On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 05:45:50PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I posted this to a newsgroup yesterday, the more I think about it the more I think someone *could* make a go of selling a Apple like solution. Anyone care to comment ?
Port it over to a platform like x86 where there are a thousand manufacturers competing with their own little tweaks, variations and buggy third party drivers combined with the massive task of support for legacy hardware and applications and you'd either have the unstable mess that is Windows XP or limited manufacturer hardware support as towards Linux.
Well, Mac OS X is partially a port of BSD Unix and NeXT technology, NeXT made releases of their software for x86, BSD Unix runs on x86, Darwin exists for x86 and there are a few bits of other software that are obviously not ported yet and lots of bits of GPL stuff in OS X.
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?
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? 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.
Adam