A Bit of History Behind the Mac OS X on Intel Project "Marklar"

[Makosuke]

+1, was thinking the same thing, the way this story is presented doesn't smell right to me at all. Steve even said it was intel compatible on stage during his first keynote after returning to Apple.

Count me in as one of the confused as well.

I'm not saying something like this didn't happen, but as-told it just doesn't seem to line up with the fact that NeXTSTEP supported x86 (and Sparc), and that Rhapsody for Intel was announced not that long after Apple purchased NeXT (1997 if memory serves), around four years before the timeline being discussed here. Or the whole Red Box Windows compatibility layer, for that matter.

Maybe the story here, getting muddled in the translation, is that that the engineer in question had it running on stock Wintel hardware, not something custom. That would make a lot more sense.

Let's also not forget that the really big deal with OSX on Intel--what made it such a painless transition, and probably the main reason it was so successful--was the incredibly-fast API-level PPC emulation in Rosetta. Which was technology that Apple licensed from Transitive years later. Without that the transition would still have been slow and painful.

Another aside, to those asking about/commenting on speed back in the mid-'00s, it's worth remembering that the G4 and G5 were generally a lot faster than the competing Pentium series of CPUs (the G5 was generally being compared, speed-wise, to big-iron Opteron and Itanium CPUs), but that the Core series of CPUs really shook things up (on top of IBM's difficulty getting the G5's power requirements down). The Core chips, while initially intended for mobile, were in most cases ridiculously faster than Intel's own Pentium 4 desktop CPUs--it was a tremendously improved architecture, with dual-core capability to boot. While there were some Windows compatibility arguments to be made, if Apple had switched from the G5 to the P4 (which I think was what the early dev towers used), there would have been waves of complaints.

I seriously doubt that it's a coincidence that both the Core Duo CPU line and Transitive's technology lined up before Apple actually made the jump.

 

[wikus]

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.

You know EXACTLY what I meant when I said 'PC'

Dont even think to assume your intelligence is greater by trying to point out that both are technically 'personal computers' when everyone else know PC is referred to a windows box.

 

[macnerd93]

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.

hmm which part is supposedly not true then? I was always told performance wise the intel equivalent to a 1GHz G4 is around a 1.6-1.8GHz Pentium, its what I've always stuck with and I can imagine it being quite true since so many factors have to be taken into account in terms of hardware and software optimisation amongst PPC Mac's whereas PC's were full to the core (at the time) of useless crap and bloatware. I'm sure the G4's Velocity Engine also helped in boosting the performance too on most tasks.

I have two G4 towers a Quicksilver and a Graphite G4. The Graphite was pretty fast for 1999 and is relatively useable for basic stuff like MS Word and AppleWorks if you run Panther on it today.

My 2001 800MHz Quicksilver beat a 2001 900MHz HP Pentium III machine running Windows ME which was actually clocked 100 Mhz higher than the QS. The G4 beat it at a variety of things mainly photoshop and graphic intensive applications. If I remember (did the tests a few years back) The Sims 1 game also ran better on the Macintosh than on the PC, which was stuttering like crazy, although to be fair I forget what graphics card the PC had, but the Quicksilver's is a 32MB ATI dedicated one.

The dual and later on quad G5's were screamers in the Power Macs and they blew PC's out of the water. In terms of value the G5's also worked out a a few hundred dollars cheaper too than a comparable XPS Dell system which couldn't even play multiple audio tracks in cubase if I remember the G5 tower played file perfectly.

I'm not disputing the fact in its later years PPC was flawed and dying, but the fact is it was faster at one point, Intel surpassed it though due to the PPC's need for cooling and mass power consumption making the G5's unsuitable for mobile use.

 

[thekev]

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 ?

