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Mac OS X May Go Embedded?
VE3OGG writes "Apple Insider is reporting that Apple may very well be developing an embedded version of OSX. The report details what they believe will be the next step in Apple's future, which is extending its consumer electronics division. The first child of such a marriage between OSX and consumer electronic may be the oft-rumoured, not-yet-materialized iPhone — which it also asserts may well be released next fiscal quarter. It seems to be their opinion that with both the desktop and the phone running operating systems with similar underpinnings, 'expansive opportunities' would emerge."
Are we still calling it now that Lynksys/Cisco has a product called that?
Would it kill story submitter to actually read the article before creaming his jeans over the rumoured iPhone?
Wouldn't the first use of an embedded OSX be the already announced iTV? Even TFA only rates the (rumoured) iPhone as one of the first, not the first. And the (rumoured) iPhone isn't mentioned in relation to the "expansive [interactive] opportunities".
Poor summaries distort a Slashdot story yet again...
"Apple Insider is reporting that Apple may very well be developing an embedded version of OSX"
1-Faster booting.
2-More immune from viruses.
So Apple is looking to extend the reach of its operating system, perhaps scaling it down a little so it can run on smaller consumer electronics like phones? Maybe it could figure out a way to incorporate as many features of the OS in the embedded system as possible, like giving it the power of being able to run various bits of software, making it compatible with various legacy packages in the regular OS. Heck, they could slap a nice color LCD screen on it and give it the ability to do almost everything, from viewing websites to playing MP3s.
How progressive. It's a good think their competitors over in Redmond haven't thought of that, because if . . . oh wait. Never mind.
Operating system that consists of BSD layered on top of a microkernel, whose only compelling feature is its rather excellent UI, wants to compete in embedded space.
This is the same embedded market where constrained resources make extra layering in the kernel a no-no and the aforementioned UI is irrelevant.
If this is true, colour me stupefied.
Didn't RTFA but Macosrumors.com reports the embedded version of Mac OS on the iPod phone/iChat Mobile/Apple Phone to be a significantly expanded version of the iPod firmware.
Wouldn't the first use of an embedded OSX be the already announced iTV?
Yegods! Insightful?
Don't you think iTV will use an almost bog standard version of OS X? It's a computer connected to a TV, with a remote control. It's not going to be much different from what loads of people do with their mac mini already.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
(This is pure hot air, and not informed by much actual knowledge. Hah! I beat you to saying it!)
For a long time before they switched, we kept hearing about x86 versions of OS X.
The impression I have is that they developed that version of the OS so that they'd always have the option to switch if they had to, not because they knew they were definitely going to switch when they started work on the x86 version.
It makes sense for them to to an embedded version, just in case. If they ever decide they want to jump, they'll be in the position of polishing something they already have, rather than starting from scratch.
And if they want to play with prototypes of things like iPhones, they'll have a really clear understanding of what it is they'd be bringing to market. They can build them, and play with them, and figure out if they'll suck or not, look at them realistically in comparison to what other people are selling, etc. Then if all of the planets are lined up, they can ramp up for a real product.
Imagine that MS had kept a few guys building audio players for all the years the iPod has been out, and that they had built a few generations of prototypes in the lab, and leaned on them for a few years. When people at the top of the company decided it was strategically important for them to be in that space, they'd have been able to jump in in a different way than they did.
MS decides that they have to be in music players, then they star a massive effort to get there. The decision is made before anyone really knows how what they'll ultimately produce will stack up against the iPod. If they had a few guys making music players for years, they'd have a much better idea of how their product would stack up before the decided to jump in.
So I'd be inclined to interpret this as a sign that Apple wants to stay within striking distance of the embedded market, not that they're definitely going in. Apple's not going to make a crummy iPhone. If they do it, they'll want it to be the best phone ever. They're not going to trash their brand just because people keep telling them that they have to be in phones.
I thought iTV would do much less than a computer. It only needs to display menus (simplified front row), cache streamed content, and adjust picure settings. It doesn't need to, say, run iMovie.
You've gotta be kidding! iTV is basically Front Row with a couple of minor tweaks. It won't need a full operating system to run and Apple would be crazy to build it with a full OS. iTV will either have the supposed new embedded OSX, or it will have a custom OS a la the iPod.
