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

Re:They may have to

[acidblood]

Someone is going to do it eventually anyway. If apple wants to get any cash from PC's using their OS they will have no choice but to come up with a "real" version to conteract the hacked versions that are undoubtedly going to spring up on every torrent site sometime in the near future (if not already)

Right, because all the big OEMs like Dell install OSes downloaded from The Pirate Bay. Oh, they don't? But surely Joe Sixpack is competent enough to install a new OS and is even aware of the existence of OS X (and hacked OS X)?

Face it, whoever's installing OS X on a non-Apple computer is not Apple's target market anyway. They're not paying now and wouldn't pay if Apple released a legal version, just like they pirate Windows today.

More Likely: Windows OEM

[NutscrapeSucks]

The eternal question about Apple is if they're a software company or a hardware company ... and when it comes down to it, I think they'll choose hardware.

The release of the Bootcamp Beta opens the door for Apple becoming a Windows OEM and shipping dualboot systems with Windows and OS X. Apple still has decent margins on their hardware, and can make plenty of money selling to customers that just want a stylish Wintel box. Plus it gives people a low-risk opportunity to try OS X.

Apple has also had a very strong relationship with Microsoft in recent years, and I don't see them competiting head-to-head for Dell's sales.

Not going to happen.

[jcr]

As I said over on Macslash:

I was yelling as loud as anyone else when Apple reneged on the promise they'd made at WWDC three years in a row that a Cocoa runtime would be available for windows, at no charge. I still think it's something Apple probably should have done, since MS's hammer-lock on the industry isn't because of their crap knock-off the the Mac's UI, it's the number of developers who are locked into their APIs. If Yellow box had been kept alive, .NOT wouldn't have been able to take over the windows developers quite so easily.

Nevertheless, the yellow box depended on Display Postscript, which Apple and Adobe couldn't come to terms on licensing (Probably because anyone could have written far better PDF-manipulating app that Acrobat in about a week using Cocoa.)

When Apple abandoned DPS for Quartz 2D, the amount of work necessary to implement Cocoa on windows got a lot bigger. Windows simply doesn't have a lot of the underlying facilties on which Cocoa depends today. Their POSIX layer is a joke. Their graphics are only begining to catch up to Jaguar. Their reliability? Well, don't get me started.

But, all that being said, the main reason why Apple's not going to revive Cocoa on Windows is that there just isn't enough money to be made selling developer tools on Windows. Compare Apple's revenues to RealBasic, Delphi, and CodeWarrior combined. It's not worth it just so that Apple can make life better for developers on the other platform.

-jcr

Re:idiots

[tktk]

And which are they going to have bigger profit margins on - a CD that they sell for $200 or a mac mini at $500?

Well, that depends on how much it cost them to make the software on the CD and how much it cost to create the mac mini. These things just don't appear in the stores automagically.

I think one of the biggest factors against OS X on PC's is the tech support. Getting hardware makers to provide OS X drivers should be easy. But then customers would call asking whether the Start button is. Or they'd call asking how to eject a CD. Answering those questions will cost Apple time and money. If if there's no solution, it'll cost them goodwill.

People like Apple because it just works. Put OS X on any PC and that advantage goes away.

Not necessarily

[Opportunist]

Apple's value lies in its name, not in its propagation. Apple has been selling by the credo of "unpack - plug in - work", i.e. their stuff is known to work. Unlike Windows, which is more renowned for installing, downloading and installing drivers, downloading and installing patches, tinkering with this or that to make it work, etc.

The hacked OS doesn't hurt them. It's neither a damage to the brand nor to the sales. It doesn't work? So? WE DIDN'T MAKE IT! It works? So? You wouldn't have bought it anyway. If you did, you would've bought a Mac as well.

If they did make a "PC OSX", though, it could hurt the brand. It could drop Mac sales, and most likely it would suffer from driver problems, at least in the first year or so. A year is a long time, time enough to ruin a brand name for sure.

Neither

[GileadGreene]

The eternal question about Apple is if they're a software company or a hardware company

They're neither. Apple is a system company.

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

[acidblood]

The sibling already addressed the first point (I wasn't aware that the similarity was Kubuntu specific, sorry).

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.

The OP specifically mentioned user friendliness and desktop quality. Anyone claiming KDE or Gnome is anywhere close to OS X has been blinded by fanboyism or is just plain practicing Orwellian doublethinking. And let's not even start on the quality of bundled applications, or the simplicity of installing an application on OS X (just drag it to the Applications folder), and so on. Apple is just years ahead and I seriously doubt that there is enough talent on desktop Linux projects to ever reach Apple's level (certainly in terms of designers there isn't).