Mobile usages are limited by available battery technology at least as much as processing power; and the former moves forward much slower. Process lead of Intel doesn't quite work the same as before in this case...
Sure, there's one future, unreleased, next year Intel product; as you can see from the article, basically "smartphones only", no Win for you or generic Linux distro (not a big deal so far). But now it gets interesting..."southbridge" has "system controller/32 bit risc" - would be surprising if that's not some ARM (plus at least another one in radio interface; that's already probably more ARM cores than x86 ones, to keep power consumption at merely acceptable levels; Intel just couldn't do it without ARM). Less efficient and more expensive multichip solution (and of course other manufacturers are expected to make this effort, for miniscule portion of the market...while Intel doesn't risk anything; but anyway, there are no announcements - while phones would need to get certs quite some time before release; Android players have no incentive to switch; Apple has none, either, considering their inhouse ARM team; Samsung goes its own way, their own SoCs; Nokia devices with MeeGo are an uberniche product - they will certainly ride on Symbian for a long time)
Plus Intel doesn't even tell everything - they show those nice power usage numbers only in scenarios...when x86 core is idling; when the "supporting" hardware (with a great help of ARM cores:D ) does the real work. Power usage when x86 is doing something intensive (using its "impressive" speed) is strangely absent...
It will be still probably around an order of magnitude difference. Plus ARM won't stand still, look at the progress in the past decade from, say, ARM7TDMI to latest Cortex. Again - a progress constrained by battery technology; Intel offering doesn't help that, quite the contrary - their greatest strength, process shrinking, no longer works quite the way as before.
MS, for all their failings, was a large part of "bringing PCs to every home" (their stated goal BTW); tried to commoditize the hardware and succeeded. That also brought us cheap boxes for OSS, btw...
Yes, commoditizing the hardware on some decent common ground that's available was a good thing. What you wish for we already had back then - many different incompatible lineages, high prices.
And how do you reconcile the ending of your post with how ARM owns markets where efficiency is king? (and where there's often not that much of a need to maintain binary compatibility, so also much easier to switch if there was something better; where high competitiveness is much less stalled by external factors)
You say that like you don't have reasons to celebrate already. Who could have thought that its descendants would power mobile phones almost universally? Just a single category of devices, one that ships annually around the number of all PCs in operation wordlwide. Hell, you can possibly find ARM cores in an average PC already. There's also this detail of ARM CPU cores possibly, by now, shipping annually in greater numbers than total number of x86 cores Intel ever made.
The cost of a Windows license, even for a retail copy of Win7 Ultimate is a drop in the bucket compared to all the other costs associated with a user....and yet you point them out mostly in the case of OSS.
Apparently some people still like it... (while certainly having lots of experience in other OSes, you can't really avoid it nowadays)...who are you to judge they must be wrong?
Security (c'mon...what malicious thing would run on MorpOS?), snappiness, plethora of Amiga and Amiga-style apps you love (and which work for you)...tons of reasons that make your day-to-day tasks much faster.
Even if you say these reason are all arguable, which they are, at least there are solid arguable reasons.
Webkit isn't a browser, you know; it's an engine. They recently built a browser around Webkit which has very Amiga-like feel - that's a bit more accurate. Most/all software they use on MorphOS has that feel. "Fairly obsolete processors" notwithstanding. Doing it via UAE apparently doesn't quite cut it for its users...
There's always AROS if you really want all that (and it and MorphOS have enough apps "to be usable on a day to day basis")
But since MorphOS, among few other things, is doing relatively (very relatively, yeah...) fine even with AROS around, perhaps its community doesn't care about those factors all that much (plus...)
As for the speed, and most notably the percieved speed...I wouldn't be so certain. Grab AROS, it's reasonably comparable for our needs (more rough though); there are even some VMs of recent builds always available. And run it on as low amount of processing power as you can get your hands on.
Amithlon was perhaps even more interesting in its time - a fully transparent layer (build around a stripped down Linux or something) providing the ability to run AmigaOS 3.9, through JIT 68k emulation, on quite typical x86 machine. Also with binary compatibility and being the fastest Amiga back then, by a huuuge margin.
But killed quickly, supposedly due to some IP troubles; though I suspect the idea of not milking Amiga faithful was simply too hard to swallow.
Can the modern Amiga OS run old Amiga software? Yes, that's the point of MorphOS... (though if it doesn't run on a machine with custom Amiga chips (zombie "1200" with PPC accelerator for example), then the software depending on that chips won't run)
What can you do on an Amiga compatible OS that can't be done more easily and cheaply with, say, Linux or even OS X? I'm asking this because I'm genuinely interested... Having Amiga-like experience. Is that so hard to guess?...
And FFS, it's not "crippling suspected pirate copies", it's a trial; quite adequate (you can restart, you know...) to determine if you want to get the thing.
It doesn't run anything which depends on those great custom Amiga chips though, only the "OS level" software. Not without UAE at least...but it doesn't really make a difference where you run the latter.
There was even better option a long time ago, Amithlon (probably quite a bit faster, to). I suspect there were not only merely problems with IP, but also somebody, at the time, thought that Amithlon doesn't provide enough opportunities to milk small fanbase out of their cash...
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Mobile usages are limited by available battery technology at least as much as processing power; and the former moves forward much slower. Process lead of Intel doesn't quite work the same as before in this case...