Based on the meager info, slips from Disney execs and rumors, it seems like the iTV could be a lot less than a Mac mini. Sure, many are using the mini as a home theater server (I'm one of them). But it's a full-blown Mac OS X computing environment with user home directories and the ability to run any app. The idea of the iTV (from my understanding) is that it's a remote TV displayer with some internet capabilities and maybe a HD for storage.
Seeing how Steve Jobs like single-purpose devices, I could see the iTV being more like the Airport Express or even the WRT54G. An embedded device like that would be more reliable than a general Mac OS X system, since there are fewer breakable (software) parts. An embedded device also has the benefit of instant-on, which is what everyone expects from their consumer appliances.
The term I have seen lately is "iChat Mobile."
I just want a portable music player that is simple and easy to use. No one wants all the bells and whistles that the "others" have.
/., I see almost no sign of number 2 happening around here. Maybe number 2 is the case and the /. crowd is different from the rest of the worlds Apples users.
I just want a simple and easy to use cell phone, an all in one techno gadget is not desired and a dumb idea.
Oh damn.. I was away for a while. The collective opinion has changed, now I should want all of these features and functionality again.
What scenario reflects reality?
1) Apple releases a new feature that no one claimed to have wanted before and suddenly, everyone wants it now and it is a welcomed addition
2) People are asking for and suggesting product enhancements to Apple and they are listening and responding to the feedback?
Mod me down or ignore my comments, either way, from what I read on
God(s)damnit. Please don't blog-spam. It is not that I disagree with your views, but at least put that link in your sig instead of inline.
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It would be great if OS(x) allowed running any dashboard applet and if Dashcode was a nice easy dev kit for this new series of devices.
It is called the A1200 (or A910 if I am blessed) and the phone runs a UNIX like OS called Linux.
Yea, its not a FreeBSD based OS, but at least I won't get "Steved" in the future. And the sync programs won't be waiting for years, unlike the Newton Sync.
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The fact is I would buy an OSX iphone pre-order, damn near sight unseen if I even slightly think it can replace my treo.
wouldn't you?
I concur...iTV seems like a perfect candidate
Did I read that right? Were you actually bragging about a 250 MB image size? Or did you misplace the decimal point? Have you seen Puppy Linux? The .iso image is 60 MB, and the whole system can run in memory on machines with only 128 MB of ram. And it has a window manager, a web browser/email client (Mozilla "SeaMonkey"), AbiWord, gxine, gaim, and a bunch of other stuff. Since embedded versions of Linux have all the unused apps removed from the image, I really wouldn't be surprised if it was possible to make a 15-30 MB .iso image for a fully functional system.
Well, first, the "iPhone" name belongs to Linksys, and they already have one out.
The second problem is that the handset industry is a slave to the carriers, at least in the US. Apple would have to do some major sucking up to Sprint, Verizon, etc. Worse, from Apple's perspective, is that handset margins are lousy. The carriers make all the money.
Just a little history on osx:
OSX started out long ago as open step (as far as being for intel). Open step became rhapsody beta, which ran on intel (i have some cds around somewhere still =). I could go on, but the point is that I'd bet, and it's been said, that osx was kept at mostly build parity with the commercially released PPC versions. I think the main thing holding back the intel version was an enabling technology like rosetta. Of course, it had been rumored for years that OSX was/is also compiled for Sparc and some other targets.
Now, this is important because an os kept this relativly flexible would seem to have a monumentally esier time being targeted at different architectures (linux has this benefit as well). And leveraging APIs and frameworks for things like phones, video players, palmtop devices, media centers, could produce the most user friendly and functionaly devices seen yet.
This brings me to why the apple phone will clean up, if even done remotely right. Cell phones suck. The UI's get worse and worse. Cell companies charge in retarded fashions for stuff in the US (ring tones? backgrounds?). Cell phone layouts keep getting worse (am I the only one who thinks the keypad on the new slim line of moto phones is atrocious?). Cell phone companies dont compete in the US (at least on price... has your cell phone bill ever really gone down, even with the current ubiquity?). Oh yeah, #1 thing - a competant music player/photo/video viewer without all the restrictions a verizon would place on it.
