OS X on x86?

FusionJunky asks: "There has been some talk surrounding Apple's OS X and its potential to be released for the x86 platform. Sites like OSXonIntel.com have been trying to get the message to Apple that we feel the consumers are ready to see OS X on x86 boxes. I'm wondering what the Slashdot community thinks this would do to Apple, would it adversely affect their hardware sales? Could Apple move away from selling G4s from Motorola and start producing Intel Macs. Do you think Apple should release an x86 version of their next gen OS?" We asked earlier whether you felt if Linux would be threatened by OS X, with the possibility of OS X working on x86 machines, has your answer changed?

If they do it at all, it has to be soon

If Apple plan on releasing OS X on Intel, they'll have to do it soon, or it won't be worth it. When Sun released Solaris for Intel, it was seen as too late -- they were already comitted to SPARC, and the market saw the Intel move as halfhearted. SPARC was always going to be the preferred platform, and Intel was always very much a second rate citizen in the Solaris world. The same situation exists with OS X. Unless an Intel version is released very soon, OS X on PPC will be too entrenched. If it reaches that point, Apple won't be able to convice developers to code for both platforms, and they'll stick to just PPC. Ultimately, the support of third party developers is what makes or breaks an OS.

I'm actually in two minds about whether or not Apple should release an Intel OS X. On one hand, more competition is always a good thing. On the other hand, if it's successful, it could hasten the demise of viable non-x86 alternatives.

Re:It might be interesting-

I'm by no means a programmer, but it would seem to me a lot of work to port existing apps over to OSX on x86

Under NeXTSTEP, most cross-processor porting consisted of the following grueling steps:

• Step 1: Open the app in Project Builder.
  
• Step 2: Check "Intel," "NeXT," "Sparc," and "HP," then hit "Compile."
  
• Step 3: There's no step 3.
  

<chuckle>there's no step three....

Re:Affect hardware sales?

What matters ultimately is how they run, not how well they fulfill YOUR idea of what a server architecture should be

"Try moving your sound card to a different PCI slot."

"Why won't my motherboard enable 2x AGP?"

"How can I keep my video card and my NIC from sharing IRQ 9 under Windows 2000?"

"My system hangs if I try to hibernate it."

"Ever since I upgraded my BIOS, all of my games run slowly."

All facts of life, day and day out, in the PC world. Check any hardware/gaming oriented message board and see. Sure, it's great if you are a tweaker, but that's not exactly Apple's core market, and it's the sort of thing that their current customers abhor.

OS X on Intel would be another one of those specilty OSes that you would pretty much have to spec out a whole machine for before buying (kinda like OpenStep 4.2!) Apple could solve that problem by selling nicely designed 'certified' boxes, but that wouldn't be open enough for the people who are campaigning for this (who want to run OSX on the box that's sitting on their desk).
--

Re: NEXTSTEP and porting

Under NeXTSTEP, most cross-processor porting consisted of the following grueling steps:

• Step 1: Open the app in Project Builder.
• Step 2: Check "Intel," "NeXT," "Sparc," and "HP," then hit "Compile."
• Step 3: There's no step 3.

Oh, and you forgot to mention that you end up with one binary which through clever sharing of resources (all interfaces, resources, etc are in the .app folder rather than in the executable) is actually smaller than for example, 4 binaries of the same app for different architectures under *NIX. It also means you could essentially fire up Interface Builder on the .nib and localize apps yourself/move buttons around and so on.

IMHO these are the most important points about OSX people on /. are missing, just look at the amount of posts here saying "it's too hard". In the case of OSX, it's not. Apple has quietly been keeping Darwin running on X86, and NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP (OSX's ancestor) always had support for X86. So an X86 port of OSX would be a matter of updating NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP drivers, writing some new ones for hardware that didn't exist at the time (note I'm only talking about drivers for those subsystems that Darwin does not include, i.e. Aqua) and recompiling. Presto, you have OSX/X86.

What I still don't understand is how Apple managed to turn NEXTSTEP (runs fine on my NeXTStation Turbo which is a 33Mhz 68040 with 32MB of RAM) into OSX (apparently only runs reasonably well on a XXXMhz PowerPC G4 with 128MB of RAM)? As far as I can see, they are essentially the same OS (OSX has a couple more APIs and more Eye Candy, but surely doesn't justify such a jump).

Things I don't need

Yeah, that's what I've been clamoring for. Yet another OS to run on my x86, preferably one without a killer app or widespread support, and even better if it's one that won't support my existing apps. I want something pretty. It doesn't need to do anything that Linux/Windows/Beos does. I've always thought that the world needs more OS's. I'd love to go back to the early 80's, when every time I sat down at a new desk, I had to learn a new set of commands just to get my work done. Woohoo! My heart beats with anticipation.

Seriously, folks, what is it about Mac OS X that would make you shell out money for it when Linux is free? Do you think it can compete with Windows where Linux can't? Do you think it's genuinely better? I don't get it.

Mac OS X won't penetrate large organizations, either. Network admins have their hands full with 95/98 desktops, 2000 desktops, 2000 servers, Linux servers, and Netware servers. Mac OS X will be looked at as just another unproven alternative with no real history, an answer looking for a question.

I also can't believe posters haven't mentioned the failed 3rd-party hardware problems generated when Apple let other manufacturers build PowerPC boxes. Remember that? Apple couldn't stand letting other people build boxes and run Apple software. Now we're hearing rumbles that not only will it run on other boxes, but it'll be boxes that Apple hasn't put their golden blessing on. That's ridiculous - Apple dropped that hot potato years ago, and they're not likely to pick it up again.

