Joshua Penix wrote:
Apple will not make the OS available to run on anything other than
Macintosh computers purchased from Apple. It'd be absolute market
suicide if they did.
I don't know how they expect to stop people, though (see iTunes, for
example). You would actually have to use some non-standard part to do
that. Now that they are going to x86, the business pressures will all
mitigate against doing that.
Remember that Apple's choice of Intel really just determines the
instruction set. Apple and Intel are going to sit down and put together
a reliable and well-engineered logic board for the Mac.
Doubtful. My guess is that Apple will very shortly quit doing much
board design at all.
They don't have
to accomodate all the things that x86 PC makers do for the sake of
backwards-compatibility (why is it that my 3.0GHz Pentium 4 can still
run DOS?)
Apple isn't moving to x86 because they like the processor (in spite of
the Reality Distortion Field, PowerPC has a much better CPU
Power/Electrical Power ratio--Apple wastes this advantage in their
systems for reasons discussed below). They are moving to x86 because
they like the ecosystem.
What do I mean by this?
For starters, Apple has(had?) a design group whose purpose is to design
the support chips for PowerPC. These are the Northbridge and
Southbridge chips present on every motherboard. No other entity will
design a PowerPC Northbridge or Southbridge. There is no market.
Even if these chips were superbly designed (a discussion for a different
day), the volumes mean that the costs are higher. Also, there are far
fewer people designing these chips so the risk is higher. Also, Apple
pretty much has to design 1 set of support chips which works across
their entire line (they just don't have the resource to do anything else).
By switching to x86, Apple can now choose from at least half a dozen
vendors who produce these support chips at various level of
cost/performance. They can lay the risk of the chips onto the vendors,
and choose a different vendor if someone fails to deliver.
In addition, they can outsource the board design. Now they can lay the
risk of that onto multiple vendors.
Finally, Apple can release quite a bit of in-house hardware driver
development since the Windows x86 codebase that the hardware suppliers
use will likely work on Apple with a bit of tweaking (see how nVidia
supports Linux using the Windows codebase with some shims).
Basically, Apple can pretty much crush all internal hardware development
in favor of off-the-shelf solutions. This is a good thing from the
point of view of business; it removes costs from areas where you add no
value.
It also means that Apple, the computer company, is, quite effectively,
toast. OS X *will* escape from Apple-only hardware (PearPC was making a
fine attempt even before this). Software can be duplicated relatively
cheaply; consequently, any advantages that OS X holds will get chewed up
fairly quickly. No one really cares about the OS anymore.
My computer usage patterns are a good example. I switch between Windows
and OS X with OS X being my primary development machine. I *like* my
Powerbook for a few useful features (Expose, iTunes, and hardware
support done right) and the Unix underpinnings, but my applications are
pretty much the same on both: Firefox, OpenOffice, Eclipse, Thunderbird
(Mail.app finally pissed me off), VLC, Azureus, Acrobat Reader.
My user experience is pretty much the same on both. The only thing I
miss is the Unix stuff on Windows.
-a
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