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Cringely Predicts Apple to Ship OS X for Any PC
boosman writes "In his current column, and in a similar op-ed piece in The New York Times, Robert X. Cringely predicts that Apple 'will announce a product similar to Boot Camp to allow OS X to run on bog-standard 32-bit PC hardware.' I dissect why this is unthinkable and challenge Cringely to a public bet on the subject."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Guess what? ...
They don't.
I am the founder and owner of probably the most successful formerly Openstep based software companies. We were very successful, and I suspect but can't prove that we made a lot more money from Openstep than NeXT ever did. Apple acquired NeXT and after a couple of years refused to sell more Openstep deployment licenses at any price (reneging on a couple of years of promises to the contrary that I personally heard emanate from Steve Job's mouth).
We sold specialized vertical market software for a lot of money. We could easily have bundled a Mac with each license to use our applications as long as Apple let our customers toss the Mac in a dumpster and run the software on an embedded Intel based single board computer. Apple clearly did not regard such a proposition as an adequate business model for selling Openstep deployment licenses.
Neither Apple nor Mr. Jobs nor market conditions have changed in any way that would change this. Yellow Box is not coming back. OS X on generic Intel will not be sanctioned by Apple any time soon. The rules of doing business with Apple have become painfully clear.
There's nothing new about his prediction in this week's column, he's just confirming that he still think it's going to happen, even though they released the reverse product from the one he said they would. In the same column he predicted "two new Intel Macs with huge plasma displays, but with keyboards and mice as options -- literally big-screen TVs that just happen to be computers, too" and an expanded
Actually, funnily enough he does: Each year. Although his definition of correct is a bit liberal, at least he tries.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
"I mean, do any of these 'industry pundits' ever have to keep track of the accuracy of their 'predictions'?"
No, they don't have to... but Bob Cringely is one of the few who does, albeit to a limited extent. Each January, his column starts by analysing all the predictions he made in last years' column, and seeing how accurate they turned out. He then goes on to predict what he thinks the coming year has in store.
You can find this year's column here, and previous columns are all linked from his archive
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
I've never seen such blatant imitation as KDE's Control Center is of OS X's System Preferences. I actually laughed out loud the first time I saw it.
.. all depends on what you want to do with the system. It is a tool like any other system.
Just curious.. what are you talking about?
KDE control center screen shot
Apple System Preferences
As far as linux "catching up"
+ Apple will never ship an obsolete BIOS
And how has that changed? They are using the 64 bit (Itanium) bios not the x86 bios.
Actually Cringely regularly reflects upon the success of his predicitions, and makes year predictions which he analyses a year later. He's usually quite accurate, and good at illuminating current trends and undercurrents even if some of his ideas are curiosities rather than cast-iron business plans. He's a great read and you're not insightful.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
No, I think he's suggesting its not a viable market. And I think he's right.
The majority of people who get there OSes via infringing torrents weren't likely to pay for them anyway.
While its true that some would, most probably would not.
Meanwhile, having a legit OSX for PC would likely cannibalize Apple's hardware sales, much like the mac-clones did some years back.
A side issue: a version of OS X for generic PC is still going to need drivers, and lots of them. Where are these going to come from? I don't think we can count on OEMs to produce them, especially for even slightly older product, and it would be a monumental task for Apple to do it.
Given that OS X trades partly on its reputation that it just works, thrusting it out into the generic world with dismal driver support is going to damage that reputation.
"I tried OS X on my old emachine and it failed to see my scanner, didn't work with the e-button on the case to launch internet explorer, and sleep never worked properly either -- no way I'm buying a crappy apple computer..."
It would be nice if that came to pass, but remember that this is MacOSrumors we're talking about, the "Weekly World News" of the Macintosh rumor industry; one should always take a large bite from the salt block before reading anything on the site. Their credibility rests somewhere between zero and zero squared, and their "rumors" appear to be nothing more than a wish list conjured up in the fevered imaginations of the site's editors. They are far and away the least accurate of the Mac rumor mills, and their information always sounds as if it was passed on to them by Bigfoot, who arrived at their office in a UFO. It always sounds interesting, but likely? Nope. It's not what they think will actually happen, it's what they hope will happen. They should just do us all a favor and change their name from "MacOSrumors" to "MacOSwishfulthinking".
I will give you a break that IPODS are over priced but as far as computing goes mac minis are light years ahead and priced very low. The future of computing is small boxes and Jobs knows this.
Umm, actually he does keep track of how accurate his predictions are - here's a column from January 2006. Past ones are in the archive.
mant
All my laptop POs for my company from now on will be MacBooks--I need to run WinXP, but for 10,000 reasons, I want an Apple laptop...
Twelve-and-three-quarter inches. Unyielding. This wand belonged to Bellatrix Lestrange.
A few people have looked at my Mac Mini and the 250 Gig firewire drive underneath it, and despite seeing the network cable, VGA, 4 USB cables, 2 firewire cables, have *still* asked "But which computer is running that 19 inch display...?" When they finally realise that the 'cute little silver box' is doing all the work, they ask if it will run Windows ... "Yes, Apple let you install Windows on it and it's a damn fast Windows XP PC."
Then they ask if they can buy it from Dell.