BeOS model

A quick skim over some of the higher rated comments shows a common thread -- a lot of people are concerned that moving to x86 would be to abandon the superior Apple hardware and to embrace a lot of crappy legacy stuff. Could Apple not do what BeOS does, by saying "yeah, you can run it on a regular x86 box, but you have to have at least x for a graphics card, at least y for audio, and at least z for the $whatever.

That way, you can support the platform without supporting all the cruft that has built up over the years. I can almost see Apple defending their hardware (and the higher prices for it) by saying something to the effect of "yeah, you can run OSX on PC hardware, but you need at least a PIII / 1.2 gHz or equivalent processor, 196 mb of ram, a DVD burner...", etc -- just make the requirements so high that it would be a relatively expensive kit anyway, so it wouldn't hurt G3 based sales that badly, and it would avoid a lot of the legacy issue.

Re:Affect hardware sales?

I'm one of the Mac-using media people you talk about. You're right that price is king, but Macs are cheaper than x86 PC's. Don't just do a CompUSA comparison of the hardware sticker-price, although Apple's notebooks, at least, will win that easily, and the desktops would surprise you if you added the comparable features to a PC. You have to evaluate what the machine will cost you over its lifetime, and what it will give you over its lifetime.

Support. There are almost zero IT costs related to Macs. Apple has an article on their site right now about a 150-user consulting firm that is a Mac-only shop and has only two IT guys, and they take care of the phone system, too. In many places, the "business people" use Windows PC's and the "creatives" use Macs, and the IT people only work on the PC's and the "creatives" take care of their own Macs (Microsoft gives this as the reason why their Mac apps are installed with a drag and drop of the folder from the CD to the hard disk, and their Windows apps have a complicated installer). If IT does support the Macs as well, they typically have a 10:1 Windows:Mac ratio on their support calls.

Productivity. The interface is better and makes users more productive, especially in media apps, which were all originally Mac-only and it shows. You only have to learn one set of key shortcuts and they work everywhere. You don't have to know or care about pathnames. You can move or rename apps and they keep working. You don't have to use filename extensions. You can mount drives formatted with HFS, FAT, UDF, and other formats. Mac OS 9 is more stable than any DOS-Windows version, and more stable than NT 4. It probably won't quite go head to head with Windows 2000, but Mac OS X does, easily (been using it for over a year and no crashes, and these are alphas and betas). These things really add up.

Hardware. Apple's hardware is high-quality, and components are optimized for each other and work well together. You can add RAM to any Mac in under a minute, because they all have easy-access doors, even the notebooks (the keyboard is a door). Their displays are all color-calibrated, and integrate with ColorSync in the OS. Towers have built-in gigabit Ethernet, and all other Macs have 10/100 built-in (for years now). All Macs have two built-in 802.11 wireless antennaes, and an internal slot for a $99 optional wireless networking card. They all have FireWire built-in (except for the low-end iMac, I believe). They all come with optical mouses and quality keyboards. The machines come with a bunch of stuff that you'd have to add yourself, otherwise.

Saving a few hundred bucks off the initial sticker price just doesn't help you in the long run. This is why Mac users are willing to pay a little extra. We don't pay much more, though. The $3499 G4 tower has a $995 CD/DVD-RW combo drive in it, as well as iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iTools, DVD player, CD-RW burning built into the OS, internal antennaes, gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, an audio amplifier for external speakers, power and USB for the display through the video card, optical mouse, room for 1.5 GB RAM, room for two removable drives and four hard drives, four empty PCI slots, easy open case with the mobo on the door, nVidia graphics. That's an awful lot of features and capabilities right out of the box.

There are so many misconceptions about Apple, because all the other PC manufacturers are in bed with each other and not with Apple. It's worth actually checking into this stuff ... it saves you money and makes your daily work easier. And they look cool and run Mac OS X. You can't beat that.

it may be iX86, but it'll be Apple's iX86

If apple were to run OS-X on iX86 based machines that they provided, I think you'd find that that there wouldn't be many similarities between apple's iX86 boxes and off the shelf windows iX86 boxes.

Look at a G4, and look at a standard iX86 box. They basically share the same memory bus, the same PCI bus, the same AGP port, the same USB ports; the Apple lacke a normal UART serial (except for the modem card that I don't think is an option any more) and has a FireWire (highspeed) serial instead. What else is different... well the processor, its cache, but most importantly the Firmware/ROM.

Apple, in some deal of wisdom, has used Sun's OpenBoot ROM (named openfirmware) to keep their system bootable, iX86s use the uber-patched BIOS. If Apple were to make intel based machines, it would make its own custom motherboard, and stick with the clearly supirior OpenBoot styled Firmware. It would be nice if you could get this off the shelf, but you can't since MS never bothered to prod developers into supporting it.

now consider that the only cost differences are the price of the Mot's or IBM's latest PPC (who-knows) vs the price of Intel's latest chip (the who-cares), using current history, you'll see that Apple is actually saving money by buying the cheeper chip. And it has better bang for buck no-doubt.

So, considering we know Apple won't use off the shelf part, whyever would Apple increase its production costs? Is the world such a sad place that it's going to sell a 1.1Ghz chip that does 0.5 instructions a cycle peak with more success than a 500Mhz chip that does 2 instructions per cycle average?

-Daniel

Meaningful performance comparisons

One interesting thing about this would be that it would remove the OS as a major consideration when doing performance comparisons. I know, I know, compilers and all that. But it would indeed bring the two hardware platforms a greater degree of parity on the OS front.