They're still one oem. Look at how many different companies buy the same cpus from Intel. It's more likely that it was a lack of available resources, and a poor implementation once it got to Apple (cooling systems and logic board designs). I'm not convinced 64 bit architecture would have done much given the lack of a fully 64 bit OS. I'm aware that the transition slowed this down, but Apple wasn't very fast at getting their own software rewritten to 64 bit code, and other companies were complaining about Xcode. Several big ones didn't even port to Cocoa until Snow Leopard came out seeing as Apple had initially promised a 64 bit Carbon API (yes I know they said Cocoa was the future, but it forced developers to switch the order of their updates).

 

[onmi]

Great article...but once I saw "marklar" I thought of that episode of South Park with Starvin' Marvin the aliens...

 

[Jeaz]

I think the first comment is far more telling of the arrogance from the mac community.

As if PC users werent allowed to use Macs? This sentiment still exists today. Ultimately, it has ZEEEEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOO effect on anyones precious mac experience;

Person A has a Mac.
Person B has a PC.
Person A feels offended by the existence of PC.
Person B says: so what?

I recently called out the iPod Classic being an inferior device compared to the Cowon J3 and pointed out a list of FACTS on why that is so. I got TWELVE downrankings thus far. Jeff Smith-Luedke was right; Apple wants zero competition (in regards to HTC and Samsung release Android phones). The Mac userbase clearly has the same mentality and it really needs to stop RIGHT NOW.

Steve Jobs once said 'We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.' Well, as much as I know he didnt fully mean what he said (due to his hatred for Microsoft and Windows) he was actually right.

Furthermore, as a consumer, it only benefits us if there is competition, ultimately driving prices down, pushing innovation and bring forth better products for all. It seems like everyone on the Apple bandwagon just wants only Apple to exist and have innovation be stagnant.

I would be absolutely THRILLED if the macrumors admins made it a rule that any behaviour that displays such devotion lacking logic and rational be BANNED completely. All such posts should be removed as to contribute to an OBJECTIVE conversation in the forums without any fanboyism. I'm sick of it.

I agree, pointless hate for another platform/os or whatever is stupid, but in my experience it's FAR worse the other way around. Go to pretty much any non mac forum and say you are using a mac and they'll come with pitchforks after you. And if you are really brave, try posting on a gaming forum that you game on a mac.

I just wish we could all be friends

 

[Gemütlichkeit]

I only know Marklar from South Park

 

[IzzyJG99]

....Isn't "Marklar" the planet that aliens are from in South Park?

 

[Quu]

So, how did the hat taste?

I have to admit, I reneged and didn't eat any hats.

 

[usersince86]

Person A has a Mac.
Person B has a PC.
Person A feels offended by the existence of PC.
Person B says: so what?


I would be absolutely THRILLED if the macrumors admins made it a rule that any behaviour that displays such devotion lacking logic and rational be BANNED completely. All such posts should be removed as to contribute to an OBJECTIVE conversation in the forums without any fanboyism. I'm sick of it.

Sounds like you're offended.

I say: so what?

It's a computer/phone/smart device/whatever...
Don't get so worked up about people who get so worked up.

 

[jamesnajera]

I remember the G5 PowerMac back then. You knew there was a problem when the second iteration of the G5 had to have water cooling. What a lot of effort and risk Apple had to take to get a updated PowerMac released. It was at that point I believed Apple had issues with IBM and I was not expecting a G5 PowerBook any time soon.

When Apple released the intel Macs it was great. I knew a lot of people that liked the look of Mac hardware, but did not want to spend the money to have a computer they may not like to use and was not compatible with Windows. The intel Mac was perfect for this, as a consumer you could take the risk of buying a Mac, and if you did not like OSX, install Windows. A lot of my friends converted at this point.

I think the potential for another processor change will come when ARM makes a 64bit SoC. Until then OSX will exist as separate from iOS.

 

[StuffitXploadr]

years have gone by so fast. I still use my faithful eMac, which has served me well. well, they couldn't go back to IBM because Lenovo bought the personal computer division from IBM.

