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Running Mac OS X On Standard PCs
ZDOne writes "ZDNet's reviews team have been tinkering with the various ways of running OS X on standard PCs. They found that with the right hardware components, a standard PC running Mac OS X Leopard is, at first sight, no different from a genuine Apple Mac. Special CPU extensions such as Intel VT-x provide support for software solutions like Parallels Desktop for Mac. Even Adobe Photoshop, which queries a Mac to verify its authenticity, runs fine on a standard PC thanks to EFI emulation.
However the article points out that it's a pretty technical proposition to get OS X running on non-Apple hardware, beyond all but the most powerful power users. And then there is the legal question. Don't even think about trying to put OS X on your PC without first purchasing a legitimate copy of Mac OS Leopard."
MacOS X on PCs is like Linux on microwaves: it's very cool, and a neat experiment, but I think for most folks, it's not very appealing.
I'm sure the crowd of people who feel the need to upgrade their computer every 5 seconds but like MacOS X otherwise might dig this. I can see this turning/degenerating into a "why doesn't Apple just license MacOS X for PCs?!" discussion awful quick. But just because it's possible doesn't mean it's a good idea.
-Matthew Riley "TofuMatt" MacPherson
I have a website
For the hobbyist and the experimenter, PC hardware is far cheaper than a license of Leopard. No charm in getting pricey OSX apps and software working on a commodity piece of hardware.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I would. Only if it was for a desktop though, I'm quite happy with the quality of Apple's laptops for everything I use it for, even with their apparently poor thermal paste application.. if I was going to do any more serious gaming on this laptop I'd probably be better off taking it apart and sorting the cooling out.
which is totally what she said
Personally, I don't recognize EULAs as legitimate contracts. If they want me to enter into a contract, then they need to negotiate it with me PRE-SALE!
I do, however, recognize their copyright. So I'll buy a copy to respect copyright, and then install it wherever I damn well please.
That said, I'm not above copyright infringement either. The RIAA will not see a penny of my money.
READ CAREFULLY. By reading this post you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies (âBOGUS AGREEMENTSâ) that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
That ought to hold up in court, eh?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Ok, Where can I buy a PC that is as small and quiet as a Mac Mini or Apple TV?
There is currently, no such equivalent.
For now, I will stick to my Ubuntu running AppleTV. It has digital audio and video out, and casts $250.
But if you have a suggestion, go ahead.
The usual argument for wanting MacOS X on PCs is that it will foster wider adoption. Most organizations look for multiple sources when buying computers so Apple, being single source, gets locked out of many purchase decisions. But if you look at it from an OS level, most are buying single source anyway. Windows is M$, even Linux will lock you in to a certain extent to a distro once you add in all the applications needed to support a business. I prefer Apple HW with the OS. Apple is comming back with this strategy. Focus needs to be kept on maintaining the real value propositions: "it just works"; "less overhead to achieve secure operation", "pleasing to work with" ...
Proceed @ 11.5740741uHz
When Apple does an update, the MBs and MBPs are usually pretty competitive pricewise. The problem is that most people don't need all that a Pro has to offer and can get by with a $400 laptop. I'm on a SR MBP now, and when pricing dells or Lenovos with the same features they were always within $100-$200 of the mac.
The problem is that Apple doesn't lower the prices of their machines over time, so if the machine hasn't been updated in awhile then the value does indeed suck.
How can the mods o' the day mark the above post "Insightful" ??? ... when the author slips in a stupid retort claiming the main reason people buy an Apple product is due to its "shiny" factor.
What horse baloney. Get over the 18 year old arguments and see reality.
I suppose Mac sales are rising as they have been these past years simply due to the shiny factor.
So ZDNet had just publicly confessed to the mother of all EULA violations, and done so to the most litigious of computer companies. Just what do they think is going to protect them from a massive lawsuit?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Apple is a lot like Intel before AMD came along. The Intel mantra was, "You'll get your faster chips when we are ready to give them to you." Apple likes to time system upgrades to when Steve Jobs can introduce them at large, regularly scheduled, Apple gatherings. But improvements in the market march one regardless of the Apple timetable. How long did it take to get the excellent Nvidia 8800GT in your Apple system? How often is faster+cheaper+larger available from someone else? Will Apple ever sell a BluRay writer even though they were an early member of the BluRay camp? You get the idea.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Come on Apple, put out a mid-tower priced around $800-$1,000 and they will sell like crazy.