So if Photoshop runs twice as fast on one platform as the other, it would be harder to say things like "this performance comparison is meaningless because it doesn't take into consideration this or that OS characteristic".

Oh, sure, there will always be reasons to dispute head to head comparisons. But they would certainly be more fun.

That said, I will still never run OSX. I find the philosophy behind the free software movement more compelling than a few more whiz-bang features and eye candy.

If Apples revenue does truly derive from hardware, and their hardware is superior, then they should GPL everything they do.

OSX on X86.. It was called NeXTSTEP/OpenStep

And it was a thing of beauty, far more advanced than Linux and it was that years ago.. OSX is just a minor look and feel change, so if they don't do it, it's just for business reasons.

It's Steve's little red wagon and you never know when he's going to make a turn...

To drift off topic..

I was a NeXT developer from the beginning, at one point you could compile a NeXTSTEP app for X86, Sparc, HP's PA-RISC, and their 68040 based slab and have the executable's exist in ONE package as the result of ONE compile.

The source was compiled into what we would call a Quad-FAT application and the underlying MACH OS would figure out at runtime which processor's code it needed to load. (Linux could take a lesson here)

I could hand a user a disk and not know or care what processor they were using.

They didn't allow the development of shared libraries at the time, so you never had to worry about problems like which version of GTK was installed, or fall into RPM hell trying to resolve what version of which library is orisn't loaded.

The real beauty was the development system, there is nothing that even comes close to comparing to the ease of InterfaceBuilder and ProjectBuilder in the Linux world.. If you never used it you really wouldn't believe how advanced it was(is),
This was pushing 10 years ago and there is still nothing close in ANY OS (Not Windoze or Linux)

Their libraries were so well thought out that after you were programming in the system for awhile you could think "gee" there should be a routine name "xx" and sure enough it was there.

CORBA..Yetch.. Because of the run time binding of Objective-C We could "publish" an Object with literally TWO lines of code and connect to it with another application with ONE line of code... No STUB compilers or any of that crap..

It was playing to ALL of the NeXTSTEP strengths, but we used to developer "Mac Write" as the 5 minute demo for programmers. (including font changes, fax capability, printing, color RTF text with embedded images and the ability to access services like "Webster" for spell checking.

Man do I miss that system..
Perhaps in another 10 years Linux will be close, but I doubt it.

Time for a beer..

chuck

Re:Apple vs Sun

Sun has Solaris available for x86. No doubt there was a lot of debate similar to what's happening.

that's totally different. the main reason Sun wanted Solaris on x86 was to attract developers. they found that a lot of companies had difficulty developing software for their Sparc boxes because they couldn't justify putting a Sparcstation on every developer's desks. they created Sparc x86 just so that developers (or more likely part-time developers) could create Solaris-based applications on cheaper hardware, and it would still compile and run on Solaris for Sparc.

Apple could follow a similar strategy to attract developers of course, but they'd get themselves into trouble from people who expect Apple to maintain consumer-level support for an operating system port that's targeted at developers.

so at any rate, it's not really the same thing.

- j

Can you define the question better?

It all depends on what you want, surely?

The OSXonIntel web page seems to take in part a disingenious approach. "We want it because BSD gives us the chance to ge at lots of open source sw and to stick it to Microsoft". Well, if that's all you want, then here's a hint: install BSD. ;-)

To be fair, later they say they want it all. But surely there's almost no chance of getting it to run legacy Mac applications or carbon apps without recompiling? So does it come down to Quartz and Aqua? What use are they on their own? Open source stuff will be available, true, but it'll be written for console or against X. Again, you're back to "install BSD"

My motto is that OS is irrelevant; it's apps apps apps that count. Why else do you think I'm writing this on a Win2K box?

I guess one argument apple can use against OSX on intel is that Apple have a very clear understanding of the fundamental hardware, so they can optimize their OS better. A lot of work done on the Linux kernel, for example, seems to be getting this and that obscure piece of hardware to work.

I think that a better response is not to try and make OSX run on Intel, but to make Gnome or K, depending on preference, look so good that it has the same "wow!" factor that OSX has.

It's been done

NextStep on x86 was available as a shrink-wrapped product for several years. And that was back when Microsoft's top product was Windows for Workgroups. Even then, it didn't sell.

Apple is a 'total product' company

Apple sells a vertically integrated product. They control the hardware and the software. That is why Macs are historically more reliable and easier to configure: there is one company controlling everything. That advantage started to erode when Apple allowed clones; therefore, Jobs killed them (smartly, in 20/20 hindsight).

Apple is able to largely avoid hardware conflicts because there are only 5 current machines (PowerBook, iBook, G4 Tower, G4 Cube, iMac) that run the Mac OS. Apple tests their products extensively on every machine that can run them from the past few years. Microsoft could never test their products on all the machines that run their software.

Apple makes their money by selling superior hardware. However, people buy the hardware because of Apple's superior software (Mac OS). If Apple allowed other companies to sell computer that would run Mac OS X, they would lose the advantage of controlling everything about the boxes they sell. In the end, it doesn't matter whether the chip inside the computer is a PPC or an x86; it matters that only Apple can produce a Mac.

Rant: L'aveugle et le paralytique

"The blind man and the paralytic one", or "Confession of an old NeXTer"

The only thing that is sure, is that they need to do something else too. OS/X ppc only will not cut it.

In 1984, Apple once was years ahead everyone else.