 

[66318]

Here's my take on the story, and what I think happened. I've read all the previous posts and many mention Rhapsody and the NeXTSTEP era of Intel compatibility as a possible reason they don't believe the story. The truth is probably somewhere in-between. As a disclaimer, I wasn't deeply looking at Apple's actions until the later OS X beta era, so most of my knowledge of Rhapsody comes from looking back.

From my understanding, Rhapsody developer preview 2 (essentially NeXTSTEP 5.1) was the last version to ship on Intel, released in May 1998. 1.0 (5.2) never saw the light of day, and the project morphed into OS X Server (5.3 to 5.6) that they shipped years prior to OS X 10.0.

Rhapsody was much more NeXTSTEP then it was OS X. The base kernel and Unix side is pretty much the same (what became Darwin), but the frameworks and UI were very different. Rhapsody was still using display postscript, had an odd mix of NeXTSTEP and classic Mac OS GUI elements, and there was no Cocoa yet.

When OS X 10.0 went into formal development I believe around May 1998, this is where Aqua, Cocoa, and Carbon started. They still took a large chunk of Yellow Box to turn into Cocoa, along with the Java hooks. At this point in time, Jobs had been the interim CEO for about 9 months (since September 97), and March of 98 was when a number of Apple projects were killed. May 1998 is also when the first iMac shipped, but it was too early to see if it was going to succeed. I bring this up because this is also likely when any serious Intel work stopped (right after finishing Rhapsody DP2), due to the dire situation Apple was in with no proven savior product quite yet. All hands on deck to focus on exactly what needs to be done with no room for anything frivolous.

The e-mail in the story shows a date in June of 2000. By then, Apple was back to being pretty stable, rising on the success of the iMac, and the other retuned products. OS X was still on it's way, with the public beta appearing in September 2000. Looking back at keynotes, January 2000 was the first time OS X was shown off with Aqua. At WWDC in May 1999 OS X was shown, along with the first DP release of OS X 10.0. Most of that demo was showing Quartz, and then describing the newly renamed Classic and Cocoa. Aqua was missing from the block diagram, and the second demo focused on showing Finder (then built on Carbon), and the Cocoa built Mail app.

My guess at reconciling the two sides is that this engineer was one of the main people who went through and picked up where Rhapsody left off, porting Quartz, Aqua, Carbon and Cocoa from PowerPC to Intel. December 2001 is shortly after 10.1 shipped, and is still early enough for Jobs to claim all OS X versions existed for Intel too. As the team ramped up in 2002, they had the manpower to fix up any non cross compatible code not only in the core of OS X, but also the newly growing Apple OS X app side with parts of iLife and other programs.

A lot of this probably remained pretty quiet inside Apple, since fixing higher level apps is pretty easy to do without raising too much suspicion. And since Darwin continued to exist on Intel back then, the low level kernel work where platform specific code is easier to spot was in full view of not just Apple employees, but anyone watching opensource.apple.com. These engineers could have easily been submitting code from fake non @apple.com addresses to cover their tracks.


My research of this comes partially from memory, along with the following sources to refresh my mind:
http://www.rhapsodyos.org/home.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_OS_X
Video from WWDC 1998
Video from WWDC 1999
Video from MacWorld SF 2000

 

[Rocketman]

Let's also not forget that the really big deal with OSX on Intel--what made it such a painless transition, and probably the main reason it was so successful--was the incredibly-fast API-level PPC emulation in Rosetta. Which was technology that Apple licensed from Transitive years later. Without that the transition would still have been slow and painful.

I seriously doubt that it's a coincidence that both the Core Duo CPU line and Transitive's technology lined up before Apple actually made the jump.

Exactly. It is also why killing it as an optional install, even for a fee, was evil.

BTW lots of "environments" have been mentioned in this thread. Is there a MacRumors (or private) concatonation of them with links to the various downloads, and a brief executive briefing as to what they are good for/with?

If no there should be. It would only take about 50 man hours.

