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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."
Steve does not like it when you operate outside the bounds of the reality distortion field. Will Apple go after ZDNet like it does bloggers for "violating" the license agreement for OS X x86?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I think that if Apple allowed third parties to make Apple clones, or Apple-Approved machines to run the new OSX on, this could potentially be good for Apple. I'd rather spend $200 on OSX for my workstation, than $200 for Windows anything -- especially if it worked properly.
This might be useful if Apple embraces the FOSS community, and lets them fill in the gaps in device drivers, etc. Keeping things closed isn't good for anyone except the company that is doing the closing, and there are many many anecdotes of where that kind of practice isn't even good for them.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
The reason that most people want to switch to Apple is the perceived quality that accompanies it. The reason people don't switch is because of cost and lack of software.
Keeping the prices high on what is essentially commodity hardware does nothing to alleviate the cost problem.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Were Apple to put the x86 version of its operating system on general release, Dell would begin to manufacture Apple clones. And lose MS' favor? I highly doubt it. New techs needed, new marketing, a bifurcated customer base? Keep bullshiting, ye who know not business.
Dell's already said that they'd sell OS X if they could. That happened within the week of the Apple intel announcement.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Then every kid out there is wrong.
While it is true that Apple sells the hardware for more than the sum of the parts; Apple hardware costs more because it goes through more quality control and has better design. Neither of those comes cheap, and they are appreciated by people who appreciate such things.
Regards to markup being your major opposition to buying Apple: what's wrong with the mini? Dirt cheap as far as computing goes and a very capable system to boot. It is actually your lust to possess the latest and greatest that prevents you from buying a cheap and good Mac? Perhaps you feel that you are something of a "top dog" with computing equipment and you don't want to loose that edge by going to the cheaper Macs and can't afford the uber-Tower G5's (which are really for professional work)?
While there are many reasons to skip Apple, price is no longer one of them!
When I was looking up tutorials online for this, I always found "It is completely illegal to install Mac os X on any old x86 machine, take no responcibility for your actions"
Then obviously they installed it on their computers (and probably downloaded the dvd img from bittorrent), and they act like they never did it. I understand they are trying to protect themselves by giving you a warning, but they have photographic proof that they did something that they shouldn't have. Seems silly to me.
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
I have to agree that, while protecting their hardware business is the most important reason for Apple to try to prevent the Mac OS from running on non-Apple hardware, ensuring a smooth customer experience is nearly as important a reason.
A large percentage of the trouble I've had with PCs while running Microsoft's OSes stem from Microsoft having only vague ideas of what my hardware might be.
Even moreso, probably 80% or more of the troubles I've had with PCs while running Linux stem from the developers having only vague ideas of what my hardware might be.
I'm perfectly happy with that situation under Linux, though. Linux is a power tool; a bread-box; &c. But my Macs are as close to appliances as I've seen a general purpose PC come. That's exactly what I want from my Macs for my wife, my children, & even myself.
Now, personally, I might rather see Apple take an approach that encouraged people to use Apple hardware but allowed those who knowingly choose a worse user experience to use any hardware. Make the installer say, "Hey, this ain't our hardware, so we're making no promises. Go buy our hardware if you want the best-of-breed user experience we've been working hard to give you."
I bought a Mac Mini, just to give the Apple thing a try. And I have to say that the software is what impresses me. What comes for free on this machine is superior to many products under Windows I'd have to pay money for.
As long as people think software has no value, they are going to be unwilling to pay extra for what Apple is offering. I will not be one of those.
Is there middle ground in this?
The usual assumption is that Apple can't sell OS X x86 for generic x86 because they're a hardware company, and nobody will buy their hardware if they can buy x86.
I can think of several possible solutions. Right now Apple is making OS X x86 locked to their hardware. What if Apple was to license this locking technology to hardware vendors, allowing them to sell at a premium, a machine that could run X or Windows. This would allow them to collect part of the price.
The licensing agreement could also require that the licensing chip was only available to hi-tier machines priced at similar price points as Apple machines, as well as requiring certain hardware elements (ie, built-in BT, Firewire 800, USB2, display adapters, etc).
This would allow people interested in OS X but unwilling to buy an Apple machine to get into OS X, but still retain revenue from hardware sales and maintain the quality level associated with Apple hardware. Even if there were no restrictions on price points, the hardware licensing should make up for lost margin on Apple hardware.
That's 50,000 Apple computers that Apple has to manufacture and ship. Let's say Apple profits $500 on each unit, that's $25 million.
Microsoft, meanwhile is making about $200 per each of the other 95%. That's 950,000 x $200 = $190 million just for software licenses -- no hardware manufacturing, no shipping.
If Apple licenses OS X to Dell, HP, and Sony to ship with clones, they have a realistic shot at 20% of the computer market in the short term.