Apple did not know how to manage its advance. The simple and friendly Macintosh mutated into a huge number of sub-standard overpriced hardware. Slim APIs and thin operating system (hey, it had to run into 128Kb of RAM) evolved into a convoluted mess. Instead of slowly adapting, they tried grandious plans that failed (Pink, Copland, OpenDoc...). A lot of working technologies were destroyed (Hypercard, to name one).

In 1991, NeXT had 10 years of advance.

NeXT did not know how to manage its advance. Pieces after pieces they dropped their assets, in order to stay profitable. First the hardware. Then the OS. Then ObjC (despite numerous claims of the opposite, NeXT was in the process of dropping ObjC in favor of java, for fucking marketing reasons). At the end, NeXT was dropping the whole AppKit, and focused on WebObjects *consulting*, which was rewritten in java. At this point, you could look behind, and see that NeXT basically dropped every single piece that gave it its '10 years of advance'. In the process, NeXT pissed about evey company that developed for them (At the time of the OPENSTEP/Enterprise thing [ie: AppKit on windows], NeXT refused to indicate how costly would be the run-time license [hint: they didn't knew themselves], despite numerous asking from the developers. It is quite nice when you tell an independant developer that he will have to compete with the biggest established players in the biggest market, but will have to pay a premium for each copy of its software. And that you cannot tell him how much the premium is going to be. "It is going to be cheap. Trust us. We are working hard on that."). I think NeXT was doomed the day Lighthouse Design sold to Sun.

NeXT then bought Apple for a negative amount of money. This was a good thing. NeXT have software that once rocked. Apple have hardware that once rocked. Thogether they are, IMHO, the only credible commercial alternative to Wintel.

The merge was difficult. Lot of good things were lost there (Newton, OPENSTEP, YB/windows). We almost lost ObjC. The most important asset of NeXT is FoundationKit/AppKit, which require developers to use a different langage. One of the amusing decision made by NeXT was to stop supporting C++. A very good idea those days. A sure way to alienate most of the existing Apple developers, but well, us NeXTers are fucking morons, and you have to play with our rules. Those have never changed over the years. I can give them to you in full:

"We are right. You are wrong. End of discussion."

In 2001, apple hardware is ahead no-one. PC hardware *blow* macintosh at any time. Linux/*BSD are way ahead of Darwin. Win2K is rock solid (and trust me, this is a pain for me to admit it). OSX interface is unusable at best (I have trouble to feel NeXTstep throught this slow mess.)

OSX/x86 could be a way to get mindshare back. But it is useless. It'll end up on the 4th partition of a linux freak that would boot it once a week, because he is bored of playing with gnome themes, then will reboot under windows to play the latest games a couple of hours later.

Nope. The only way I see for them is to:

1/ Revive Yellow Box (This implies porting Qartz to windows to get rid of the fscking Adobe DPS licensing issue). Price it at an exact 0$. Give it away from their website. Give it from magazine CDs. Tell developers to learn objective C, so they will use the best object oriented API in the world *and* deploy the same code under different operating system

2/ Write the unix yellow box. Price it at the same 0$. Tell unix deleloper that they can use the best object oriented API in the world *and* deploy the same code under different operating system

3/ Help the GNUstep project to implement the OpenStep spec. A statment that they will not sue the project would already be a great thing (gnustep-db developers are afraid that Apple sue them on 4 key EOF patent. Development basically stopped).

At this point apple will have a viable and healthy software platform. They could then sell ppc boxes, arguing that they are compatible with old Mac OS applications and have the best OpenStep^WCocoa implementation out there.

Unfortunately, this would require Next/Apple to do the right thing, which, based on personal experience, is very unlikely.

Cheers,

--fred

Warning about OSXonIntel.com

If you sign up friends to be notified about this site (at the end of the petition), they get sent a really gumby sounding email:

----
Hey there,
This website is an online petition trying to get Mac OS X ported to the intel platform. Go check it out at http://www.osxonintel.com I signed it and you should too!
*Your Name*
----

I recommend that you write your own messages, if you don't want to sound like that -- otherwise you end up having to write explanatory messages to your friends to tell them that no, you didn't write that email, but it's a good site anyway...

Also, I would think that making it look as though the referrer is the sender and writer of the email is actually fraudulent, because I most certainly did NOT write that, yet it has been made to appear that I did.

rr

Re:Honestly I feel that OSX for x86 would hurt APP

By and large I must agree. Apple is a hardware company and always has been since the day the Apple 1 was built in Woz's garage/shop using 6502s in wooden cases. (As I recall, one 6502 was the CPU, the second was a cleverly timed Video generator.) Yet, Apple is, just as importantly, a design company.

Sadly, the hardware side of competition doesn't win Apple the clearest of victories. Some wins include the peaceful, silent design of the fanless system, the artistry of the cases, and the simplicity of the peripheral attachments. But these do not distinguish it enough from its Wintel competitors: The Motorola PowerPC chips perform competitive benchmarks per clockcycle, but the masses want those GigaHertz.

A software-oriented Apple could still sell its strongest point, Design, but that takes development. Taking the new direction of support the x86 platform, with its Tower of Hardware Babel, could be more than Apple is ready to chew... affordably anyhow.

Sounds fun, but does Apple care?

I'm a connoisseur of OSes. I install 'em all to play with [*BSD, Linuxes, BeOS, Windows], so for this reason I would like an x86 version of OS X. I already grabbed the supposed Intel port of Darwin [not yet tried it out].

But, does Apple care about such a beast?

