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iPods Don't Run OS X
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.
my iPod runs linux.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
This is an April Fool's Joke, and an old one too: http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/dev eloping-quicktime-apps-for-ipod/
I think the new thing about the upcoming generation is that they will use _MacOSX_ as a _UI_ layer, not the kernel.
That way it gets the benefits of all the underlying graphics/sound/presentation infrastructure. Right?
From the article it looks like they used a variant of SNOBOL. I wonder why such a language was chosen? Was it just a geeky decision?
More fine "editing" by kdawson. It was a fucking APRIL FOOLS JOKE. This guy is why Slashdot is a JOKE. Nothing to see, move along.
http://www.prophetofdoom.net/
FUCK ISLAM!
Oh dear, it turns out the iPod is running Mac OS X--with a Mach kernel and a Unix userland--and has been for years.
Nonsense.
What this listing shows is not an iPod running "Mac OS X". It shows an iPod that may be running "a Mach-based version of UNIX", presumably a variant of Darwin. Darwin is not OS X. This would be like finding a copy of "vmlinuz" in an embedded device and claiming it's running Ubuntu.
I hope this is not the beginning of a rebranding thing, where everything apple sells runs OS X. If it is, people are going to by a new device expecting a certain level of functionality, and that level will not exist. Mac OS X, like MS Vista, will become have random service levels, except all at the same price.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
... even without prior knowledge of the joke, what do you think the chances are that an Apple employee could publish this and still have a job the next day?
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
Come on... undocumented ls -af for "all files". That should of thrown all sorts of bs flags.
The FBI keep hacking my Slashdot and Kuro5hin accounts and changing my passwords so I get locked out! This is almost certainly because I am now well-known to them as a whistle-blower (I've uncovered such frauds as the moon landing hoax, the face on Mars, all sorts of stuff on 911), is there any way to stop this happening? (Posting anonymously for obviosu reasons)
the iPod runs Apple's own Mach/BSD kernel
No. OSX uses a Mach kernel and a BSD userland. Why do so many articles get this wrong?
$ whatis themeaningoflife
themeaningoflife: not found
Apple's OS X is actually doing what Microsoft promised but failed to do over a decade of WinCE development.
Now, let me say up front that my own experience with Windows CE based devices has not been a bed of roses, but then neither has my experience with desktop Windows... which is a market success despite failing to deliver what Microsoft promised. Not only is Pocket PC, now known as Windows Mobile, used in an awful lot of devices... but it's even penetrated the stronghold of its arch-rival Palm. Yes, Palm created that situation by dropping the ball around 2002, but Palm tried their own embedded UNIX as well as their inevitably doomed BeOS spinoff and ended up deciding to embrace the "failed" Windows CE anyway.
In addition, there's a plethora of applications for it, something that Apple shows no interest in even making possible. No, supporting fancy web-based applets is not at all comparable to running actual local applications... particularly when it's rather likely those "iPhone apps" will happily run on Pocket PC as well: if not now, just as soon as someone ports Webcore to it.
And that's just *one* application of Windows CE. You can't license Apple's ARM port of Darwin or any of the rest of the software in the iPod or iPhone, like you can Windows CE. There's no developer's kit, no porting kit, no product.
So not only is Windows CE not a failure, it's not even the same kind of product as Apple's closed fork of OS X on the iPhone or their closed fork of Darwin on the iPod. Most of what Microsoft promised, Apple's declining to even offer. And Microsoft has done a surprisingly good job with Windows CE... in many ways it's a far better and more secure product than desktop Windows.
Does it make money for Microsoft? Who cares, other than Microsoft stockholders? Does it do what Microsoft promised? Absolutely.
Some people are saying that this article is from April Fool's day, but the exact date isn't in the article anywhere.
However, one thing you can determine is that the article was written in 2004! See http://www.mactech.com/articles/, and look at 'volume 20 - 2004'. That, plus 'copyright 2004' in the source code clips kind of give it away...
And it's volume 20, issue 4, which hints at April, but doesn't prove it.
