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A Bit of History Behind the Mac OS X on Intel Project "Marklar"
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Since Person A and Person B both own a personal computer. The issue issue is moot.
Person B could own a Mac or iPad. Since a both are a PC.
Due to compartmentalization, each person's perspective is likely to vary somewhat from now historical known events, and where they are still not known, each view should be interpreted as a view from a perspective.
That said this particular story gives insight into a change of emphasis in a particular time so it would be instructive to look back and see what product issues were arising then and two years hence which is a typical product cycle.
Rosetta was probably the transition defining moment IMHO.
But this story and the related user posts raises another rhetorical question. Why didn't the copy machines at Redmond take the open source stuff and morph it into a Apple compatible run time utility on PC's?
Another aspect of context to the story is it happens in December 2001. Some may not recall this very clearly but 9/11 (9-11-01) was not just a thing in NYC and DC and PA. The NATIONAL airspace was shut down and for weeks it was not up and running again. There was a large economic disruption as citizens stopped and contemplated the first large public and publicized strike on the Domestic US and a large city in particular. It was our version of the London bombing.
Unlike the Brits, we did not have a "stiff upper lip" and vow to move on despite it. Instead we went down the path of reflexive actions (as predicted and desired by OBL). It had real effects on business and the economy in a negative way for a long time.
So a "reboot of thinking" inside Apple makes sense as a backup plan to maintain shareholder income and equity in light of that strange and harsh environment. The fact it was essentially already running is both unsurprising and handy. What did not exist was a transition strategy and tool. That took years to implement.
Tomorrow will be interesting and yes I do think we will see Microsoft Office on iOS mentioned in some way.
Rocketman
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_17/b3729061.htm
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/200111/01-1116E/
BTW that top of the line laptop in 2001 has about the same tech specs as iPhone 1 in 2007.
That said this particular story gives insight into a change of emphasis in a particular time so it would be instructive to look back and see what product issues were arising then and two years hence which is a typical product cycle.
Rosetta was probably the transition defining moment IMHO.
But this story and the related user posts raises another rhetorical question. Why didn't the copy machines at Redmond take the open source stuff and morph it into a Apple compatible run time utility on PC's?
Another aspect of context to the story is it happens in December 2001. Some may not recall this very clearly but 9/11 (9-11-01) was not just a thing in NYC and DC and PA. The NATIONAL airspace was shut down and for weeks it was not up and running again. There was a large economic disruption as citizens stopped and contemplated the first large public and publicized strike on the Domestic US and a large city in particular. It was our version of the London bombing.
Unlike the Brits, we did not have a "stiff upper lip" and vow to move on despite it. Instead we went down the path of reflexive actions (as predicted and desired by OBL). It had real effects on business and the economy in a negative way for a long time.
So a "reboot of thinking" inside Apple makes sense as a backup plan to maintain shareholder income and equity in light of that strange and harsh environment. The fact it was essentially already running is both unsurprising and handy. What did not exist was a transition strategy and tool. That took years to implement.
Tomorrow will be interesting and yes I do think we will see Microsoft Office on iOS mentioned in some way.
Rocketman
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_17/b3729061.htm
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/200111/01-1116E/
BTW that top of the line laptop in 2001 has about the same tech specs as iPhone 1 in 2007.
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This story seems to indicate that OS X was "suddenly" developed to be able to run on generic Intel based PCs.
Like others have said Rhapsody ran on Intel as did OPENSTEP.
And, let's not forget that "Darwin" has always been an open source project, freely downloadable from Apple's website, which ran on most generic PCs at the time, too.
IMHO, ever since NeXTSTEP ran on Intel, Apple (reed: Steve Jobs) has never, ever, let Apple Operating Systems NOT run on Intel.
I understand that the Carbon API and Aqua GUI (introduced with Mac OS X DP 3 IIRC) got the PPC *must* as all new Macs were G3's at the time, and that Intel compatibilty was of less focus, but I'm pretty sure Steve was confident that all NeXTSTEP -> OPENSTEP-> Rhapsody -> Mac OS X builds were Intel compatible.