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
No way that's right, first, purely semantics but the PowerBook is dead and gone, it's a MacBook Pro now. Compare the MBP with any other 2.6G Core2Duo laptop with a 17" screen and the difference is minimal. There's still an Apple "premium" but it's only a few hundred Euro/USD. On that note, Apple DOES charge far too much for it's products in Europe based on exchange rates. That's why my European co-workers always hit the Apple stores when they're over in the US, it's like getting a 30+% discount.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
The thing with Apple is that they tend to give you everything you might need up front, rather than keeping costs low and letting you upgrade to the things you need. Sure, if you start with the Mac pro as your base and bring up other systems to match, the Mac pro may be less expensive, but I'd probably have everything I needed on a PC well before its specs rivaled that of a Mac pro.
As far as your argument on an sibling post about poor drivers and companies going under: if you buy the cheapest cards on the market this might be a concern, but you can buy expansion cards from reputable companies. Many OEMs (Dell, Hp, etc.) offer various expansion cards. I would expect their expansion cards work well with the systems they build, and these companies have five times as many sales as apple, so I don't see them going under any time soon.
Oh yeah, no way THAT'S going to happen.
You don't think an Intel Mac running 10.5 has no advantages over a PowerPC running 10.2? You think a Linux box that's the equivalent of the latter would be able to seriously compete with the former?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
It's pretty obvious you've got a strong dislike for Apple -- and I have to think it goes beyond a simple, logical comparison of system specs for the money.
I've used quite a few HP laptops, and frankly, I'd never be caught using another one, if I could help it. I'd gladly pay a premium for the Apple-branded notebook, vs. dealing with what comes with an HP purchase.
1. Unless things are different in other countries, Apple tech. support is WORLDS better than HP in the USA. When I contact HP, I typically have to wait about 48 hours for an email response from some 1st. level technician who just quotes obvious nonsense from a checklist. Why email, and not phone? Because calling HP results in over an hour wait time on hold, as a rule, only to wind up with another clueless response.
2. Apple is far more conscious of "design" than HP. Apple notebooks have a bare minimum of plastic doors, sliding trays, and the like which tend to break/snap off. Even the CD or DVD drives on them are slot-loading, so you don't have a big drive tray sliding out the side of your notebook, requiring extra free space around it and potentially breaking. The 17" Macbook Pro and Powerbook before it were thinner and lighter-weight than anything 17" HP had to offer, too. And don't forget Apple's "mag-safe" AC adapter. That's one more great idea, especially when I see how many HP and other laptops are out of service due to loose/broken AC power jacks!
3. OS X, in my opinion, is a FAR less trouble-prone environment to use, day-to-day, than anything else offered for PCs. I can't run a legal and officially-supported OS X environment on non-Apple hardware right now. So essentially, even if Apple hardware costs me a premium, I understand that paying it helps support and subsidize further OS X development and improvement -- and to me, that's a good place for my money to go.
$400 laptop? bukllshit... I can't get by on a $400 desktop, not even including a monitor.
"Most People" buying a machine today work with digital photos, have a camcorder, want to be able to burn DVDs, want to play music while working, want to keep a web browser, e-mail, and at least 1 other application running. ANYONE buying a machine today that doesn't have dedicated graphics at some level (even if soldered onboard) is buying a throw-away machine. Anything with Vista and less than 2GB or RAM is also pretty useless once you add the overhead of security software to your load.
I have a Core 2 HP Notebook, 5400RMP 120GB drive, 965 chipset graphics, 1GB of Ram, and Vista Home Prem on a machine i use for work. It was a 4900 machine. My wife's 2.5 year old gateWay AMD 64 notebook runs CIRCLES around it. I've optimized every setting in vista that's available to tweak, I've gone through every one of the 140 services, performance settings, background tasks, and more, and it still takes longer to do anything on this PoS than any older machine I have running.