Someone else pointed out the 'ls -af' command has got to be an 'April Fool' clue too. All I know is that I've reformatted my FAT partition enough times that any hidden files have long been destroyed, but my ipod keeps on working.
Hmmm, they find iPod Solitaire is written in ROT-13 encoded SNOBOL using an interpreter called SNOJOB?
... which if I ROT13 then XOR with a fiboonacci sequence I find is ....
:-)
And the issue number is vol 20, number 4
April. Hmmmm
I pitty da Fool, etc, etc.
Mach doesn't support much of anything until you add BSD.
The kernel contains a large chunk of the BSD kernel. Take BSD, rip out the memory management and scheduler, graft it onto a supposed microkernel that long outgrew "micro", and there you have it.
It's a trainwreak of a kernel, proving that the kernel alone doesn't make the OS.
Either Dan thought it amusing to continue the joke (despite tipping readers the wink by actually mentioning the original article was an April Fool's joke) or someone hacked his website and posted the article as a joke.
Whichever it is, this one's not in his RSS feed.
...every RoughlyDrafted article appears on Slashdot?
Payola, perhaps?
Maybe Digg and its Apple fanboys are hurting Slashdot's and OSDL's revenues THAT much?
It really isn't that unlikely or hard for Apple to use the same microkernel on the iPod. Calling it the "same OS" is strictly correct, even if slightly deceiving.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Isn't the microkernel Darwin?
No, the soi-disant Microskernel is Mach, and it's not a Microkernel in any useful sense.
This is why we could move Mac OS X so easily to the Intel platform.
The OS kernel in Darwin ran on Intel long before it ran on the Power PC. The GUI layers over the UNIX kernel and utilities are probably *less* device independent than most of the system, due to their close integration with the GPU and OpenGL (have a look at all the Apple-specific OpenGL extensions on a Mac video card some time). The ancestors of the components in Darwin - BSD, Mach, the shells and utilities - were designed (after Bell Labs failed to acquire a Multics system because AT&T dropped out of the project) for hardware independence from the start. The first actual port (from the PDP-11 to the Interdata 7/32) took place a few years later in 1976 (the year the Apple I shipped), and have run on every major hardware platform from thumb drives to mainframes... let alone common systems like Intel.
It's not that the GUI was hardware independent so you could shove a new kernel under it. It's that the underlying OS was designed from the ground up for hardware independence before Apple existed.
Roughlydrafted is nothing more than drivel made to look like news by and for apple fanboys. It's truly funny that this apple fanboy is sourcing an April Fools joke.
'faboby' is snobol rot13'd right? i don't get it.
Nah, the kernel is not called OS X, it's not called Mach/BSD, and it's not called Darwin. The kernel is called Xnu.
Xnu -- The Apple Open Source kernel, a combination of BSD, Mach, and IOKit.
Darwin -- the Xnu kernel and BSD userland binaries and libraries. Basically the Open Source parts of OS X. Darwin is bundled as a full Unix OS.
OS X -- Darwin + Aqua, Finder, Quartz, Quicktime, Cocoa, and the bundled graphical tools and apps.
The article would more rightly state that the iPods have always run the Xnu kernel.
...I hear that Bill Gates will give $1 to charity for every e-mail you send him. Why not put that ancient April Fool's joke on the front page too?
My iPhone upon sync wants me to send a file to Apple containing the following information: Auto Submit = Yes Bug Type = 109 Process = Mobile Mail OS Version = OS X 1.0 (1A543a) SysInfoMachineConfigKey = iPhone1,1 SysInfoOSVersionKey = 1.0:aA543a I am no OS X expert, but, well yoiu decide what the iPhone is running. I had to truncate the file due the /. junk in the trunk detector going off..
