNet has tested Mac OS X x86 on a Toshiba laptop. The article discusses installation process, performance and power consumption comparison and has a thorough photo gallery as well." From the article: "Mac OS X will not be available on any old x86 PC, though, as Apple wants to retain control over its hardware platform. From the company's point of view, this is an understandable position, as the margins on Apple-branded computers are much higher than is usual for standard x86 PCs. Were Apple to put the x86 version of its operating system on general release, Dell would begin to manufacture Apple clones. This would put enormous pressure on the price of Apple's own computers -- something the company is naturally keen to avoid."
"Put to the test?" = Installing pre-release software on hardware it wasn't developed for?
Can't we just wait until Apple ships a mac with intel inside? I love Apple and everything, but this barrage of useless Apple articles has got to stop.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
"Steve Jobs might not approve, but Apple's latest operating system can be installed on any x86 hardware."
That will last as long as it takes Apple to DRM the hell out of it. Or worse, dispatch it's army of lawyers armed with cease and desist orders to anyone who dares to suggest a method to install on a non Apple box.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Apple sees how much Microsoft pays in supporting what ends up being other manufacturer's problems. MS isn't innocent, but if Video Driver #16 works where #1-15 crashed, why did MS have to handle 500,000 phone calls?
OS X will not be available on any old x86 PC
Good. This means that, like the hardware in my Powerbook, OS X should play well with the hardware of their x86 PC. Better than trying to support all odds and ends of hardware for all x86's. Things are much more stable in the Powerbook, than the Linux desktop with the Nvidia graphics card (on which X.org crashes and freezes up the screen after 5 minutes of use).
Hey, I'm a huge fan of Linux, but sometimes, you just want things to work the way they were meant to and not spend 3 hours setting something up. This is how OS X spoiled me I suppose....
Lexus makes a great car, with a ton of room for third party add-ons and third party service. But their smooth engine and user friendly console won't fit in a Hyundai. Are Hyundai drivers mad?
The engines won't fit in a Hyundai, but they fit in Toyotas and are often found (with trivial modifications) in Toyotas at much lower price points. Another example are Hondas and Accuras. My neighbor owns a 2000 3.2TL Sedan and I have an Accord V6 sedan of the same year. The car is almost identical, with a few more bells and whistles on the Accura. The big difference is the nameplate, not the car.
//No producer of high quality goods should listen to cheapskate NewEgg buyers who don't care for quality and future development.//
... you're painting all newegg customers/products as cheap and/or craptastic. Simply not true.
Not all products on newegg.com are cheap and poorly made.
I put together a very nice system (for gaming) for under $800, all with quality parts from newegg.com. It's been running for four months, with not one problem.
Ok, one problem: Fedora Core 4 won't recognize my wireless PCI card.
Anyway
Frammin' on the jim-jam, frippin' at the krotz!
Your comparisons are not valid. You cannot fit a Lexus engine in a Hyundai, but you can put Apple OSX on a X86 platform.
Lexus does not "prevent" Hyundai drivers from putting Lexus engines in their cars.
Your only valid point is the need to have a nice profit margin for R&D.
'My MS helpdesk team fixes 90% of problems that can be assessed as "sub par hardware" and "user is a moron and bought crap."'
-- Why is a user a moron? I can guarantee you that the parts this user purchased claimed they were 100% compatible with Microsoft products. What is the user supposed to do about this?
Everyone else seems to be harping over how Apple will lock out unapporved hardware. I'm interested in the opposite. Will Apple companies to make hardware that Apple has approved but also works for other x86 platforms? This is interesting because I can forsee "Apple Approved" being a quality standard for x86 hardware. That could potentially be a very good thing regardless of your OS or computer manufacturer.
If Apple loses their hardware business to clones and their software business to CheapBytes, how exactly are they going to keep making OS X? Their going out of business may be good for everyone but them (although I'd disagree with that) but that seems like an odd calculation to expect them to make.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You know Apple hardware is way less expensive because???
I'm sure it's because you've combed their financials and you've figured out what per unit profit is after removing cost/profit associated with R&D, retail, distribution, software sales....