They would have to start supporting the newest technology, from all different vendors, not just themselves. Big expansion of their happy little driver coding armies

They would have to expand their customer services exponentially, to support all the people fleeing MS, who don't know the first thing about MacOS, let alone *nix.

The would be taking an aggressive step towards MS, that they would not take to kindly. I mean Apple's not really competition for MS in the PC market, but this would make them direct competitors, and everyone has an opinon about what MS does to competitors.

I don't think it is in Apple's best interest [as far as business practices are concerned] to supply an x86 port of OS X. It may be a nice little bit of press, and 'response to customer appeals', but it would change a lot of their business model.

Of course, there is the added benefit [to end users] of increased interoperability between both *nix and Macs, which may be a nice bit for the business world. Interesting thought... MS's being the only OSes without the OS X seal of approval.

My pennies,
-bZj

Apple vs Sun

Apple has to make the same choice as Sun.

Sun has Solaris available for x86. No doubt there was a lot of debate similar to what's happening. However, there is a difference. The difference lies in who the customers are. Does Apple perceive its customers as driven by hardware or software?

Sun has been clear about its stand. Hardware is what they think will rake in the moolah. Software is incidental.

The question I want to ask is, whether we want Mac hardware or Mac software. If software is the answer, then there may be an overwhelming case for porting OS X to x86. If hardware is the answer, convincing Apple may be tough.

No Legacy crap

It would be a shame to have the Mac OS X move onto x86 and then get mired in the PC legacy crap that has caused us to continue to see ISA slots on 1ghz machines. I'm much happier with the SCSI/USB/Firewire legacy the Mac hardware has fostered. Of course it's going to negatively effect hardware sales. Don't you think that the new G4s with DVD burners are specifically to generate hardware sales? Where do you think their priorities are? Why do you think they keep orphaning hardware in each release? No OS X is planned for NuBus macs, yet another "trimming/pruning" of the Apple Tree.

Re:Affect hardware sales?

Apple has a real problem with their CPUs that other server RISC based CPUs do not have - they are about two times too slow to keep up with the AMDs and Intels of the world.

First of all, Apple makes workstations not servers. Comparing a G4 to an 8 way Xeon is bullcrap.

Second, I guess Sun is too 'slow' as well. Their Ultra series workstations max out at 450Mhz...The
new Blade 1000 peaks at 750Mhz.
Why would people buy those? They're so much 'slower' than a P4!

I wonder why Sun's sales were up 85% from last year...Could it be that there is *still* demand for real UNIX hardware, even with the PeeCee?

I think if you had a clue about anything other than PeeCees you'd realize the only 'race' Apple is losing is the marketing race - Mhz is not an accurate measure of real-world performance.

People will NOT switch to OS X when it comes out

That's a huge generalization.
I know several people that are lusting after OSX right now.
Will appreciable amounts of people buy Apple boxen? I don't know, but I think there will be more than you expect.

--K

Re:Affect hardware sales?

I beg to differ about "three kinds of people who buy Macs" ...

Apple has always, with a few notable exceptions, built first-rate hardware. With the combination of the PowerPC and OpenFirmware, modern Macs are, for all intents and purposes, low-end workstations, pretty much indistinguishable from the low-end RS6000 machines that IBM is making these days. (Boot a modern RS6000 -- you'll see Apple plastered all over the firmware.)

By contrast, PCs are still incredibly broken AT architecture machines. They still have 16 interrupts, and PCI doesn't work around this very well. If you look at a machine with no ISA slots, you'll see that windoze still loads ISA drivers. The machines are CRAP. The only decent non-server intel machines ever built were the SGI machines of a couple of years ago -- because those were full-blown workstations, throwing out all of the legacy crap, and having a real firmware.

The combination of really good hardware with a first-rate UNIX is a one-two punch that few serious UNIX geeks will be able to resist. And it's sexy and comes in Titanium.

I *hope* Apple doesn't start catering to the lowest common denominator and making crappy AT boxes. The effect will be to kill the last quality consumer-level hardware, and it'll kill Apple, because Apple makes its money on hardware.

If Apple started making non-AT intel-based systems, that were otherwise built like normal Macs, with decent firmware &c, that would possibly be a win. But the OS for a machine like that wouldn't run on a commodity PC.

WebObjects, FileMaker, and the NeXTies

Apple is a systems company.

They make well-designed hardware that lasts. Case in point: in 1995 I purchased a PowerMac 8100/100. After using it for four or five years, I sold it to my dad so I could buy a rev A iMac. He used it for a couple of years. Now he's purchased a new iMac and I've got the old 8100 back. It's happily running MkLinux (I know, I know..., but it is great as a simple network server). The point is, these puppies last!

But back to my original point. Apple has some stealth revenue sources that nobody seems to remember. FileMaker (formerly Claris) is a $282 million company, and Apple owns a sizeable chunk.

WebObjects (run by the Apple Enterprise group) has been raking in money on huge contracts with big corporations and government agencies for some time. They've downplayed the Apple name until now, and have concentrated on telling customers the history of WO (developed by NeXT) and its capabilities.

Both of these sources of revenue are independent of Apple's hardware sales (FileMaker makes as much money off of sales of its Windows products as it does off Mac sales, and WO only recently became available on OS X Server).

The WO factor, in particular, points out the impact of the NeXTies and the lessons they learned. Remember, they first went the hardware/software system route, then were forced to ditch the hardware. Jobs has been much more flexible on hardware decisions of late. Note the move from ATi to nVidia. There are strong rumors that Jobs is talking to as many as five chip manufacturers to figure out a way around Motorola's failure to deliver sufficient yields.

