On Wednesday 06 April 2005 7:45 pm, Adam Bower wrote:
Basically, yeah Apple could put everything into a big mixing pot and come out with a version that runs on x86 and it would probably be very cool, worrying about some drivers isn't really a huge problem as if you buy crap hardware then you get crap drivers, if the hardware already has a Mac OS X driver then why should the x86 version be any crapper?
I remain unconvinced, it's hard to properly QA software or hardware for the X86 platform because there are so many variables and inconsistencies. If you say "Supports Mac OSX" then you are really talking about a very limited range of machines that you have to test your product against.
The reason that Apple won't release Mac OS X on x86 would be because it would instantly kill their hardware lineup, who would buy a super-expensive Mac for twice as much as a cheap x86 box with Mac OS X?
Agreed apart from the bit about Mac's being super expensive, that's only true if you ignore things like build quality and sensible design and just compare clock speeds.
I struggle to find laptops as well designed as say the iBook or Powerbook's for less money when I start to consider other things that are important to me (portability, battery life, build quality).
When the Dual G5 was first made available it was very hard to build a X86 based machine with the same real world performance for much less money and that's completely ignoring the fact that they are one of the best designed and built Workstations I have ever had the pleasure of pulling to bits.
You can beat the Mini Mac on a straight price/performance comparasion, but factor in subjective things like near silent running and the tiny form factor and you'll struggle to find anything to compare. Just off the top of my head a MiniITX board, case, memory, Hard drive, Slimline CDRW and PSU comes to about £250 retail (and that's for less performance and does not include an operating system or any manufacturer support)
and given that how many people would then buy Mac OS X for x86 when they could just pirate it? At this point Apple will have managed to kill their revenue stream, Apple would die as would Mac OS X and a large company that opposes M$ would crumble into the dust. This would be bad news and not very good news for Linux as M$ (who are imho far more evil than Apple will ever be) would now have a larger market share and more of a stranglehold on that monopoly of theirs, *just* kept it on topic there with that last line.
Agreed