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iPods Don't Run OS X

Posted by kdawson on from the all-you-need-is-an-undocumented-ls-option dept.

Redrum writes "Everyone thinks that Apple's iPod runs an OS called Pixo, and that the iPhone ushered in a brand new epoch based on OS X. That myth has been busted: the iPod runs Apple's own Mach/BSD kernel, and Pixo is only used as a graphics layer. Daniel Eran outlines the story behind Pixo and what OS X means for Apple. It's no joke; the story was confirmed by Tim Monroe, a member of Apple's QuickTime engineering team, as is easy to verify yourself." Update: 07/15 19:48 GMT by KD : Turns out to be an April Fools joke.

2 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. pixo os by duranaki · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I worked with Pixo a bit back in the late 90's. Their OS was largely meant to run on top of another OS, so why people would think ipods were running pixo OS standalone is beyond me. Pixo was a great UI OS btw and they had lots of talented engineers. They mostly went work for apple after pixo imploded. :)

  2. Re:Got the reasons backwards... by argent · · Score: 2, Interesting

    XNU is the Darwin kernel. It's not a "whack hybrid" of anything, it's a pretty standard Mach single-server implementation, using a FreeBSD derivative instead of the original 4.3 BSD kernel as the server. It's not that much different from 4.4-Lites or Tru64 or any other contempory Mach-based kernel.

    The file listing presented in the Roughly Drafted included several directories that implied the presence of Darwin userland components... applications and utilities... as well as the kernel. I suppose all those directories could have been empty, but I don't think that's likely.