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Jobs came up with another rabbit out of the hat. He's become less doctrinare in his approach over the years, and more attuned to market realities.

Re:Reminds me of...A BIG mistake by Apple

My iMac DV (400 MHz G3) will run OS X PB VERY nicely. As for an "iMac power user" being a "contradiction in terms..." nyah! :)~

But seriously, as for your shoe being more upgradeable than an iMac, think about Apple's choice of architecture--the Motorola chips. They don't work the same way the Wintel chips you're familiar with do, in terms of megahertz. My grandma has a 233MHz original Bondi Blue iMac. It has 32MB of RAM, I think. She's not running linuxPPC on it and compiling three kernels a day, so it's not like the little beast has a terribly heavy load--instead, she's doing word processing, surfing the web, email, playing a bit with graphic design--BUT even with OS 9 on it (I love macs, but don't get me started on OS 9) it doesn't feel like a slow box. This was a machine from 1998. My boyfriend's K6-233 has LONG since been retired since then.

Cost is key, concerning the sales of G4's and G4 cubes. iMacs can be had for around $700 (and then you get some rebates--my aunt got a rather good deal on one) while G4 systems are still up there in the $1,700-ish range. (Didn't stop my aunt from getting one of those either, though. :)

Don't be too hard on the iMac--I think things are looking up for the iMac, all around. They're really pretty affordable and the peripherals that ship with them have improved. The Apple Pro mouse and Pro keyboard are a DRASTIC improvement over the child-sized mushy original iMac laptop-like keyboard, and they've started shipping with the Pro mouse instead of that aggravating iPuck.

Re:Things I don't need

Yeah, that's what I've been clamoring for. Yet another OS to run on my x86, preferably one without a killer app or widespread support, and even better if it's one that won't support my existing apps.

...you mean like virtually anything that already runs on BSD? Or did you mean all your Java apps? Or was it basically anything ever written for Macintosh? Apple did their homework on this one; even though true Cocoa apps aren't abundant in the wild yet, there does indeed exist a sizeable software base already, much of which has been freely (beer and speech) available to the UNIX world for years.

I want something pretty. It doesn't need to do anything that Linux/Windows/Beos does...Seriously, folks, what is it about Mac OS X that would make you shell out money for it when Linux is free? Do you think it can compete with Windows where Linux can't? Do you think it's genuinely better? I don't get it.

Well, let's see. One, it has a great graphical user interface. To even suggest that any of the competing Linux GUIs can be seriously compared to that of OSX is utterly laughable; we can't even drag and drop properly between apps yet! Two, it has a learning curve of about a week for people who are fundamentally computer illiterate. Compare that to the learning curve of the average Linux experience--Linux is free just so long as one considers the weeks/months it takes to learn it as disposable time. Three, it runs on BSD. It runs for weeks without crashing. Yep, Linux does this too, but then again, Linux has always trumpeted this as an advantage over Windows and other "pretty" systems.

OSX offers, for the very, very first time ever , a system built on a BSD core with a virtually idiot-proof user interface. Linux can compete on the under-the-hood aspects of OSX; it can't even begin to hold a candle to the user experience, though. What's not to get about an operating system that has both a real CLI and an absolutely beautiful, easy-to-use GUI?

Mac OS X won't penetrate large organizations, either. Network admins have their hands full with 95/98 desktops, 2000 desktops, 2000 servers, Linux servers, and Netware servers. Mac OS X will be looked at as just another unproven alternative with no real history, an answer looking for a question.

I agree with you to a point on this one. Many large corporrations won't welcome OSX for the very reasons you point out: they already have their hands full trying to get a hodge-podge of OSes playing nicely with each other, and don't need another, thank you very much. Other orgs, though, may do exactly what the Linux community has been clamoring for: drop everything and start from scratch (but with OSX instead of Linux.) There's enough appeal in OSX for both power users and point-and-grunters that it could present a tempting option, especially if Apple were to sweeten the deal somewhat for large corporate accounts. As for the unproven alternative, answer looking for a question bit, well, you just described the situation with Linux circa 1998. That, and I can think of a number of questions to the answer, "a UNIX system that a total novice can use".

I also can't believe posters haven't mentioned the failed 3rd-party hardware problems generated when Apple let other manufacturers build PowerPC boxes. Remember that? Apple couldn't stand letting other people build boxes and run Apple software. Now we're hearing rumbles that not only will it run on other boxes, but it'll be boxes that Apple hasn't put their golden blessing on.

A very valid point, and one that I see as being one of the bigger potential stumbling blocks out there. A possible answer for Apple is to partner with one or two major peecee manufacturers and spec out a narrow range of "Apple Certfied" x86 systems. This helps absolve Apple from having to release n! drivers every week, and since they're already used to dictating their own hardware terms, it shouldn't be too tough of a policy for them to stand firm on. Yes, they got burned once by the licensing fiasco, but it's entirely possible that they've learned form their mistakes and feel ready to give it another go.

OSX stands to be a genuinely impressive operating system. It's still too early to tell, but everything I've seen of it so far has been really promising. Apple seems to be on track for a repeat of 1984 in a lot of respects, and it is entirely possible that the in-house version of OSX they have on Intel may exist for reasons other than sheer novelty...

information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.

The wildcard...

I'd have given up hope for OSX on x86 a while ago (the arguments against considerably outweigh the arguments for, IMHO) if not for one little factor called Steve Jobs.

If there is anything at all I have learned about the man, it's that he is utterly unpredictable, he probably has a grand scheme in mind, and he loves surprises. I think that the biggest question to ask isn't one of technical hurdles or risk/benefit analyses of Apple's hardware sales, but "What's really bouncing around in Steve's head?"