A $400 notebook? for anything beyond runnign XP home, cheap antivirus, and e-mail, there's no way. A Celeron notebook in that price range can barely handle Java apps without stuttering, faulters on You Tube, and runs out of resources scanning documents. I can't even imaging trying to open 8MP images and try even simple editing tasks on one, even under XP...
Apple doesn't sell machines in that price range for a reason. Their machines are designed to be home entertainment and personal systems for photo, movie, and music use. If they made anything less powerful than the Mini, half their own software would exceed the hardware capabilities. Same goes for a PC.
Apple is basically Vista ultimate, with a few other bells and whistles on top. Can you imagine running ultimate on anythingless than a $1000 notebook or $800 desktop? Microsoft won't even allow ultimate to be pre-installed on a system that doesn't have dedicated graphics and 2GB or RAM... The cheapest Dell with Ultimate as a configurable option is over $800...
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Oh, I most certainly do. While the case law on EULAs is all over the map, I can't find a single case of a single user of software getting successfully sued for breach of an EULA.
So, if they could even find out that I had broken the EULA, it almost certainly wouldn't be worth their time to try and sue me for breach of contract - especially given the likely payout.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
In a corporate environment, uniformity of hardware and lack of 3D gaming performance are advantages of the Mac mini computer.
As I see it, the big reason that people are so obsessed with running Mac OS X on commodity PCs is to fill the gap in Apple's product line between Mac mini and Mac Pro. But Mac mini is perfect for administrative employees, and creative professionals could make good use of the power of a Mac Pro. What would make a product in that gap useful to someone in a corporate environment?
First, go to the Dell web site and spec out a machine like the 8 core MacPro 3.2GHz. Apple Retail = $4,399. Dell T7400 = $6,338. (Don't forget the 512MB GeForce 8800 equivalent). Does the Dell have two independent 1.6 GHz busses or just one? I can't tell from the specs. The Mac Pro has two.
Second, look at how you install hardware in the two of them, like drives. The Dell is a rat's nest. The Mac Pro has carriers that slide the SATA drive straight into the logic board. No cables. The hardware certainly feels a lot better.
If I could get the equivalent performance and reliability from a commodity PC for less money, it might be worth it. Comparing new Macs and new PCs tells me that isn't going to happen with this generation of equipment.
Most of the stuff on
You really hit the nail on the head.
When Apple does an update, they tend to be using top-of-the-line, bleeding edge hardware. When you compare a freshly-updated MBP to other notebooks, the price/performance ratio is usually in Apple's favor, or very, very close to it. Apple makes their profits when parts prices fall, because they keep their prices the same. Near the end of a product's refresh cycle, Apple products look like horrible deals. Near the beginning, they're quite competitive. Unfortunately, people tend to remember the bad and spout off their vitriol even when the Apple machine is a perfectly good deal.
And then, as you alluded, there's the issue of options. With Apple, you just don't get very many. Even though OS X would probably run fine on a budget notebook, Apple doesn't offer budget products. It probably works in their favor--companies usually have fairly slim margins on their budget lines, and there are plenty of people who buy Apple computers simply to get OS X.
I would also argue that Apple provides better service (than PC makers), in general, and better community support (except maybe linux). That has to be worth something.
Indeed. I've got a MacBook Pro as my main computer, and an AMD dual-core 4200+ computer in my living room running Windows.
Yet, I prefer Linux as far as the user experience goes. But I don't even have a Linux partition. Why?
It's the apps.
I'm a documentary director so I got the MacBook Pro because I can use it as a monitor and I can use Final Cut Pro. Sony Vegas for windows is good, FCP is better. To date, there is no native GNU/Linux solution that matches the power, stability, and functionality of Final Cut Pro. It has saved me time and energy and has produced some amazing footage. I bought an entire computer and operating system simply for the functionality - FCP, for me, is the Mac killer app.
But I'd rather run FCP on Linux, if I could.
What about that Windows PC? Well, if you must know, I'm addicted to PC games. Half Life 2, Oblivion - waiting for Fallout 3... I'd rather play them in Linux, but WINE performance and stability isn't acceptable yet. There, games are the killer app.
