Sun produces Solaris for their own boxes (Sparc), as well as for x86. But, how many people associate Solaris with the x86 platform? If you really wanted a Solaris box, would you load up an Intel or AMD box, or would you get a Sparc?
Apple's Advantage is Hardware *and* Software
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OS X on x86?
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· Score: 2
Apple's advantage is the fact that they control both the software and hardware side of things. Look how long it took to get USB supported on Windows, because of the number of companies that needed to agree on it. Apple can make a single decision and have the hardware and software support immediately. By moving to x86, they would lose this advantage.
As well, since the classic environment is not available for x86, Cocoa apps would be the only programs that would run in this environment. Many developers are carbonizing their apps, not rewriting them in Cocoa. So, it will be a while before we see a large number of Cocoa apps available. Without the software, MacOS X on x86 is basically a nice gui, but totally useless.
IMHO, what Apple really needs right now is market share. Porting to x86 would allow Apple to take advantage of this market. However, I don't think anything will happen until the software base is there, at minimum. Ultimately, I think that it would hurt more than it would help, since they would lose the hardware control.
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Sun produces Solaris for their own boxes (Sparc), as well as for x86. But, how many people associate Solaris with the x86 platform? If you really wanted a Solaris box, would you load up an Intel or AMD box, or would you get a Sparc?
As well, since the classic environment is not available for x86, Cocoa apps would be the only programs that would run in this environment. Many developers are carbonizing their apps, not rewriting them in Cocoa. So, it will be a while before we see a large number of Cocoa apps available. Without the software, MacOS X on x86 is basically a nice gui, but totally useless.
IMHO, what Apple really needs right now is market share. Porting to x86 would allow Apple to take advantage of this market. However, I don't think anything will happen until the software base is there, at minimum. Ultimately, I think that it would hurt more than it would help, since they would lose the hardware control.