I remember seeing Steve's OS pitch. Compilable for ALL platforms (some day). He specifically mentioned X86, PPC, Sparc, and a couple of others.

In reality he compiled OSs for many processors. 6502, 68000+, PPC G3+, Intel Core+, Pentium, and others.

Rocketman

 

[dolphin842]

[Allow licensing of OS X to PCs and] Say goodbye to everything that makes Macs and OS X great.

Not necessarily. Pretty much everything that personally annoys me about macs is hardware-related (glossy screens, static-laden audio ports, lack of hard drive expandability, hot internal temps, power supply issues) and could be solved by moving to a hackintosh/PC platform. Of course, geeks who build their own computers are in the minority and so will likely never get any attention from Apple.

hmm which part is supposedly not true then? I was always told performance wise the intel equivalent to a 1GHz G4 is around a 1.6-1.8GHz Pentium

It depended on the architecture. A 1GHz G4 was likely competitive with a ~1.8GHz Pentium 4, but by 2003 Intel realized that the P4/NetBurst setup wasn't scaling well. The Pentium M that resulted was much more competitive clock-for-clock with the G4.

I remember CNBC interviewing Jobs after the transition announcement in '05, wondering why Apple hadn't gone with AMD (which was still taking Intel to task at the time). Of course, Jobs was privy to Intel's Yonah project, which would become the Core Duo and be the bridge toward Intel regaining performance parity. All in all, the timing of the Mac transition couldn't have been better.

 

[filmantopia]

What's so marklar about marklar is how marklar the markler is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzq4YDt7V-o

 

[Makosuke]

All in all, the timing of the Mac transition couldn't have been better.

I think that's a bit backwards; it wasn't that the timing of the transition couldn't have been better, it was that the transition didn't happen until the timing was right.

If the Core Duo hadn't been on the horizon, Apple might well have gone with AMD (or just waited longer, though that was getting difficult with the G4 aging). If Transitive tech had been available much earlier, Apple might have even considered switching earlier (though in that case likely to AMD). Even as it was, Apple didn't immediately jump on Transitive--they waited until a suitable, powerful mobile processor was ready to go to pull the trigger.

----------

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.

It's funny, I was kind of the other way around. My very first instinct after reading those early rumors was that it was crazy, then about a minute later I thought about it and my gut told me they were actually true, and Apple really was going to jump ship.

I wasn't confident enough to wager the consumption of any headware, but despite the sort of weird, "world is changing" feeling and a whole lot of "can't possibly happen" posts here, it just seemed true.

I should dig back and see if I actually posted something saying such, so I can claim foresight.

I also remember the sort of weird feeling when I first got my 17" Intel MBP 1st gen, and how that feeling went away amazingly quickly when I realized that it "felt" exactly the same when I booted it up and started using it.

 

[the8thark]

You know EXACTLY what I meant when I said 'PC'

Dont even think to assume your intelligence is greater by trying to point out that both are technically 'personal computers' when everyone else know PC is referred to a windows box.

Next time say what you mean then. I am not a mind reader.
And everyone knows a window's box, a Mac and an iPad are all PCs.

 

[wikus]

Next time say what you mean then. I am not a mind reader.
And everyone knows a window's box, a Mac and an iPad are all PCs.

Did you find Apple's TV ads also confusing with 'Mac vs. PC' ??

 

[gnasher729]

I recently called out the iPod Classic being an inferior device compared to the Cowon J3 and pointed out a list of FACTS on why that is so. I got TWELVE downrankings thus far. Jeff Smith-Luedke was right; Apple wants zero competition (in regards to HTC and Samsung release Android phones). The Mac userbase clearly has the same mentality and it really needs to stop RIGHT NOW.

And I called you out on your post, because you basically don't know what customers (you know, the people who actually buy the products) want. So you are making totally false claims here of being modded down for daring to criticize an Apple product when in fact you were modded down for criticising it on points that are irrelevant to the customer.