And if apple is able to go te way of european phones, sellong unlocked phones useable worldwide with sim chips (and even possibly paid for with the latter in the US), all in all, apple should clean up and maybe, just maybe, force cell companies to make somereally good products. Kinda sucks that apple would be at least somewhat tied to current infrastructure, as it is said to be buying network usage from cingular.
Oh well, I'll been holding off my cell upgrade till macworld.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
It's Apple's GUI libraries with the funky licensing. The OS itself (Darwin) is essentially open source. If the embedded OS rumors are true, I don't know what they'll do. I'm only assuming they would get a lot of their kernel code from Darwin.
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A while back I ran nmap against my Airport Express and it reported it to run OS X. It is most likely the embedded version of Darwin which they talk about here, then.
--
Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen "...and...Tubular Bells!"
MacOS X embedded? WTF? I mean, I'm sure it's a wet dream to imagine that you could run the same thing across a bunch of platforms, but ... no, it's not going to be the same thing, or even a very similar thing. In fact, there's a word for it: it will be a different thing.
I mean, look at Windows CE. The main similarity it has to Windows XP is that they both have Windows in their names. Sure, there are APIs which are similar between them - that's because if you have an existing API to do a particular job and it's working fine, you'd be silly to create an entirely new API to do the exact same job. Likewise for code. Just as Solaris and Linux have similar APIs in some places. But nobody would describe Linux as "Open-Source Solaris", except to idiots.
Wait. Oh, OK, I get it. Carry on.
It is highly unlikely that the iTV will be anything at all Mac-like. Instead, it will almost certainly be an iPod with display outputs rather than a screen, and audio out rather than a headphone jack. All it needs to do is generate animated TV titles, just like those presented in today's iPod games.
By being a cousin to the iPod, it would share much the same hardware internals and custom designed software. It would really be insane to suggest that Apple would create an entire new distribution of the desktop Mac OS X just to support a $299 TV output device, given that it can poop out an iPod with an HDMI port and have a unified architecture that runs the same iTunes driven content, including iPod games.
An iPhone would be much the same. Handspring adapted the Palm to accomodate phone functions in designing the Treo, so why not add phone and text features to the iPod architecture and end up with a communications device? It's not a cell phone that plays iTunes, its an iPod cousin designed to act as a phone. That gives it all the stuff Apple has already standardized for free: cables to sync, charge, and display out to a TV (can your phone work as a DVR?), software to run iTunes and iPod games, and built in sync integration with iTunes.
iPod, iPhone, iTV: Why Apple's New Platform Works
Don't you remember the late 90's? There was eThis and iThat all over the fucking place.
Apple has an excellent kernel available to them that already runs on numerous embedded systems, has lots of drivers, and is compatible with their userland: Linux. Instead, they pour lots of resources into doing their own port of OS X. What are they hoping to accomplish? The whole thing looks like a serious case of "NIH".
Wasn't the AMIGA's os Embedded on a ROM chip? I remember it booted quickly and ran well! .. Ahh...The days when things just ran...
Hardwarewise, the iTV probably is a Mac Mini. Take out the optical drive, put a different set of ports around the back and presto!
That's really cool. Now what we need is a ruggedized MacBook a la ToughBook. Something that can get tossed around, dusty, and wet.
So apple finally tears a page out of Microsofts book and builds an OS for embedded devices. Lol. And this is news because....
iProcurement and iStore are two of their CRM offerings.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
This is one of those rumours (especially the OSXon-a-phone part) where I look at the rumour-sayer and repeat: "Are you retarded?"
Seriously -- there are a variety of technical reasons why Apple will never try and embed OS X in a phone... I would hope that anyone reading this comment can guess why. If you need a hint, think of why the iPod doesn't do OS X (something about overkill, the bad example of Windows XP, etc.)
The real litigious bastards...
Well, and an entirely different driver model, known as I/O Kit.
That & the XNU kernel design might be attractive to some developers over the Linux models. Maybe. Possibly. Inside Apple.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
No, really, you'd have to strip out everything but the Darwin core and build a less computationally expensive window system (like, say, the one they had in NeXTSTeP and Rhapsody, before they started pumping it full of glistening eye-candy steroids).