Or did you simply decide this because you did the most obvious thing, you compared them to Dell? You figured a G5 is pretty much the same thing as a P4 even though Apple has to buy a relatively low volume processor from a different company, and they have to design and contractract the fab of their own system controller and motherboards, and they have smaller economies of scale, and they make a nicer box (there's about 10lb of Aluminum in just the G5 tower shell)...
That's how you know that Apple charges way too much, right?
Of course every kid knows this.. that's why the average ACT score is like 13.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
I'll preface this by saying I'm not an Apple pundit, and while my current machine is a Powerbook, my last dozen were all PCs (of the AMD kind).
Why do people get all worked up about OS X being hardware locked? If it were my OS, I'd do the same thing -- not just to secure my profits (though they are entitled, it is THEIR operating system), but to actually standardize on a reference platform that can be supported.
How much of any OS developer's time is wasted trying to account for instabilities in your cheap ass, five dollar, no name, Korean sweat shop motherboard? I don't care if Intel just botched a huge batch of boards, it happens, but trying to accomodate a hundred different chipsets and video cards and ram types and people messing with voltage...
We complain about how this industry has been around for so long, and how computers still aren't that stable? It's because there are N! possible combinations of hardware and software to try and get working together nicely, which is a lofty goal at best.
Call me crazy, but I'm at an age where I just want it to work, and my Powerbook at home always does, and my Powerbook at work always does. Part of that is the quality of the OS, and that's reflected in the (relative, not concrete) stability of the reference platform it's built on.
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
Try to add a static network mount. Just drop it in fstab, and it'll all be there, right? . Sorry yet?.
/etc/sysconfig/network, doesn't work on slackware though...
:) And I can assure you from experience, getting your unix app to run on other varients of unix is not usually a piece of cake either.
... with a spiked hammer.
... but yet, Mac OS X is one of the harder common platforms to test on due to the need for special hardware and the lack of developer / "lite" OS versions.
:)
You create static network mounts by editing the fstab? Er...
BTW, mac os x can be configured to use the same files as any other unix, by default it's just set up to check netinfo first. You can modify the lookupd configuration to change this. Yeah, apple does things differently. But hey, different unix systems do to. I mean, I'm used to editing my
Now look at the syntax in `ld' for linking "framework" libraries, and hell, the fact that "framework" libraries exist. If you haven't worked on build systems, you won't understand the horror of that one.
This is a product of apple's development environment. They provide and promote their own dev environment that is not unix based. Well, sort of but not really unix based. Frameworks to me are a better solution than libraries, because they are far more flexible. Your framework can include multiple libraries for different platforms (say, um, x86 and PPC), it can include translations for multiple languages, it can include graphics and help files, etc all in one neat little package. How do you do this with unix systems? You end up with files spread all over the place, requiring installers and multiple archives for different platforms. I can easily delete everything associated with a framework. Deleting everything installed by a library is not so simple.
And of course mac os x supports plain old shared libraries as well.
If you haven't given up yet, try starting a GUI app from the console. Tip: You have to use the special "open" command, just executing it isn't enough.
Not true, you can start an app from the console just like you would on a unix system. Hint: the actual binary is not the yourapp.app folder, it resides inside there.
It goes on, and on. None of these things are all that bad (well, except for the retard who chose to ignore all compatibility and use "-framework name" instead of "-framework,name" in the linker options) but they're all very frustrating for someone developing for UNIX.
They're much less frustrating than getting your unix app running on windows
They're also good reasons to inform any Mac user who claims that "Mac OS X is just UNIX on the inside" just how wrong they are
Depends on what you consider unix... I mean, os x is unix on the inside. However, like many unix vendors and linux distros, they have their own way of doing certain things. At the core though, you have a unix kernel. That doesn't mean that your linux app will just compile and work (although many do just fine if you have the right libraries installed and use X11 for display). Now if you want your unix app to use apple's GUI components and other tools, well then, you're going to have to do more work, as you're leaving the compliant unix layer and using apple's own additions.