That's 200,000 units times the $200 MS currently makes = $40 million.
So, Apple makes $40 licensing OS X instead of $25 million selling Macs per every 1 million units. That's a 160% increase in profits, and that's assuming clones completely canibalize Macs which is unlikely -- there's no reason why they couldn't still sell Macs anyway.
CONCLUSION: Apple WILL license OS X to Dell/HP/Sony. It's inevitable.
boxlight
Apple are justifiably proud of their boast "It just works". If you start letting people run OSX on any platform, then that becomes much harder, if not impossible.
Personally I think Apple should continue producing quality hardware and software for those that want the best, and not cater for the cheapskates who want to run the OS on crappy cheap hardware.
Has anyone tried it on a Tecra M4 Tablet convertible? I wonder if inkwell would work with the display. That would be schweeeeet!
Out of interest why do you compare an Apple branded x86 PC as a having a v12 when all other PCs are deemed as "Hyundais"? The straight fact is that any modern "Hyundai" could quite easily run any x86 operating system from Windows, Solaris, Linux, BSD and OS X with absolutely no performance issue whatsoever. If Apple wants to cripple their OS so it only operates on a subset of hardware that is their own business, but it doesn't mean it's somehow superior or intrinsically more demanding to run than any other OS out there.
I can understand why they don't want any common garden variety PC to run their OS - opening it up to any OEM PC system would seriously impinge on their hardware sales. Still, if that was their big concern, perhaps they should have stuck to the PowerPC platform where it would be the non-issue it is now. It's quite obvious that within six months of OS X x86 coming out that there is going to be some kind of emulator for it, possible running as close to full speed that it would be viable to use it from a generic PC.
I think it'd be interesting (though not worth apple's time to administer) if to expand the choices of the consumer that Apple would license OS-X to people at the price of the margin on their basic (no added RAM) highest-end hardware (ie. the current Dual G5). That way if there was hardware that Apple didn't support someone _could_ use it legally. However, I doubt anyone would want to pay $1000+ for OS-X just to be able to run it on their particular hardware, given that the drivers would also have to be custom written (not by Apple in this scenario) and the kind of situation where it might make sense would be a big honking server where OS-X just doesn't outperform the competition. :-)
So, never mind
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I'll admit to my potential ignorance now and get it over with...I don't follow the whole MS/Apple/Intel/??? soap opera as closely as most of the Slashdotters do, I'm probably more the everyday Joe Sixpack who just wants a machine that works.
Having switched to Mac OS X from Windows, I have achieved that goal: a machine that "just works." Reboot my iBook? Why? Reboot my HP? Every other day, and make sure I take out the Linksys WiFi card, because half the time it won't boot with it installed.
OK, enough of that, back to the topic at hand.
For years the MacOS has run only on Apple hardware. Now Apple has decided to switch to an x86-based architecture and has a version of OS X that will run on said architecture in advanced development. Marvelous, now they can use x86 processors in Apple hardware instead of PowerPC processors.
Now there's a big hullabaloo about wanting to run OS X on non-Apple hardware. There are pros and cons, many of which have already been brought up for discussion here. "Sell it for standard PC hardware and you'll capture market share!" "Lock it to Apple hardware to prevent loss of hardware sales and keep the stability of running on known hardware!" All valid points.
My question to the masses is: if it is limited to Apple hardware, who cares? How is that different from present, where OS X is only available to the general public with Apple hardware?
It's Apple's OS. Whether it runs on an Apple or grapefruit, that's their own business. Frankly, as a user, I'd prefer that OS X stay on Apple hardware. It works. It's stable. Apple doesn't sell a computer or an OS, they sell a package solution--a package solution that works.
Now, that brings up the question of Microsoft and Microsoft-produced hardware. If Microsoft were to come out and say "Starting with Longhorn, Windows will only run on Microsoft-built hardware." The lawsuits would come down hard and heavy.
How is this different from Apple? With the brief Mac clone market, Apple Mac hardware has always been required to run Apple Mac software (don't know if this is true for the Apple II/III line so I can't go back that far.) Marrying OS X to Apple hardware isn't a new business practice, it's been that way since the beginning. Microsoft starting the same thing now would be abuse of it's near-monopoly position.
So to keep myself from getting long-winded I'll end with the question again. Apple OS tied exclusively to Apple hardware. It's been that way since the beginning, what's the big deal now?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
And Michael Dell has also said about 100 times, that he was considering switching to AMD processors. He also said that Apple shareholders would be better off Apple shut down. He says things to promote himself or his company not because they are true. In this case, like the "we're thinking of going AMD" it's just about putting pressure on one of his suppliers to get a better deal. Anyone who takes this statement at face value is just not paying attention. Ain't gonna happen.
Vote Quimby.
