iPhone Not Running OS X

rochlin writes "We know that Steve Jobs has said the iPhone won't accept third-party apps. The iPhone looks to be running on a Samsung provided ARM core processor. That means it's not running on an Intel (or PPC) core. That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like). Darwin, the BSD based operating system that underlies what Apple has previously been calling OS X, does not run on ARM processors. The Darwin / Apple Public Source licensing agreement says the source would have to be made available if it is modified and sold (paraphrased; read it yourself). A Cingular rep has said the iPhone version of the OS source will not be made available. It will be closed, like the iPod OS and not like Darwin. So if it ain't Darwin, it ain't OS X (in any meaningful way). An InfoWorld article on an FBR Research report breaks down iPhone component providers and lists Samsung as the chip maker for the main application / video cpu. So, that leaves the question... What OS is this phone really running? Not Linux or the source would need to be open."

Comments

Non sequiturs abound.

[russotto]

Last things first: Apple doesn't have to abide by the APSL with respect to their own code.

Second, if it's "OS X" on PPC, and "OS X" on Intel, why wouldn't it be "OS X" on ARM? It could well come from the very same code base, simply an unreleased branch.

Re:Non sequiturs abound.

[Score Whore]

Darwin/OSX is based on the FreeBSD userland. The kernel is based on Mach. Regardless of whether either one requires an MMU or a nuclear reactor in order to run keep in mind that it's software. Which means that clever types and go in and make some changes and maybe take away a requirement or add a feature. Gosh kids these days.

OSX != Mac OSX

[robbieduncan]

I think you are confusing OSX with Mac OSX. Mac OSX is the OS that Apple sell and put on their computers. At no point in the Keynote or after has anyone said that the iPhone runs Mac OSX. They have simply said that it runs OSX. To my mind this means that it is running a subset of Mac OSX. At the very least the iPhone OSX appears to be missing Carbon (no loss to me), the Finder and other "built in" apps and quite possibly Quicktime. Whilst Steve said it had Cocoa that normally just refferrs to the main Kits: Foundation and the App Kit. This does not include PDFKit, QTKit and so on.

Whether is's based off Darwin or not is hard to say. At a certain level that does not matter. What would matter if Apple decide to open up to third part developers is the APIs that are available. There may be a small subset that want POSIX on their phone but for actual application development Cocoa with some custom PhoneKit is probably all that is important.

A little premature?

[P. Niss]

Any chance we could, like, wait for the iPhone to be, you know, actually released before we make definitive statements on what OS it is or isn't running? Right now, the only people who have any idea what OS is really running on the iPhone are the people who worked on it; I'm taking a wild guess here that you're not one of them.

Sure, I understand it's going to be a long six months with nothing but speculation to keep us warm at night. But let's keep in mind that, until we get our hands on the iPhone, it's speculation only, not knowledge.

Re:I can exclusively reveal

[bonch]

That means it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense (Apple can brand toilet paper as running OS X if they like).

How does it mean it's not running OS X in any meaningful sense? I'd say having Cocoa/AppKit (and therefore an Objective-C runtime), Core Animation, and other OS X technologies constitutes being OS X.

So if it ain't Darwin, it ain't OS X (in any meaningful way)

Again, what is with this "meaningful" crap? Objective-C, Cocoa, AppKit, and the like are OS X. OS X is the NextStep-derived stuff running on top of Darwin. It can most certainly be OS X without Darwin. In fact, it might be Apple's first steps toward moving off of Mach sometime in the future.

FreeBSD, ARM and the rest of the components

[smackenzie]

1. Here are the iPhone components according to FRB Research via arstechnica:

- Samsung Electronics for the CPU/Video processing
- Marvell for the 802.11 chipset
- Infineon Technologies for baseband communications
- Broadcomm Corp. for the touch screen controllers
- Cambridge Silicon Radio for the Bluetooth chipset

2. Darwin is an open source core based on FreeBSD according to Apple, Inc..

3. Here is freebsd on ARM processors (intel-based). ARM FreeBSD.

4. Why is it tough to believe that Apple would simply recompile necessary components of Darwin on the ARM processors and then include and compile the necessary (and only the necessary!) mid level libraries? Many existing apps would work with only minor modifications (to take into account the new control scheme) and a recompile.

Re:I can exclusively reveal

[samkass]

I'm not sure why you bothered to reply to this article; it's so utterly wrong in so many ways. First of all, Apple holds the copyright to Darwin and can use it however they want. Just because they license it to YOU under a license that requires YOU to share code you modify, Apple is not bound by that license. Secondly, it would be silly for Apple NOT to leverage some of the Mac OS, but it would be just as silly for them to port the entire desktop OS. I think of this as about the same as saying the XBox OS is Windows 2000. It shares many APIs, it's branched from the same codebase, but it's targeted and maintained for a completely different goal.