Sure, there's one future, unreleased, next year Intel product; as you can see from the article, basically "smartphones only", no Win for you or generic Linux distro (not a big deal so far). But now it gets interesting..."southbridge" has "system controller/32 bit risc" - would be surprising if that's not some ARM (plus at least another one in radio interface; that's already probably more ARM cores than x86 ones, to keep power consumption at merely acceptable levels; Intel just couldn't do it without ARM). Less efficient and more expensive multichip solution (and of course other manufacturers are expected to make this effort, for miniscule portion of the market...while Intel doesn't risk anything; but anyway, there are no announcements - while phones would need to get certs quite some time before release; Android players have no incentive to switch; Apple has none, either, considering their inhouse ARM team; Samsung goes its own way, their own SoCs; Nokia devices with MeeGo are an uberniche product - they will certainly ride on Symbian for a long time)
Plus Intel doesn't even tell everything - they show those nice power usage numbers only in scenarios...when x86 core is idling; when the "supporting" hardware (with a great help of ARM cores :D ) does the real work. Power usage when x86 is doing something intensive (using its "impressive" speed) is strangely absent...
It will be still probably around an order of magnitude difference. Plus ARM won't stand still, look at the progress in the past decade from, say, ARM7TDMI to latest Cortex.
Again - a progress constrained by battery technology; Intel offering doesn't help that, quite the contrary - their greatest strength, process shrinking, no longer works quite the way as before.
BTW, how is the i960 or Itanium going?
MS, for all their failings, was a large part of "bringing PCs to every home" (their stated goal BTW); tried to commoditize the hardware and succeeded. That also brought us cheap boxes for OSS, btw...
Yes, commoditizing the hardware on some decent common ground that's available was a good thing. What you wish for we already had back then - many different incompatible lineages, high prices.
And how do you reconcile the ending of your post with how ARM owns markets where efficiency is king? (and where there's often not that much of a need to maintain binary compatibility, so also much easier to switch if there was something better; where high competitiveness is much less stalled by external factors)
You say that like you don't have reasons to celebrate already. Who could have thought that its descendants would power mobile phones almost universally? Just a single category of devices, one that ships annually around the number of all PCs in operation wordlwide. Hell, you can possibly find ARM cores in an average PC already. There's also this detail of ARM CPU cores possibly, by now, shipping annually in greater numbers than total number of x86 cores Intel ever made.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2008/08/12/44304/arm-outlines-power-benefit-of-multicore-processors.htm
The cost of a Windows license, even for a retail copy of Win7 Ultimate is a drop in the bucket compared to all the other costs associated with a user. ...and yet you point them out mostly in the case of OSS.
In Soviet Union, a better way has you!
Plus TV, especially in its early days, is a single device shared among many eyeballs.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was some unintended effect of trying to run it natively...
Apparently some people still like it... (while certainly having lots of experience in other OSes, you can't really avoid it nowadays) ...who are you to judge they must be wrong?
180 days is far from adequate and gives you no ability to test the long term accumulation of crud in the OS...
So maybe also assume this news is about AROS, ehh?
Security (c'mon...what malicious thing would run on MorpOS?), snappiness, plethora of Amiga and Amiga-style apps you love (and which work for you)...tons of reasons that make your day-to-day tasks much faster.
Even if you say these reason are all arguable, which they are, at least there are solid arguable reasons.
Webkit isn't a browser, you know; it's an engine. They recently built a browser around Webkit which has very Amiga-like feel - that's a bit more accurate. Most/all software they use on MorphOS has that feel. "Fairly obsolete processors" notwithstanding. Doing it via UAE apparently doesn't quite cut it for its users...
It has killer feature of emulating the Amiga experience (there's your something that Linux have...), that's enough for its intended audience.
There's always AROS if you really want all that (and it and MorphOS have enough apps "to be usable on a day to day basis")
But since MorphOS, among few other things, is doing relatively (very relatively, yeah...) fine even with AROS around, perhaps its community doesn't care about those factors all that much (plus...)
As for the speed, and most notably the percieved speed...I wouldn't be so certain. Grab AROS, it's reasonably comparable for our needs (more rough though); there are even some VMs of recent builds always available. And run it on as low amount of processing power as you can get your hands on.
Hell, why one would bother with Linux distro for day-to-day work if it can be done with Windows that came preinstalled on a laptop...
Amithlon was perhaps even more interesting in its time - a fully transparent layer (build around a stripped down Linux or something) providing the ability to run AmigaOS 3.9, through JIT 68k emulation, on quite typical x86 machine. Also with binary compatibility and being the fastest Amiga back then, by a huuuge margin.
But killed quickly, supposedly due to some IP troubles; though I suspect the idea of not milking Amiga faithful was simply too hard to swallow.
Can the modern Amiga OS run old Amiga software?
Yes, that's the point of MorphOS... (though if it doesn't run on a machine with custom Amiga chips (zombie "1200" with PPC accelerator for example), then the software depending on that chips won't run)
What can you do on an Amiga compatible OS that can't be done more easily and cheaply with, say, Linux or even OS X? I'm asking this because I'm genuinely interested...
Having Amiga-like experience. Is that so hard to guess?...
BeOS open source?
http://morphosambient.sourceforge.net/
Apple products are more open source than morphos
Ehhh?
http://morphosambient.sourceforge.net/
And FFS, it's not "crippling suspected pirate copies", it's a trial; quite adequate (you can restart, you know...) to determine if you want to get the thing.
It doesn't run anything which depends on those great custom Amiga chips though, only the "OS level" software. Not without UAE at least...but it doesn't really make a difference where you run the latter.
There was even better option a long time ago, Amithlon (probably quite a bit faster, to). I suspect there were not only merely problems with IP, but also somebody, at the time, thought that Amithlon doesn't provide enough opportunities to milk small fanbase out of their cash...
That's quite a bargain considering prices of many things with which amigans kept their nostalgia alive over the last decade+
This OS is one of the ways Amiga zombie tries to stay undead; stuff quite a bit for nerds, I'd say.