Details (I hope Apple is right and there is no personal information in this:
Process: MobileMail [31]
Path: /Applications/MobileMail.app/MobileMail
Version: N/A (N/A)
Code Type: 0000000C (Native)
Effective UID: 0
Parent Process: SpringBoard [15]
Date/Time: 2007-07-15 06:13:12.693 -0400
OS Version: OS X 1.0 (1A543a)
Report Version: 6
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS
Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0xe7ffe405
Crashed Thread: 0
Thread 0 Crashed:
0 libobjc.A.dylib
1 Message
2 Message
3 Message
4 Message
5 Foundation
6 CoreFoundation
7 Foundation
8 Foundation
9 MobileMail
10 UIKit
11 CoreFoundation
12 CoreFoundation
13 CoreFoundation
14 CoreFoundation
15 GraphicsServices
16 UIKit
17 UIKit
18 UIKit
19 MobileMail
20 MobileMail
Thread 1:
0 libSystem.B.dylib
1 libSystem.B.dylib
2 GraphicsServices
3 libSystem.B.dylib
Thread 2:
0 libSystem.B.dylib
1 libSystem.B.dylib
2 CoreFoundation
3 CoreFoundation
4 WebCore
5 libSystem.B.dylib
Thread 3:
0 libSystem.B.dylib
1 libSystem.B.dylib
2 libSystem.B.dylib
Thread 4:
0 libSystem.B.dylib
1 libSystem.B.dylib
2 CoreFoundation
3 libSystem.B.dylib
got tired of snipping here.
I was wondering why the article was so poorly written and aimless. Then I saw it was from roughly drafted and it all made sense
Slashdot - April Fools everyday, just to appeal to the fanbois that now control it.
/. is still less biased sadly.
How much lower can your editorial responsibilities go?
This week is just ridiculous, and makes the inquirer seem credible, although
I guess saying ipod/iphone run OS/X is about the same as saying PocketPC's and cellphones run Vista.
The kernel will be written with compatibility in mind (overlapping API's or a subset of the same API's), but I don't believe for a minute it's the same kernel.
What the fuck are all of you talking about??!
Funny gets you no karma, Informative does, so some mods will mod informative to give the post a boost in ranking AND karma to the poster.
The logic in "funny" not giving karma is based on the idea that it is easier to be funny than to be smart, and they want to promote "smart" more than "funny", which makes sense.
Technically, you can write a post, get it modded +5 Funny and lose karma points. Example: your post gets modded up and down as funny and offtopic. 8 mods Funny, 3 mods Offtopic = -3 Karma. Modding Insightful, Interesting, etc. offsets that.
You should read the faq. All of it. That is where you will learn how a post can technically be modded as +5 Flamebait. (I have seen it) -1 Flamebait and +6 Underrated = +5 Flamebait.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
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. :)
Slashdot must have set a new record in posting April fools late.
Aren't jokes supposed to be funny?
It's a new paradigm, and everybody who doesn't buy, now, will be priced out forever. Anybody who does buy will be rewarded with a lifetime of riches, as their property will continue its 30% yearly price increase.
Renters, and anybody born in a future generation, will not be able to afford a $10,000,000 starter home in 15 years. They will live in tent cities, and Hondas.
This asset bubble is different than all of the others - it will never slow down, or pop. The gains are permanent.
That's what they all said, but in reality the future is bleak.
Without 6% they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men.
On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed.
Except for one man armed with an AK-47, and a Honda full of silver.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Quality control, please.
Fucking hello?
HELLO?
... but it's not too far away.
I can't see how the form factor of the nano or shuffle can accommodate the hardware necessary to run OS X, so maybe only some of the iPod product line will run on OS X -- but extending and leveraging the iPhone is too profitable an opportunity to pass up. Driving component purchase volumes up decreases unit costs, and allows Apple to wield a bigger club in negotiations with suppliers.
The next video iPod may have a spinning disk drive in place of the iPhone's flash memory, as 30 (or 60) GB of hard drive is a lot cheaper than the same amount of flash memory, but it will likely use most of the rest of the iPhone, sans cellular hardware and camera, to provide a really nice video player with possibly some game content as well.
Ok, because someone modified Linux to remove the MMU requirement means that Darwin couldn't be modified to work on hardware without an MMU? I'm so lost as to how that makes sense as a logical argument. But that's ok, don't RTFA just mod up the guy who isn't making sense.
Please RTFA people. It talks about how it isn't the related April fools joke and provides concrete evidence. It doesn't claim that it *IS* Darwin but that you can see evidence of the Mach/OS kernel and bits of userland. Proof is provided. Proof that wasn't sourced from a joke.
