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."

Comments

More likely than Apple dropping OS X for Windows

[Nova Express]

Then again, unlike John Dvorak, Cringley doesn't seem to be smoking crack...

Re:I want OSX on my Dell

[ral8158]

Guess what? ...
They don't.

Like that's going to happen

[EMB Numbers]

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.

Cringley *Re*predicts

[earthbound kid]

This isn't the first time Cringley has predicted OS X on generic hardware see also his January 12th column.

"Here's how I believe it will work. Apple won't offer versions of OS X for generic Intel hardware because the drivers and the support obligation would be too huge. But just as you can buy a shrink-wrapped copy of 10.4 for your iMac, they'll gladly sell you a shrink-wrapped Intel version intended for an Intel Mac, but of course YOU CAN PUT IT ON ANY MACHINE YOU LIKE. The key here is to offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned on the kind you get for most Open Source packages -- a web site, forums, download section. and a wiki. Apple will help users help themselves. With two to three engineers and some outreach to hackers and hardware makers, Apple could put together an unofficial program that could easily attract two to three million Windows users per year to migrate their old machines to the new OS. Imagine the profit margins of three engineers effectively generating $300-plus million per year in sales."

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 .Mac service. The year is only a quarter out, so there's still time for him to have been right, but I'm still a little skeptical. Then again, it's Apple, so you never know what they'll do next. Last year at this time, who'd a believed in Intel iMacs?

Re:Why pay attention?

[taskforce]

I mean, do any of these 'industry pundits' ever have to keep track of the accuracy of their 'predictions'? No...

Actually, funnily enough he does: Each year. Although his definition of correct is a bit liberal, at least he tries.

Re:Not any time soon, but eventually this will hap

[naelurec]

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.

Just curious.. what are you talking about?

KDE control center screen shot

Apple System Preferences

As far as linux "catching up" .. all depends on what you want to do with the system. It is a tool like any other system.

Re:Why pay attention?

[mantissa128]

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

Re:boutique hardware

[UnanimousCoward]

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...

Re:More likely than Apple dropping OS X for Window

[localman]

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 the Itanium switch?

[Foerstner]

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.

Re:Help me with the math

[Anonycat]

The remaining 30 times, they press B, and 30% of those (= 9) give treats, for a total of 58.

It's zeroing memory pages

[Myria]

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