Sadly, it's impossible to answer this question. One thing is for sure, though--if Apple does release OSX for x86, Jobs is going to have a blast in announcing it. And it's going to catch everybody pretty much off-guard, even those of us who want it the most.

information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.

Silly idea

Let's think about this.

If they're running on commodity x86 hardware then hardware sales would go through the floor. Who would buy the expensive (but good) Apple hardware when there was cheaper hardware which did the same job? Doesn't matter if the Apple stuff is better, the man in PC World isn't going to know that so he buys the cheapest. Apple lose out bigtime.

If they're running on their own dedicated x86 hardware (remember here, there's a difference between having an x86 CPU and being IBM PC compatible) then they have to develop that, so they've got a new one-off cost to develop this, along with the same costs to maintain it as they currently have with PPC - except they don't have experience with it so they'd be running slower for a little while. Oh, and they'd lose the current advantage of not having fans, as the x86 CPUs run a lot warmer as a whole than PPC. I can't see they'd go to all this trouble so they could use laptop or Crusoe processors. They'd also then have to move their software over to the new CPU for the second time in recent memory, write all the converters and so on. So they wouldn't have a speed advantage for a couple of years (think upgrade cycles) as it'd be emulated. Not pretty.

All this so they can use different CPUs which have a current speed advantage (which the change would knock out for a while). Could someone possibly explain why this could be a good idea?

Issues

Whilst I would openly welcome OSX on my desktop, running on my x86 hardware with all the funky hardware I've bought I see this as the one major problem for Apple. If OSX were to be released for the x86 market the number of configurations and hardware devices the OS would have to be able to support would grow to the sort of levels which would be problematic. At the moment they only have to support a few graphics chips out of the box - how many would they have to support if they were attempting to sell OSX to the masses. What about soundcard, modems, network cards and so on. I just can't see it happening without a lot of support from manufacturers who are unwilling to provide driver support on the existing mac platform.

Affect hardware sales?

There are three kinds of people buying Apple computers. There are the OS interface junkies who love the "look and feel" of the interface. There are the media workers who buy Apple simply because it's still the industry standard in that field, in the same way that office workers invariably use MS Office. Finally, there are those who have been seduced by coloured, translucent plastic.

If OS X for x86 was available, I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of the first two groups would immediately jump ship over to cheaper hardware. Mac OS hardware is nice (The G4 is a great chip) but being realistic, price is king.

The question, therefore, is whether the increased revenue in OS sales would compensate for the losses in hardware revenues. Personally, I'm not sure.

When it comes down to it, though, Apple won't listen to what we say. Pretty much every major decision will depend on what Steve thinks, and I don't think Steve likes the idea of open hardware - historically, he's shown himself to be very sensitive to physical appearance (the original mac classic, the iMac, the cube) and I suspect that he just doesn't want his lovely OS X running on ugly grey boxes. :)

(Cue announcement from Apple tomorrow about OS X for x86, just to prove me wrong...)

Apple not just a hardware company

For those of you who insist on purporting that Apple makes all of it's money on hardware, I suggest you take a different look at it. My question to you is, how much money would Apple actually make selling hardware, if that hardware didn't come with the Mac OS attached to it? Would you buy an overpriced piece of hardware just because it looked cool, but had to run windows on it?

If your answer is no (as I suspect it is) then the reason you buy Apples is primarily because of the software and OS, which makes Apple primarily a software vendor who uses their software technology to sell hardware. Without the Mac OS, the Mac is just an overpriced PC encased in dayglo plastic. Sure some of the hardware touches are nice, but none of that really matters without the Mac OS.

Apple is primarily a software vendor people. Don't forget that. Just because their accounting puts most of the revenue in hardware sales doesn't mean that hardware is truly where their competitive advantage is.

I've heard this tripe for so long, it makes me ill....

Doesn't make sense

In my humble opinion, Apple would release OSX on x86 hardware on only one condition. That it was *Apple* x86 hardware and not everything under the sun that is currently available for an x86 based platform.

Meaning that the issues that people have mentioned about Legacy problems with the x86 hardware would not exist. The situation would go something like this. Not that I ever see this happening, but it is the only way I can think of to make it work.

Steve would decide that Apple needs a good, powerful sub $500 system to compete with the likes of Dell, Compaq, Gateway and eMachines. The Apple Design Department would start working on an Apple standard platform mainboard (meaning that this would not be an ATX/AT box, it would be a G4/iMac box) that uses only *one* of the current x86 processor technologies. They would choose between either Intel or AMD and stay there.

Let's assume the choice would be AMD, because of cost per processor and the fact that in my scenerio they want to beat out the $499 eMachine AMD based box. The mainboard would be designed to be PCI *only* with USB as the same keyboard / mouse input we see on current PowerMacs. (Don't worry about issues with ISA slots, Apple would not write drivers for anything in them anyway.) This means the mainboard would be similar to the "legacy-free" Compaq system, the iPaq. No serial, no parallel, no PS/2 ports. Just USB and some PCI slots. Oh, and don't forget the single AGP port for graphics.

This indicates, that even though in theory Apple is porting OSX to x86, they are really porting OSX to AMD. Though Intel is also an x86 chip, they do have different command sets than the AMD chips have and vice versa. OSX (in my scenerio) is optimized for the AMD processor, so most likely a good number of the options of the OS would not work, or simply break entirely, if run on an Intel processor.