I have worked on embedded systems with microkernels (QNX) and this all seems perfectly reasonable. You can run a UNIX app in 4 megs with a microkernel and userland. And with the number of iPods Apple is selling you can understand why they would want to own the OS it was running in house.
-- http://thegirlorthecar.com funny dating game for guys
Even fellow Mac Bloggers are pointing and laughing at this "article". So much for his credibility.
I agree, people should not jump to conclusions one way or the other, especially with the MMU argument which makes no sense. Apple has complete control over their kernel and they have proven they can port it back and forth all over the place, even to low powered embedded platforms.
The evidence is fairly strong in this case, while I don't have an iPod here to explore, I would say that the kernel file being present along with posix directories is way outside the scope of a quick joke, especially one that most people would remember and find annoying as a repeat. That diagram over on roughlydrafted would take quite a bit of effort as well.
This isn't a complete 180 turnaround, it was never clear what kernel the iPods were using, at least not to most of the public, but it was fairly clear where the interface came from and that has not changed.
In any case, stop changing the title of this article, and at this point in my opinion the title "iPods Don't Run OS X" is incorrect.
There's no indication that it's an April Fool's joke. You had to read it when it was first published to know that it was published in April, but it's still lingering around to misinform the unsuspecting reader. Apparently some know it's a joke, but I hadn't read it until now and it looks legitimate to me.
If MacTech is ok with printing this garbage then why should we consider them with any respect or confidence?
You're making a big stretch just so you can demean someone.
You must be new here too!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The article was not a joke, it was a presentation of OS X used in the iPhone.
It referenced the MacTech joke about SNOJOB, but that wasn't a central part of the story. It was presented among other jokes that hinted around the truth: that Pixo did not deliver Apple's iPod for it, that Apple has seven years of experience in delivering the ARM based iPod, and that Apple has delivered core portions of the iPod, as Pixo is not a kernel, but rather a UI framework.
Why Slashdot decided to present the 2004 article as the key message of the article, and why readers made a huge stink about tagging the article as a joke and then feigned their indignation about being joked, are all much more ridiculous than anything in the article itself.
If you'd prefer a simpler version of the article without any subtlety and written at a Digg level, there is this version:
The OS X iPod is the iPhone! Pixo, ARM, and the Mac OS
Your programming skills or leadership decisions suck. Fix the windows version and make it 64-bit already! Seriously. I'm not even joking. Itunes runs like shit, it's not 64bit in windows vista 64bit. Srolling through music on a fucking qx6700 with 8gigs of ram, reminds me of the old win3.1 days. Its FUCKING TERRIBLE.
I know you guys cripple the dam windows versions on purpose to drive Mac hardware sales but come on... enough is enough. We Pc guys own Ipods!
Windows CE is in a number of markets. It's had success in some. Failures in others, like any other product. Microsoft has a huge ego problem, and has spent a lot of money trying to target the cellphone market with WinCE-based software, and that *application* of Windows CE has done poorly... but that application is not Windows CE.
Windows CE is an embedded OS. It's built around the same programming model as Win32 with a set of libraries targeted for different platforms. I don't like the design, myself, but I'm not in their target market... I don't like Windows design either, but that hasn't kept it from being a success.
Windows CE is not Microsoft's "Stinger" phone, though it's built on top of Windows CE.
Windows CE is not the Pocket PC, though that is built on top of Windows CE.
Windows CE is not Pocket Internet Explorer, though Pocket IE runs on top of Windows CE. Opera runs on top of it, too, you know.
You're making HUGE category errors, the same kind of category errors as the people claiming the iPod runs OSX just because it runs a Darwin-based kernel, or (for that matter) the people claiming that OSX is a failure because it hasn't toppled Windows on the desktop.
Shouldn't it be BSD/Mach (like GNU/Linux) as opposed to Mach/BSD?
Slashdot = -1 Redundant, Asperger, kdawson FUD, Libertarian, and Linux
It's good to see you can be overly defensive as an anonymous coward as well.