Actually, I don't see the logic in your statement, at all.
Currently there is no compelling reason to buy an apple computer to run an alternative OS. Sure, you can run Linux and NetBSD, but not many people are doing that (well, perhaps on XServe, but I even doubt that). Virtual PC is bundled with Office for a reason, it doesn't actually sell many copies on it's own. I can't think of many people who enjoy spending most of their time in VPC. You can even run GNOME and KDE under the X11 layer if you want - nope, not many people doing that, either.
While this obviously isn't empirical data, I know plenty of mac users and not a single one of them are using macs primarily because of the hardware. This kind of counters your complete speculation.
I blew $2000 this year on an iMac because I wanted a nice computer that ran Mac OS X. I did the same last year on a laptop. There's no real benefit to buying a $2000 computer in this day and age without a compelling, exclusive reason. My PC's certainly didn't cost that much.
Personally, instead of this x86 bullshit, I'd rather they fixed the damn finder, already.
But what's wrong with not wanting anyone and their grandma' to be using Mac OS X on some cheapshit of a computer form a nameless chinese manufacturer?
I don't want you to use Mac OS X like that for two reasons. One, Apple's OS is what it is because there were morons like me and, I presume, the grandparent who were/are buying Macs all those years, while you were whining how overpriced and crappy they are and touting the superiority of Windows base PCs. Two, Mac OS X on a myriad of "yellow" PCs may make my life as developer a living hell, something I were avoiding up to now, and I don't think you, being such a cheapskate and all, deserve such a sacrifice on my part.
All in all, EVERYBODY can use Mac OS X - just buy a Mac (be it a PowerPC or x86).
I don't have any inside figures, so this is all speculation.
Apple charged the clone vendors too little for the OS.
If Apple licensed MacOS X to any X86 vendor at $1,000 per copy, the cloners wouldn't be able to undercut the price of the Mini or the eMac. And undercutting the smaller iMacs would be tough.
There is a price at which cloning makes sense to Apple. Right now, it looks like Apple is not willing to spend the time and effort to find that price.
If I could buy OSX server to run on my existing intel servers I would. It's worth a thousand dollars to get a pre-configured ldap, samba, apache, php, jabber, java, remote desktop, etc would certainly be worth it.
Hell if there was a linux distro like that it would be worth it.
evil is as evil does
First, I should note that I don't use Mac OS X much. Every time I try, it hurts - because I'm a long-time UNIX (mostly Linux) user, and nothing works even remotely "right" to my eyes. Consequently, I could easily be seeing things from the same perspective as (say) a win32 user just exposed to Linux - "oh god it's all scary and different and weird and argh!".
;-) . At other times, they're fixing a problem really well in a way that the UNIXes can't due to the constraints of history, inertia, and backward compatibility. Some of the time, they're doing both, and almost all the time there's a hefty dose of not-invented-here syndrome going on. Also, it's clear that Apple don't believe anybody reads man pages.
/changing/ quite as fast.
So, about your questions:
(1) If anything, they're moving further away from being UNIX-like with every release. Aqua, NetInfo, Launchd, etc etc etc. It's turning more and more into a whole new OS that has bits that look and work superficially like UNIX, instead of being a whole new OS with a UNIX-like subsystem that it uses for parts of its functionality. That's not a bad thing, so long as nobody tries to call Mac OS X "UNIX", though I do wish they'd do a better job of documenting what they do (or integrating it into the existing docs - a "see also" here and there in the man pages would go a long way) and making it all fit together neatly. So far, Mac OS X looks like it's an OS 1/2 way through being totally re-written, and each release includes more of the "new" OS and backwards compatibility kludges for the old one.
(2) Almost all of what they do appears to be their effort to "make things better". Sometimes I suspect they're fixing one problem with a half-assed bodge that'll cause other problems, or fixing it in a way that could arguably be done much less distruptively. None of their fixes feel very UNIX-like. (a) they're not always horrific hacks, (b) they all need special domain-specific tools, (c) the tools seem to SUCK, and (d) the changes outpace the documentation. OK, those last two are very UNIX-like
I guess they're trying to make Mac OS X into a more user friendly OS, but they seem to be paying little attention to the administrator as they go.
As an example of how they don't seem to be trying to be all that sysadmin friendly, check out the section on xinetd in the launchd summary: http://developer.apple.com/macosx/launchd.html . Nice document, nice idea re launchd, but if I ever have to configure that by hand instead of xinetd I think I'll cry . It's evidently made to be configured using launchd specific utilities, which is a trend I intensely dislike but can live with - until the tools break, as tools always do.
The single biggest things that I like about UNIX (mainly BSD / Linux) are the things Apple are taking away:
- The ability to see (relatively) clearly what the system does as it performs a task / the ability to follow what the system is doing as it does it. Solaris 10 is AMAZING in this regard with dtrace, and most UNIXes are pretty good thanks to the fact that much of the OS is human readable scripts, and thanks to tools like strace/truss and gdb.
