Apple Intern Spent 12 Weeks Porting Mac OS X To ARM
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."
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to recognize Apple's freedom to run their business however they want.
If you really like freedom even a little bit, you need to stop using rhetorical hyperbole posted on websites as a basis for decisions.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Its not like Apple hasn't changed CPU architectures before. 68K->ppc->intel and if you want to count the Apple II, you can also include 6502->68k
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Um the closed console model for phones existed long before Apple. The reason most people don't remember back then didn't buy many apps because they were all shit. And back then it was the carrier controlling the access not the phones manufacturer. And you were lucky to get if the store only took 45%.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That's just tepples. He lives to complain about Apple, logic need not apply. He'd complain that Apple products are racist because they are all white (if you conveniently ignore the other colors they have in their products).
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
That's like saying America is socialist because of the welfare state or is laissez-faire because we have a robust capitalist system. Neither is true and it is a matter of degrees.
Not being open source doesn't make something "completely locked down." If that's what you want, more power to you, download Linux or FreeBSD.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Yeah, that 30% cut for handling all the credit card processing, hosting, bandwidth, servers, storefront etc... Such a travesty.
Seriously, the 30% cut just for managing the payment stuff *alone* is a bargain, as anyone who has ever had to handle a merchant account and payment processing will tell you, especially for small transactions. It is very expensive and time consuming to deal with.
Apple's official financial statements have confirmed year over year that they do not make much at all on the store - the 30% really just covers the cost of running the thing. That's not the point of the exercise for them, though - the store exists to drive hardware sales, and the third party developers are a major part of that.
If you're stuck thinking that the 30% cut is some sort of daylight robbery or "quite bad" then you really have no idea what the costs (in time, resources and hassle) it is to handle distribution yourself.
Also, "responsible for translating the closed console ecosystem to phones"? How short is your memory?! Phones were anything *but* open before Apple entered the market. If anything Apple has made it more open, by driving the success of its main competition - Android.
What you describe is how application resources are bundled. But fat binaries are a different thing. They are a single executable file that contains code for multiple instruction sets. Same for both command line tools and Applications.