All these sorts of issues make it crucial to test on Mac OS X
I'd agree with that, but really it shouldn't be that hard to test. A mac mini costs less than $500. There are also a large number of mac os x hosting companies, not sure but I would think that someone out there probably offers some sort of full account where you could do VNC or something. Maybe... It'd be a good idea at least
I think that a lite version of OSX would not be worth apple's time though, I mean the resources to maintain a sepearate crippled release probably wouldn't benefit apple any. And if they just offered a developer version that is fully featured but runs on cheap x86 boxes, well, I think that would be abused pretty quickly.
I understand your frustration, but you aren't making sense.
The one great thing about the x86 platform was that we could put what operating system we wanted on it.
You can't run Solaris on it. Until recently (and still, legally speaking) you coulnd't put OS X on it. Apple isn't changing anything there. They aren't doing a darn thing to your existing x86 box, and the x86 boxes that they sell will happily run any operating system that you want. Their restrictions are software restrictions, and have no effect on the hardware that runs the new OS.
Apple is bringing to the x86 world that it is okay to lock consumers into your own brand of hardware. This is not the direction we need to go.
Bah. Your criticism is nothing new, and it isn't specific to the x86 world. Apple has always restricted its OS to its own hardware, except for the brief period where they allowed clones. The move to x86 is not some insidous plot to force their business strategy on everyone else, and it won't change the way Linux or even Microsoft products operate.
After what Apple did to the original Mac clone makers it makes one wonder how anyone can excuse them.
As an Apple shareholder, I most certainly can excuse them. The decision to open up their business to other vendors was theirs to make, and so was the decision to close it again. As a responsible business, they could not continue to hemorrage money just because it makes them look nice and "open" (even though only officially licensed clone makers could produce computers that ran MacOS).
Perhaps its just "correct" to continue to excuse their obviously monopolistic activities...
When you make a claim like "obviously monopolistic", you are assuming that nobody could observe their actions and disagree that they are a monopoly. However, many people do disagree, and the burden of proof is on you to provide examples of monopolistic behavior and back that up with informed references to U.S. and global anti-trust laws. I believe that you cannot, and should therefore stop wasting your time writing rants like this. Come to think of it, I should stop wasting my time responding to rants like this.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
"10 percent of computer users are Mac users, but remember, we are the top 10 percent." - Douglas Adams
Although, I believe what the poster was saying that he doesn't want OS X running on cheap computers for anyone to use it, because that would degrade the quality of the operating system and the user experience. Hello, Windows.
Mac and OS X will always be intertwined. That's how Apple does things.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The difference being that even with technically (I mean, by specification, not including whatever funky copy-protection nonsense is on there) identical hardware, Apple wishes to restrict their base.
First, the technically identical hardware is temporary, its convenient, it may be a good feint, etc. Switching to an Intel PCI chipset and Intel CPU *does not* mean you will have PC/AT compatible hardware. Apple has the expertise to design their own motherboards and chipsets. They could do anything from take their current proprietary design and replace the PowerPC with a Pentium to take a stock Intel PCI chipset as a reference and incorporate some of their custom chipset work, or simply leave out legacy PC junk that they have no historical dependency on but the currently shipping Windows does. Apple *did not* say that the current version of Windows would run on their hardware, they said they would not prevent Windows from running on their hardware. This suggests Windows will need to be ported to Apple's x86 hardware. Look back in history, once upon a time MS-DOS machines were not IBM PC compatible, the IBM PC was merely one of various MS-DOS machines. These machines had Intel CPUs and other similar hardware and benefitted from commodity parts as a result. However these systems were fundamentally incompatible, you had to adhere to the MS-DOS API to be safe. I'm leaning towards a repeat of history over a standard off-the-shelf PC design plus a DRM chip.