- The ability to easily configure the system and alter the system's behaviour using nothing but a text editor, including not only config files but system scripts .
It's that last one that Mac OS X suffers for the loss of, and the one I most miss when I have to use it.
I should note that almost all of this is really from the sysadmin's perspective. Things are quite a bit more stable when it comes to programming APIs and ABIs (more so than your average Linux distro), and quite a bit better documented too. There are certainly plenty of quirks, but they're not
I really do not see how having Dell or HP sell computers running OSX will degrade the quality of the OS, but that is just me.
Then you probably are exactly the sort of user who should switch to OS X.
It has become increasingly the case that Dell and Gateway computers have been using cheaper and cheaper components to undercut each other's price points, and quality has suffered. Many recent news stories and articles on this topic have been published lately. Have you not been reading?
Windows is a system designed to be installed on any commodity PC and with proper drivers operate flawlessly. I personally have had great luck with Windows on many PCs because I am careful in selecting my hardware when I put together systems. Unfortunately I have seen it is more often the case that people buy preassembled systems that were designed to meet low price points and the systems are absolute trash. Windows is unstable and the users are typically unsatisfied.
In these cases Microsoft almost always gets the blame. *nix users love to make jokes about Windows instability and what have you, because as a general rule the stories they tell of blue screens and lost data are backed by hard numbers. And yet there is still a huge percentage of users that have rock solid systems running on Windows without any problems (without Viruses and Worms, even, though that's an entirely different issue).
At some point you have to realize that when it comes to computers, sometimes you really do get what you pay for. That cheap CD-Burner is going to make coasters. That cheap sound card is going to hang and leave applications wihtout sound, or not allow different applications to share the sound device, this USB interface is going to interfere with that Parallel Port so you can either use your web-cam OR your printer, but not both (and sometimes your Sound Card or your Printer, but not both).
This all sounds like bullshit from MS-DOS days, but it's quite true today. I have on many occassions found that while repairing someone's practically brand new system that there really wasn't much wrong with it except that they were attempting to do two things with their system at once that it just doesn't like to do.
THESE are exactly the sorts of problems that Apple wants to keep tight control over.
"Why should they care?" people will ask.
They care because OS X is more stable than Windows. It functions more reliably, it does so with less complication and less knowledge required by the user. Apple does NOT want to add in the nightmare of universal hardware support and complicate things by trying to figure out what crap component some users added that made this or that program stop working unexpectedly.
If Apple can control the number of failure points in the OS, they can keep that reputation of being a more solid and easier to use/configure OS than Microsoft.
If they decide to open the floodgates of cheap hardware and 3rd party commodity system resellers, then they will simply turn into yet another *nix distributor, and take on all of the headaches that come with a huge sea of unsupported hardware. After all, Joe Sixpack would be pretty pissed if he buys a USB webcam that won't work on the OS X system he bought from Dell/Gateway/Whoever. That would then reflect negatively on Apple.
You might say you'd rather have OS X on generic x86 haredware, but Apple doesn't want the negative factors. They make OS X and you don't. They win.
For now, there won't be any official support for OS X on generic PCs. That isn't stopping you from buying a copy of OS X and tricking in into installing, but when something doesn't work right, don't expect Apple to care. You are, after all, an unsupported user.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Dell makes some fine high end systems. We're talking low cost commodity PCs. The XPS gaming systems hardly qualify since you pay a price premium for them.
If you've ever done any amount of repair work, you would know that contrary to your (obviously) limited exposure the low end systems from practically any manufacturer are exactly worth what people pay for them. Shit.
Apple stands to win out in many ways and lose out in some. They stand to win out by people purchasing the OS to install on unauthorised PCs (which will happen, and they know it) but they don't have to support these people. They will see an increased amount of software support for their growing user base. They will, however, probably take a hit from piracy, though these people aren't going to buy a Mac so it's probably not going to effect their bottom line all that much. Still, even pirates count as installed userbase, adding even further the need for a growth in software support so once again they win this way.
When people start to notice the better support on Apple's own hardware, they're more likely to buy a Mac if they want the support. People will probably buy a MacIntel if the price point comes down a bit, and if the ability to dual boot OS X and Windows exists. And if these people don't buy a Mac, they may still count as a "switch" if they aren't buying Windows. Another win.
Apple's userbase is growing. That's undeniable. Dell and Gateway both have had slumping sales, and many think Dell may be past it's best days.
In the end though, if you don't like OS X or Apple, nobody is making you switch. Use whatever platform you like. I personally am a Windows and FreeBSD user, and there is major appeal for me to add an OS X system to my arsenal.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.