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

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.

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.