Secondly, Apple does not wish to restrict their user base, they wish to ensure that they survive in a meaningful sense. Apple fundamentally is a hardware company, they are famous for their software but that software is largely a tool to get people to buy their more expensive hardware(1). Their software is not really their core business, it is their core marketting to some degree. To run Mac OS X on generic PC hardware would kill their hardware business. They tried growing the Mac market by introducing alternative hardware vendors and it nearly killed them. The market did not grow, Apple's sales were cannibalized as existing Mac users flocked to the Mac clones. You can look to Linux as another example. Sun once had a thriving desktop business selling generic (with respect to the functionality that the user needed) unix boxes. Once a generic unix (Linux - again, only addressing people who needed generic unix apps/tools) could be run on inexpensive hardware Sun's desktop market evaporated. Apple would suffer a similar evaporation of their hardware market, suffer a devestating loss in revenue, and be a ghost of their former self. So a PC user may benefit from Mac OS X on generic PC hardware but what is in it for Apple. It has to be a mutually beneficial deal for it to happen, it is not, it won't happen.
(1) I have to note the mini as an exception. Unlike other systems it is pretty damn price competitive, or maybe its just that Apple's proportionately higher markup is being applied to such an inexpensive machine that the difference between the mini and a comparable PC is insignificant. Or maybe the mini's margin is much less than other Macs and the mini is being used as a "loss leader" to draw users into the Apple family. If enough people buy a bigger Mac as their second Mac whenever it comes time to upgrade Apple may have made a very good long term versus short term tradeoff.
I wonder if people who complain about the price of Macs apply this same logic to other aspects of their lives? When grocery shopping, do they try to find the greatest amount of calories/protein they can get for their dollar? Do they eat nothing but beans and horsemeat? Do they buy the longest CDs/DVDs, regardless of content?
Repo man's always intense.
It is not the fact that it is beta software. It is just that iTunes is absolutely the worst application that they could have tested.
First, iTunes is the one application in the developer build that comes as a PowerPC application. That means, it hasn't been compiled for a Pentium, but for a PowerPC, and has to be translated to Pentium code by Rosetta. Every other application would have been absolutely on par with its Windows counterpart. I first thought they might have used iTunes deliberately, but it is of course the only one where a Windows version exists, so they had to use this.
Second, iTunes music encoding (which is what was measured) is about the most highly optimised code that you can find. It takes advantage of Altivec on PowerPC, it uses SSE2 and SSE3 on Pentium, and on an elderly G3 it falls back to plain floating-point code, using all the 32 floating-point registers that the G3 has.
Guess what. Rosetta doesn't handle Altivec code. For two reasons: It is an absolute pain to translate to Pentium code, and if an application needs handcoded Altivec optimisations on a PowerPC, then you surely want handcoded optimisation using SSE on the Pentium. Because Altivec is not handled, the G3 version is translated, which is much less optimised. So we are now comparing the translation of plain floating-point code with hand-optimised SSE code. But that floating-point code uses all 32 floating point registers - and Pentium has only eight! So the translated code spends lots of time storing and loading registers, which the Pentium code doesn't. An AAC or MP3 encoder written for Pentium just wouldn't do that; it would try to use fewer variables.
3. iTunes encoding is incredibly processing intensive, while other applications are memory intensive. Memory has the same speed, whether you run original Pentium code or translated PowerPC code. Memory intensive applications tend to use the same time, whether Pentium code or Rosetta-translated code is used. If you copy 100MB of memory, the speed will be exactly the same, whether you use Pentium code or translated PPC code. With compute-intensive code, Rosetta falls behind.
4. iTunes encoding doesn't use any operating system functions. Most apps use the OS a lot, for drawing, user interface, disk access and so on. All OS routines run at full speed, with no translation penalty. Rosetta apps with lots of operating system calls will tend to be quite close to native speed, those without any OS calls will be relatively slower.
So here we have the absolutely worst case for any application: A compute-intensive application, heavily relying on Altivec code, where the much inferior G3 version gets translated to Pentium 4 code. Compared to hand-optimised SSE2 code. Exactly the kind of application where developers would create a native version as quick as possible.
(Note that with a shipping product, iTunes encoding on Windows and on MacOS X 86 will use exactly the same source code and run at exactly the same speed, because Apple will use exactly the same hand-optimised SSE code for both versions.)