*Sigh* Apple won't release OS X on beige box, because there would be no mass market. There *is* a mass market for cuteness though, when the box just works. And part of 'just works' will be Apple updating the OS X 'first run' to allow Windows to be licensed and installed in addition, or in place of OS X. This will be a smooth process using a custom install partition that will perhaps need the user to call MS for a license or call at time of purchase, and to all intents and purposes, Apple will be selling Windows boxes.
Steve Jobs will justify this by saying that Apple is only 'enabling' people to do this, *much as BootCamp does this today*, but in fact it will in the medium run kill off OS X for all except the die-hards.
Jobs will get something though. Microsoft will allow, and maybe help, the Cocoa compatibility layer to run on Windows XP/Vista, maybe through the existing download layer with iTunes, but extended so that pretty much any Apple software will run with a Mac flavor on Windows XP.
So what do we have, maybe 3 years down the road? The NT kernel still dominant as it is today. Windows runs both a Win32 and Aqua front-end. Macs run Intel chips and ship with Windows, but support both Win32 and Aqua apps. I think we'll see some pretty interesting announcements over the next year.
Personally, if I could develop software on the Aqua gui, and have it run on Windows, I would be well pleased. The Mac api's deserve a wider audience, and having them run on the (slightly more stable*) NT kernel would be fine with me.
* Win NT (1 crash in last year when I pulled out the harddrive accidentally)
OS X (Various crashes, seem to be resolved by disabling bluetooth, still a PITA)
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Wrong. Apple used to design it's own system controllers and chipsets, while modern Intel Macs are a very standard Intel design that required very little system engineering on Apple's part.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
When you plug a standard Windows keyboard into a Mac, the Windows key acts as the cmd/Apple key :)
Microsoft is a company with a lot of talent, if they wanted to write a good new OS, they could do it
As ex-Microsoft I can confirm the former, but I don't agree with the latter.
Any development project that size takes a lot more than talent. It takes a cohesive vision, it takes a lot of sacrafices and tradeoffs, and amazing organization, communication, and cooperation. In my experience Microsoft lacks all these things internally. Which is a shame because again, they have a lot of very talented people there.
Cheers.
You mean like the Mac switch to intel a year early, which all the Mac geeks killed him for?
Take a look at that prediction again.
It predicts that
- Apple will switch to Itanium
- Apple will ship dual-architecture Itanium-PowerPC machines
- The switch would happen sometime between March and September of 2004.
Even today, that article is ridiculously out-of-touch. Itanium? Dual-architecture machines? Nobody with a modicum of common sense would buy that.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
First of all, the drivers issue is exactly that "only remaining hurdle" I was referring to. Second, if I do enough research, I ought to be able to find a driver that works, since as the AC mentioned Wacom has Mac drivers and Tablet PCs just use Wacom digitizers.
Also as the AC mentioned, Apple already has tablet support built in with Inkwell -- in fact, that's why I want to use the tablet PC with Mac OS in the first place! Inkwell comes with all copies of Mac OS X; Apple has just configured it so that unless you plug in a tablet, you never know it's there.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The remaining 30 times, they press B, and 30% of those (= 9) give treats, for a total of 58.
Um... Microsoft already *did* this. It was called Windows NT. It had a VMS-like core, originally it ran on all kinds of hardware, and making it backward-compatible with DOS and whatnot was a lot of work.
;)
Of course, the VMS-like core might not have been the best idea, since, well, UNIX was also widely available... but oh well, live and learn.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
When you allocate memory in Windows NT (2000/XP/2003/Vista) with NtAllocateVirtualMemory, it starts out all zero. To optimize this, the "System Idle Process" actually zeros out memory pages all the time, in the hopes that there will be enough pages available when an application wants them. It works out pretty well. If there aren't enough pages, NtAllocateVirtualMemory will block while it does a rep stosd / rep stosq.
In case you're wondering, when the kernel detects it's on battery power, the System Idle Process becomes an "hlt" loop to shut off the processor instead of a memory zeroing process. (Similarly, if there are no more pages to zero when on AC power, it also goes into an "hlt" loop.)
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
AMD also has SSE2 for most recent cores and SSE3 for Venice and up. AMD embraces every extension intel produces, it is intel that has no interest in some AMD extensions (3dnow). However, Intel did certainly embrace AMD64 (of course not calling it that...) At least I haven't heard of intel system doing that.
My intel system flags (Pentium M):
fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 tm pbe est tm2
My most recent AMD system (pre-venice):
fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt 3dnowext 3dnow
It is of course true that whichever vendor has an extension released there is a short time in which it is exclusive to their product line, but it doesn't last long. I think AMD and intel have a long standing cross-licensing agreement that precludes either from locking out the other from new instructions/instruction sets.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Of course one way hashes are a type of encryption. Obvious use is to compare hashes to see if my password is correct. It is not decryptable per se, but your heavy handed dismissal of a book due to your own ignorance is laughable. Thank *you* for playing.
With encryption, you encrypt a MESSAGE with a KEY/PASSWORD through an encryption algorithm, with the intention that somebody will be able to decrypt that back to the original MESSAGE by passing the CIPHERTEXT with a KEY/PASSWORD through the decryption algorithm.
With one-way-hash algorithms being used for user login passwords, there is no MESSAGE. Only KEY/PASSWORDS. Those keys are not expected to be decrypted, which is a good thing because one-way-hashes do not encrypt anything.