Also, there would not be drivers for everything under the sun, including the breadboard PCI card your Grandmother built to keep her recipe system organized. Apple would choose a small amount of cards to build drivers for itself. (The cards that ship with the system) Then it would be fully up to the hardware manufacturers themselves to write drivers for their hardware. If it isn't "Apple Certified" you can bet that Apple won't even give you a deaf ear to voice complaints upon.

Also, software that runs on OSX will need to be rewritten for most apps. Apps that are specifically coded in ... Cocoa? ... will be the easiest to port. As I understand it Cocoa is a subsystem API that talks to the Mach microkernel, not to the hardware. So Apple would port the Cocoa API to x86 with the rest of the OS and the apps that use it would port easily with a few changes, just like OpenGL games do now. The "hardware" apps would obviously be the hardest, and would cause the most harm to Apple's partner alliance. Take Adobe for instance. They have worked very hard to get their Photoshop for the Mac to take direct advantage of the AltaVec Velocity Engine instruction core in the new G4 chips. There will be no Velocity in an AMD chip, so that entire section of their code would have to be thrown out, or rewritten. Being that they already have a Winport and a RISC Macport, doing a specific x86 Macport might be just enough to cause those companies using Velocity specific code to jump ship entirely.

Basically it looks like Apple would be shooting themselves in the foot to port to x86 at this stage in the game. The only reason to do it would be to have a sub $500 price point system. They would have to retool entire manufacture specs on a board specific to x86. They would have to port the OS, and all of their specific drivers to a platform that would *still* only work in the Apple way. (They aren't going to give me technical support on OSX if it is installed on a Gateway PC.) Then they would have to train technical support to field questions on the new x86 based box.

Kind of like SGI and their current market position. I never thought I would see the day when I could purchase an x86 box running NT Workstation / Linux with an SGI logo on the front of it. But I can, and I still have to ask myself "Why?" As far as I know, SGI still has some MIPS based hardware running IRIX for sale. Yet they also have these x86 boxes that they have to develop, troubleshoot, support and market. These SGI boxes are no more or less special than an IBM or a Dell system with the same specs. Apple is not about to let *anyone* say that about them.

No, I don't think OSX will have be fully available on an x86 box until long after Apple is dead and gone as a company and someone has bought all of the intellectual rights just for the purpose of porting OSX to x86 hardware. It isn't that it is impossible. The core of the system is already running on x86 (Darwin) and could probably even get as crazy as NetBSD or whatever and be running on Dreamcast, and Amiga, and VAX, and Commodore, and my toaster oven. The kernel is portable, it's just not going to be ported. It just doesn't make a good business sense looking at the current Apple business model.

The Big Picture, can you see it?

While Linux and the various flavours of BSD all currently offer solid environments for x86 hardware, the desktop facilities offered by all of them are still poor in comparison to most commercial opertaing systems.

Despite the hype surrounding some of them, I've not found any Unix desktop environments particularly compelling so far... There's also plenty of hype surrounding GNOME and KDE, but I don't see any killer applications for them. People don't need buzzwords, they need a powerful desktop environment running on Unix, and this is what Apple will be providing.

Linux and the BSD derivatives are excellent server environments, as is Darwin, but MacOS X is also getting Maya and the Adobe applications on a viable desktop.

Personally, I've yet to find a desktop environment that offers me everything that I want, BeOS came close, but Apple are in a position to offer everything in one package.

Apple are also in an excellent position to pick up the gauntlet dropped by SGI, right at the top end of the content creation market. 3D, publishing, design and video editing are about to get a whole lot better on the Mac.

The most likely reason Apple will want to continue development of Darwin for x86 is that it needs a backup plan, exit strategy if things go wrong.

If Motorola and the G4 architecture don't scale fast enough, if Apple can't buy the hardware in the volumes they need, if the price of PPC processors is too high, then Apple would still be able to put x86 processors into it's systems with only minor re-engineering OS X.

Custom designed Apple x86 hardware is therefore a possibility, and an exciting one, but I doubt Apple see any commercial interest in supporting generic PCs and legacy hardware.

Also remember that OS X has the useful ability to support application "bundles" with binaries for multiple platforms in a single executable. This would make it very easy for vendors to ship applications in a form that would run on both PPC and x86 transparently to the user.

This won't happen

My opinion on Mac OS X on Intel is simple: it would be nice to have, but it simply won't happen. The reasons for this are not technical - Darwin (the BSD core of Mac OS X, which is open-sourced) runs on x86 hardware, although driver support is extremely limited right now. The issue here is economical. Apple is a hardware company. They make a living selling boxes, not software.

Now even if Apple decided to make x86 boxes of their own, and make them right, i.e. with all the little features and the good stability and support we've come to expect, Apple would still be in deep trouble. They would release a version of Mac OS X that only runs on Apple's x86 hardware, of course. But the core, Darwin, is open-sourced, so it would be a matter of days (or maybe weeks) until someone comes up with drivers to let it run on other hardware. We've seen how much trouble Apple had with clone makers, now think about what would happen if Apple moved to x86...

Anyway, Mac OS X would have a hard time on Intel. If you're used to Linux, compiling and running Unix software on Mac OS X is (excuse the wording) a pain in the ass. I know what I talk about, because I ported GNOME to Mac OS X (see http://fink.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]). Also, there is no Classic environment on Intel. This is a big drawback, because not all applications will be ported to Mac OS X right away, and you won't have the choice of running the classic Mac OS applications of x86 hardware.

Personally, I'll just keep running Mac OS X on my PowerBook G3 and be happy...