He knew Apple were in trouble with the PPC. The G4 was going nowhere. The G5 was impossible to get inside a laptop.
BTW, Steve never would have licensed Mac OS X to the Sony VAIO. He loved this laptop (he called it sexy, and it was the sleek model on which the Titanium PowerBook was "based") but licensing OS X to another brand would never make sense.
Like others have said Rhapsody ran on Intel as did OPENSTEP.
And, let's not forget that "Darwin" has always been an open source project, freely downloadable from Apple's website, which ran on most generic PCs at the time, too.
IMHO, ever since NeXTSTEP ran on Intel, Apple (reed: Steve Jobs) has never, ever, let Apple Operating Systems NOT run on Intel.
I understand that the Carbon API and Aqua GUI (introduced with Mac OS X DP 3 IIRC) got the PPC *must* as all new Macs were G3's at the time, and that Intel compatibilty was of less focus, but I'm pretty sure Steve was confident that all NeXTSTEP -> OPENSTEP-> Rhapsody -> Mac OS X builds were Intel compatible.
He knew Apple were in trouble with the PPC. The G4 was going nowhere. The G5 was impossible to get inside a laptop.
BTW, Steve never would have licensed Mac OS X to the Sony VAIO. He loved this laptop (he called it sexy, and it was the sleek model on which the Titanium PowerBook was "based") but licensing OS X to another brand would never make sense.
I think everyone who has followed Macs for a long time KNOWS who Bertrand Serlet is!
Hello ARM
It certainly did fail to deliver. And guess what. Intel is, in some ways, holding Apple back now. Apple was clearly forced to delay the release of these updated Macs for months, while they waited Intel got their Sandy Bridge act together. This "big bang" of Mac model updates is proof. We've been ready for months, Intel. What's your problem?
And just look at how far behind Intel is in the mobile space. It took Intel five long years to optimize their ancient x86 architecture and get Atom to where it is now. They're finally shipping faster, lower-power netbook processors. Too bad the netbook era is over.
It was obviously correct for Apple to go with ARM processors for iOS. And Apple could do the same with the MacBook Air first, then the rest of their notebook lineup. This would require a 64-bit architecture, of course, and probably more than 2 CPUs per chip. ARM published the 64-bit instruction set for ARMv8 last year. It's just a matter of time. It's inevitable.
It certainly did fail to deliver. And guess what. Intel is, in some ways, holding Apple back now. Apple was clearly forced to delay the release of these updated Macs for months, while they waited Intel got their Sandy Bridge act together. This "big bang" of Mac model updates is proof. We've been ready for months, Intel. What's your problem?
And just look at how far behind Intel is in the mobile space. It took Intel five long years to optimize their ancient x86 architecture and get Atom to where it is now. They're finally shipping faster, lower-power netbook processors. Too bad the netbook era is over.
It was obviously correct for Apple to go with ARM processors for iOS. And Apple could do the same with the MacBook Air first, then the rest of their notebook lineup. This would require a 64-bit architecture, of course, and probably more than 2 CPUs per chip. ARM published the 64-bit instruction set for ARMv8 last year. It's just a matter of time. It's inevitable.
Thanks for that detailed information!
While I knew some of that, there are plenty of people who might read this article that would know none of that. I would think that we would want this article to make sense to a fairly broad audience, especially given Apple's rising star these days.
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Don't you want people who haven't followed Apple for a long time to also know who Bertrand Serlet is?
While you or I might be aware of him, if you read the article from the perspective of people who might be curious about a story behind Apple's transition to Intel but also don't know the names of all the players (which is probably a good number of people), it would be nice to know who the players are and why they're important.
Depends on how you define "suddenly." If you (re-)read the story, you'll see this:
(Bold font added for emphasis.
)
Didn't Apple have a project porting the classic Mac OS (I want to say OS 7) to Intel, codenamed "Star Trek"? And then they had a new project to port Mac OS X to Intel when it was first released codenamed "Star Trek: The NeXt Generation"? Maybe I'm remembering wrong.
hahah that's exactly why I always laugh when people start saying the sky is falling whenever there is a change.
