Apple Intern Spent 12 Weeks Porting Mac OS X To ARM

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 7, 2012 @02:29AM from the really-small-tattoo-gun dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Apple hasn't released a Mac OS X device running on ARM yet, but a recently discovered thesis from a former Apple intern going by the name of Tristan Schapp details a 12-week project carried out in 2010 to port the OS to the ARMv5 architecture. The port got as far as booting to a multi-user prompt, but then hit hurdles to do with drivers and cache. The good news is that same intern now works for Apple as part of the CoreOS team. With rumors last year that a MacBook Air running on ARM could appear by 2013, could he be part of a team making that happen? If he is, I bet it will use the new ARMv8 architecture announced late last year."

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Not this again by rogueippacket · 2012-02-07 02:44 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Apple learned their lesson last time with the G3/G4/G5 chips, and I find it hard to believe they would do something as stupid as introducing a third chipset (Intel, A4/A5, ARM) into the mix, especially with one of their mainstream laptops. Nobody wants to go through that - not the users, nor the developers.
A more likely scenario is a MacBook Air based upon iOS with a built-in touchscreen.