Now, if I wasn't a gamer, and I wasn't a movie maker, I would absolutely love to use GNU/Linux as my only OS. If I need to run a Windows program, I don't mind doing it in virtualization.
The problem is that games typically don't work, or don't work well, in virtualized environments. Neither does video editing software (which is why I have no desire to run a virtualized MacOSX - what am I going to use it for if it renders video at a turtle's pace?)
GNU/Linux is at a strange place in it's adoption cycle, and this is a real concern: By the time you are savvy enough with computers to think outside of the marketing and go with Linux as an easy, usable operating system that does everything a beginning user does - you're no longer a beginning user and probably have some application - productivity, gaming, whatever - for which there is no Linux equivalent.
So long as the GIMP remains substandard compared to Photoshop (with poor typography support, bad CYMK profiles, etc.) you won't see graphic artists considering Linux. So long as Cinelerra remains substandard compared to Sony Vegas and FCP (with poor stability, complex user interface, no 24p support) you won't get the video guys. So long as gaming continues to be a hassle on Linux, you won't get the gamers.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that all of these problems - all of them - can be solved simply through software development - the one thing the GNU/Linux community is extremely strong at. If you want to work towards GNU/Linux adoption, work on developing GIMP or Cinelerra. Get together a group of buddies and work to tackle problems as a team.
I wish I was a programmer but I lack the skill. I know where I would focus my efforts.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
The argument tends to be that that particular piece of the EULA is dubious at best, probably not enforcable... but even if it isn't, Apple has another trick up its sleeves (as far as I can tell, someone tell me if I'm wrong): they don't sell full copies of OSX, only upgrades. The only way to get a non-upgrade license of OSX is with a Mac. So you can't just buy a copie at the store and install it, since you don't qualify for the upgrade license.
Apple used to be a computer hardware company. They branched out and now sell significant amounts of pro software, music players, and smart phones.
They could change their revenue models and sell their OS without tying it to their OS. Mind you it would be economic suicide so long as MS holds a monopoly on desktop OS's, but they could do it. I would argue, in fact, they'd be pretty much forced to do it if the OS market were restored to a free, capitalist market.
Still, right now Apple develops OS X to profit on complete computer systems including hardware and software. If they can't tie them, their OS development is just an expense with no profit involved.
And Apple just counts its cash reserves since they don't compete in most areas that Microsoft tends to. There is happy crossover with, say, Office 2008 for Mac, but generally Apple and Microsoft are different worlds.Actually, Apple is a threat to MS, chipping away at their desktop OS install base, as well as several other key MS technologies. Apple, on the other hand, is very much affected by what MS makes, since they can use any market they enter to lock out Apple users, thus reducing Apple's sales. That is why Apple entered the portable music player business in the first place. In order to survive they must commit to entering every market MS threatens to monopolize, or find partners who will and who cannot be bought out by MS. It is a very precarious place for Apple and a situation no other company wants to place itself in. Apple would never have willingly entered it, but already had competing products when MS took over and was unwilling to abandon those markets.
Shouldn't it be rather easy to do a Wine counterpart to OSX? Windows is, in every aspect it can, Unix-offensive. The same is not true for OSX and I think it would not be that much insane to do a "compatibility layer" for OSX executables.
Many parts of OSX are even open-source.
Has anyone ever considered this seriously?
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
In addition to the EULA, they almost certainly violated at least one provision of the DMCA along the way as well.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When OSX86 first came out, there was a lot of curiosity--but most of the people who were watching (myself included) never bothered to actually set up a system. Most of the people who had gotten it running weren't using it much. Many of the people who I asked were people who already owned a Mac, and were just curious to see it running on a PC. I'm sure somebody at Apple worried about losing revenue but from my informal polls I got the impression that anyone who had wanted a Mac had already bought one, and being able to download OSX86 for free didn't change much of anything.
I was one of the people who didn't bother. Most of my reason was that I already had a bunch of PC software that I knew how to use, and didn't want to bother re-learning other software. I suspect that once people get used to either platform, this is a bigger preventative factor in changing (either way) than the higher prices of a Mac machine.
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