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Will MacIntel Kill Apple Open Source Efforts?
An anonymous reader writes in to say that "Rob Braun (OpenDarwin core developer claims Apple's open source efforts are now dead, because Apple is afraid of assisting OSx86 piracy. First, Apple withheld the source of cctools required to to build Darwin. Now it seems they are no longer releasing the source to OS X's xnu kernel. "
IBM dumping Apple last year signed the death warrant for Apple computer hardware. MacIntel is essentially an exit strategy for Apple to ease their way into a purely digital media company.
Or are there still people out there that believe 'Apple chose Intel due to their Roadmap(tm) and superior performance per watt and that the x86 world is just waiting around to throw their money at an OEM selling Intel exclusive x86 hardware running a niche OS'?
Cocoa/Carbon APIs are on their way for Linux/Windows...
OSx86 is all over the net now. Apple can now forget about selling hardware anymore.
:) )
They enjoyed a monopoly in their private market before but they screwed the pooch with the Intel move.
At best they will become an OS and apps vendor unless they can come up with some
really exceptional hardware. But basing their biz on machines that anyone can build with standard PC parts was a bad move.
Their days are numbered now. If they want to survive they're going to have to sell their OS to anyone that wants it and really make it shine way above M$ or Linux.
(I have 2 genuine macs and soon will have an osx86 mac
Remember OpenDoc.. Never forget.
Apple and innovation?
Apple is regarded by its supporters to be an innovative and forward looking company. They claim Apple invented most things from the GUI to Desktop publishing. Almost always the supporters make the innovation claims with restrictions like "in the field of personal computing", "over the entire product line", "affordable solution" or "as a standard feature". They also like to blur your vision when equaling "popularized" and "introducing" with "inventing". Apple supporters always maximizes the importance of Apples involvement in an innovation (even if it's very slim) and at the same time downplay any other companies involvement.
Case in point "USB":
When the supporters speak about how innovative Apple is they talk about how iMac was the first computer utilizing USB. This is arguable, but if you tell them they counterattack with something like "over the entire product line". And now they are correct. In reality Apple had absolutely nothing to do with the technical creation of USB. Intel invented USB as an answer to Apples pay-per-port licensing of firewire. Apple was one of the first companies to use USB but strictly (or not so strictly) speaking that isn't innovation. They just used an of the shelf product that where developed on the PC market.
The same can be said for a lot of products Apple supporters claim Apple invented, of course with "additional restrictions" (see above). Some of these innovations are: Audio, SCSI, Ethernet, long file names and Floppy drives. In reality Apple invented none of those products.
A nice place for looking at these "innovations" is an older wikipedia page describing the Macintosh on which of course Mac users gone totally mad in describing the Macintosh as a very innovative platform. Almost all of claimed innovations are in fact just off the shelf parts licensed from other companies or already old products used in a slightly different manner by Apple. The wikipedia page has since been revised and is now more in line with what Macintosh actually brought to the table of computing.
It is however true that Apple are fast at picking up new technologies invented outside Apple and as a result the Macintosh is a faster evolving platform than the PC. This is a design decision made by Apple to keep the Macintosh computer interesting and "fresh". This however has some lowdowns. Every five year or so the Macintosh developers and users have to adapt to a completely new platform or a new operation system (68k->PPC, legacy Mac OS->OS X, PPC->x86, soon x86->x86-64). In the PC world this would be suicide, too much money are tied up in legacy technologies. Macintosh are mostly used by home users and small companies who don't need a homogenous environment, or have so few computers and programs they can invest in new technology every so often. The PC platform is used by everybody, small and large. It would be almost impossible to "twist and turn" the Apple way. Intel tried to introduce Itanuium for 64bit computing but in the end had to back down to a backward compatible x86 solution.
Conclusion:
All things considered, when the dust has settled. After decades of innovation and jumping between CPU families and platforms the Macintosh has transformed into nothing less than an ordinary PC, at least in hardware and mostly in software. Linux x86 booted within a month of the x86 Macintosh release using the standard EFI bootloader and Gentoo Linux distribution. Windows vista will probably boot out of the box on the Macintosh without Microsoft putting any effort in testing on the platform. On all important fronts the
No root user, but yet the first account you setup has root access. Seems a bit like M$ and their everyone's an admin (at least if you want to be able to install and use what you've installed). How is giving normal users root privileges so great?
BSD actually, not Linux.
OH MY GOD, REALLY? I HAD NO IDEA. Oh, right, NOW I remember. Steve Jobs' attempt to manipulate Linus's insecurities totally failed, so they knifed the mkLinux project and looked for more willing cocksuckers at the FreeBSD project.
Sorry about the confusion.
I hate to be the one to burst your Mac faggotry bubble, but there's a MAJORITY of PC users out there who really don't give a fuck what overpriced piece of crap Apple's hawking today.
Dipshit.