Those old threads crack me up with the ignorance out of some people.
I hope not. Just running isn't enough. One of the great things about Macs is their overall design, in particular how quiet they are. Magnetic power cords, which is just brilliant for laptops.
Of if they ever did license, I'd hope reviews would compare models on such factors, because these little details are extremely important to the overall experience and increasingly dwarf things like processor speed.
That's not true.
PPC and the G4 specifically had a huge advantage in floating point (FP) math but that was about it. This was useful in some select specialized applications - I remember our office G4 beating the pants off of our PCs in SETI at home.
In integer math, PPC and Intel were much closer - for the most part PPC was supposed to be "more future proof", "better", and "soon to be faster" but thanks to Intel ingenuity, resources, spit and sweat they never fell far behind, and ultimately of course when the G4 hit the 500Mhz (yep!) barrier, they went ahead.
Intel had this stupid, brute force solution which worked actually pretty well until it was replaced by the Centrino architecture. It was crap for mobile but then mobile wasn't important back then, and PPC soon screwed up majorly, the last G5 PPC tower requiring liquid cooling. As bad as the P4 was, it was never this bad.
You all seem to be forgetting about AMD at that time... AMD was king of the CPU speed wars from 2000 to until the time Conroe came out from Intel. The XP line and Opteron spanked PPC for the most part.
Hello? You do realize that ARM chips are currently way slower than even the slowest Intel chips? That's kind of the issue there.
The "ancient x86" architecture is a small add on on the chip which translates said x86 to whatever Intel needs at the moment, micro instructions or whatever else they want to run the actual core on. I am not saying it's trivial or easy to get to perform right but Intel has this tech down pat, they've been doing it for over a decade now.
I am sure Apple is impatient with the speed of development at Intel but where's the alternative. For laptops and desktops, Intel has won. For the foreseeable future at least.
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Yah, AMD was fightin' and doing well... until TDP became important, then they kind of disappeared with a whimper.
I am still impressed with Intel's dual strategy - they had the P4, and were planning chips with 6GHz and 600W TDP. I saw the road map, I can distinctly remember as it seemed insane to me to have a 600W chip. Of course this never came to be thanks to laptops and thanks to the 3Ghz barrier.
But Intel was also working on a completely different chip based on the P3, and that eventually became Centrino and wiped out AMD. AMD had nothing - all they knew how to do is compete with the P4.
Interesting thought, a lot of people talk about OS XI in the forums like it'll be out soon, maybe after 10.9,
but after seeing this article it made me go and watch the Intel announcement WWDC on Youtube, and Steve says OS X will last them 20 years. The first OS X was released in 1999 wasn't it? So OS X has a good long amount of years left in it.
but after seeing this article it made me go and watch the Intel announcement WWDC on Youtube, and Steve says OS X will last them 20 years. The first OS X was released in 1999 wasn't it? So OS X has a good long amount of years left in it.
I know some people would bitch & moan about how Apple did that before & say it nearly killed Apple. However, I'm the kind of person who thinks that just because Apple tried and failed once, that doesn't mean it can never succeed. While I also understand Apple not wanting to risk these other companies tarnish the Apple & Mac names, but Apple could always put something in the license to let them revoke the license as they fit.
I'd love to see Apple license out OS X Server and have real, enterprise-grade servers again.
Jumping to some conclusions there about what I did and when. As for the G5, you seem to have forgotten the hoo-ha at the time over Apple's claims of having the fastest computer.
For what it is worth, I was an early hackintosher and did get a Tiger build running on a Dell Latitude D600. That had a 1.6 Banias cpu compared with the 1.33 G4 in my iBook. About the only thing I could not get working was fully accelerated graphics due to no existing Intel drivers for the Radeon 9000 gpu but for anything cpu based it was not even close and more than the difference in GHz would lead you to expect.