If they did that I'd beg them for a copy to run on my Mac Mini. Even if 99% of the apps that weren't ported from NeXT would refuse to run.
I am waiting for the announcement from Apple that they are switching their kernel to OpenSolaris. DTrace and ZFS ports are just a start.
Um, shouldn't that headline have read "Might OS X go embedded?" It may, if Steve grants it permission.
Here is just another example of how MS keeps following Apple's lead...
Oh wait. Nevermind.
FLAME AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow...talk about eerie.
...and then this article appears today.
I was just thinking the other day about the new generation of consoles, and thinking about the old "Apple is going to buy Nintendo!" rumor. Now, I don't think Apple could *buy* the big N, but they could certainly *partner* together. Specifically because consoles are doing more and more...what if the next Nintendo console used an embedded version of OS X?
RHapsody, the pre OSX, nextos beta in 1998/9 ran on intel x86, sure it wasnt OSX, but it did run.
They just had to keep coding with in those guidelines, and make sure it ran, and it was no effort really. ie have no hard dependancies on
PPC/altivec stuff, make it all modular.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I think Apple should attempt to reuse the good ideas that made Newton special.
When GSM service was introduced to the US, the normal frequency bands had already been assigned, so the FCC gave out two new ones. You need a tri-band or quad-band GSM phone if you want to it work both in the US and the rest of the world. Though some Latin American countries have the infrastructure for both.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It's probably not a Mac Mini - it's physically clearly too small to contain a hard drive and large amounts of flash memory is an unlikely scenario and of course at that size (and with no fan) it would be a big struggle to fit a full system onto a board that small. Even without the optical drive the mac mini is what, twice as big still? (with the PCMCIA + slot + BT attachment and HD taking up a lot of that, but also the fan and heatsync IIRC).
It's surely going have an embedded OS's of some sort, though a basic Darwin system with a custom GUI app (nothing as heavyweight as Quartz) seems more likely than anything really resembling Mac OS X. Though I rather expect it will just have a custom embedded OS as I can't see why they'd bother to use the Darwin Kernel in this instance, for the same reasons as they didn't with the iPod - name there are plenty of existing serviceable embedded OS's to choose from (and it would also be probably easier to just have someone write a new one specifically for the iTV).
It would certainly be way cooler if it had a working UNIX alike OS (open for hackery) but I don't think that's in Apple's best interest as I don't think it would be the simplest/cheapest option for them. Still, it's got to have a decent framebuffer I guess (given the point of the thing is to display video at a decent resolution) so, assuming it's using some non-bizzaro embedded chipset, you probably could fit a cut down Linux / BSD kernel on it (even if it's just with some basic software - giving you something like a Sun Ray system - maybe mount what you can't fit on it off an NFS share or just re-display an exported/tunneled X session).
You've gotta be kidding! iTV is basically Front Row with a couple of minor tweaks.
If that's all it is, it would have shipped in time for Christmas this year.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The Apple cell phone should have a free (or almost free - like $9.95 a month) service to have VIOP connection to any other apple phone.
All these retail stores Apple keeps popping up could install strong hot spots - maybe with a large radius - just for iPhones?
Then any Apple iPhone user could call any other Apple iPhone user - with free minutes as long as they are near WiFi, wireless internet, or an Apple Retail Store.
Apple instantly would eat a chunk of the cell phone market in the US.
For All the people who already have wireless put in there homes, and for all the people who have Cable/DSL/Fiber running to their homes,
then the Apple iPhone would be the logical choice for cell phone use.
If out of range of a wireless connection, the cell phone would default back to regular Cell towers - and 'roaming' charges would apply.
That would keep the phone working almost anywhere in the USA.
As more people go wireless/high speed internet - and as more Apple retail stores are built - Apple Telecom (Orchard Communications 'Seeing the forest through the trees'.) would grow and grow - a second business to run.
And $9.95 a month - base price for WiFi VIOP cell phone service is 'teen friendly' - a target for Apple's growth in music, video, and hardware sales.