I completely agree with you. I just voted you up (an was actually surprised to see so many down votes on this post!!). I have actually come across people like this, where I try to not even TALK about anything technological to them anymore!
Another thing that comes to mind, if after these people would justify an Apple action and show the alternative is really bad, Apple does do the alternative, somehow they'll justify that and show the previous thing was bad!!!
AnonMac50
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I'd always hypothesized that after Rhapsody for x86 was abandoned they had actually been working on it, just not in front of the public. Reading this story I also noticed an inconsistency.
Not sure that I'd choose to call it "doomed business relationship". G5 on the Mac Pro (or the PowerMac as it was called) it was a huge success, delivering a very powerful desktop/workstation, not to mention the 64bit architecture when Intel and AMD were struggling on that area.
I clearly remember, though, that IBM stated they had problems making a portable version of their CPU and that they won't do it after all, forcing Apple to move on (I know first hand as I've been waiting to see a new cpu on Apple laptops in order to upgrade my G4 powerbook). Up until then, Apple was trying to keep their laptops in the game by keep pushing the clock speeds of G4 further and further, trying to keep them comparable to the PCs. Eventually this had to come to an end, and powerbooks became too underpowered using G4 cpus.
Small or big partner by that time, I'm sure that if IBM had succeeded to predict Apple's momentum they might have tried harder to keep this partnership. I'm sure they thought that "this ship is sinking", but it seems they were just wrong. After all, who wouldn't want to be a partner with the richest company in the world ?
I remember the first time this rumor popped up that Apple would be switching to Intel and I confidently exclaimed to another poster on a different forum to this one that if Apple switched to Intel I'd eat my hat. I was that sure it wasn't true and I even listed all the problems they would have switching.
I really couldn't believe it when it turned out to be true. I was happy though and I bought one of the first Core Duo MacBook Pros.
I really couldn't believe it when it turned out to be true. I was happy though and I bought one of the first Core Duo MacBook Pros.
Depends on how you define "suddenly." If you (re-)read the story, you'll see this:
(Bold font added for emphasis.
I mean that this story indicates that development of OS X for Intel was "suddenly" being developed once it already run on PPC.
And I'm sure that Intel development of OS X and its ancestors (NeXTSTEP, OPENSTEP, Rhapsody) have always been parallel.
Of course, like I said, Carbon and Aqua development surely had the focus on PPC only as to get the "final" (okay... Public Beta) version of Mac OS X 10.0 ready ASAP.
But once it became clear that Motorola hit the 500 MHz (G4) barrier (and even had to put 450 MHz G4s inside newer Power Macs...) I'm sure Steve had his OS X guys fire up the: "get it on Intel, quickly" campaign.....
IBM made a business decision to concentrate on other markets. Apple was the last PowerPC-as-high-end customer. Even IBM abandoned PowerPC for workstations, using either x86 or POWER CPUs. And *NOBODY* else used PowerPC for high-end lapops. POWER was for ultra-high-end, PowerPC for ultra-low-end. At the time, it made no business sense for IBM to continue developing an ultra-niche product that was basically JUST for Apple at that point. (Same reason Motorola/Freescale stopped at the G4 - even Apple's use of the G4 was taking a lower-end G4 and getting hand-picked-to-overclock chips. The instant Apple dropped the 1.66 GHz PowerBook G4, Freescale stopped marketing PPCs faster than 1.4 GHz.)
While it was absolutely true at the time of PowerPC's introduction that it was a much better architecture than x86, and the G5 leapfrogged all x86 CPUs of the time in terms of basically every kind of performance, x86-64 made up the gap. x86-64 did away with most of the bad legacy parts of x86, (although they're still present for backward-compatibility, if operating in 64-bit mode, only the new/better 64-bit parts are used.) x86 has finally reached the point where it is a serious competitor to IBM's flagship POWER architecture, much less the watered-down PowerPC. No, it's not fully ready to replace POWER yet, but it is darned close.
(And this was written by a long-time PowerPC snob who owns a PowerPC IBM ThinkPad from 1994.)