As regards to Apple wanting competitors or not: I can't see Apple complaining when people are competing. They seem to have a problem however when instead of competing, people copy Apple's products. That's not competition.

Very interesting story. But curiously enough, it totally misses the question. How they do keep secrets is mentioned only in a single sentence and it's not particularly spectacular ("I am to forget everything I know, and he will not be allowed to speak to me about it again until it is publicly announced.").

In this case, keeping a secret is reasonably simple. You hire a person and tell them what they work on, and not to tell anybody, and you hire a person who knows what "do not tell anybody" means.

Now would be a good moment, that Apple (Tim Cook) would license MacOS to different PC manufacturers, since Steve Jobs is no more.

A stupid decision that would be damaging for Apple is a stupid decision, whether Steve Jobs is alive or not. Steve Jobs didn't pull decisions out of thin air, there is a reason. In this case, you can convince a certain percentage of computer users to use MacOS X instead of Windows. Apple manages to sell computers to 100% of those potential customers. Licensing MacOS would mean the percentage goes down.

 

[needfx]

Great article MR!!

 

[palmerc]

There are facts and then there are facts.

I think the first comment is far more telling of the arrogance from the mac community.

As if PC users werent allowed to use Macs? This sentiment still exists today. Ultimately, it has ZEEEEEEEEEEEEROOOOOOOOO effect on anyones precious mac experience;

Person A has a Mac.
Person B has a PC.
Person A feels offended by the existence of PC.
Person B says: so what?

I recently called out the iPod Classic being an inferior device compared to the Cowon J3 and pointed out a list of FACTS on why that is so. I got TWELVE downrankings thus far. Jeff Smith-Luedke was right; Apple wants zero competition (in regards to HTC and Samsung release Android phones). The Mac userbase clearly has the same mentality and it really needs to stop RIGHT NOW.

Steve Jobs once said 'We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.' Well, as much as I know he didnt fully mean what he said (due to his hatred for Microsoft and Windows) he was actually right.

Furthermore, as a consumer, it only benefits us if there is competition, ultimately driving prices down, pushing innovation and bring forth better products for all. It seems like everyone on the Apple bandwagon just wants only Apple to exist and have innovation be stagnant.

I would be absolutely THRILLED if the macrumors admins made it a rule that any behaviour that displays such devotion lacking logic and rational be BANNED completely. All such posts should be removed as to contribute to an OBJECTIVE conversation in the forums without any fanboyism. I'm sick of it.

You're assuming that your interpretation of the facts is sacrosanct. I just looked up what a Cowon J3 is based upon this email, I've been out of the iPod market for a while, and maybe your evaluation of the product based on the features is correct. However, it is an opinion.

I myself think the Cowon J3 is inferior to my iPhone 4S with iTunes in the Cloud and generally feel the dedicated music player era has passed. It is great that Cowon is trying to dominate a product that as far as Apple is concerned "the past." That is Apple innovating in my opinion, moving beyond the iPod by not spending more resources on that product line. Still the iPod Classic, as inferior as it may be in your opinion, is what some people want. They want that classic wheel interface, they want a portable hard drive, they want tight iTunes integration, whatever. If a group of people like that, who are you to say that they are idiots? I can think of many products I consider inferior to my choices, but still they manage an existence. So please keep in mind your getting wound up about other peoples choices.

 

[Can't Stop]

You know EXACTLY what I meant when I said 'PC'

Dont even think to assume your intelligence is greater by trying to point out that both are technically 'personal computers' when everyone else know PC is referred to a windows box.

You could learn a thing or two from that fat signature of yours … starting to smell a bit like hypocrite as of late.

 

[Suboptimus]

Here's my take on the story, and what I think happened. I've read all the previous posts and many mention Rhapsody and the NeXTSTEP era of Intel compatibility as a possible reason they don't believe the story. The truth is probably somewhere in-between. As a disclaimer, I wasn't deeply looking at Apple's actions until the later OS X beta era, so most of my knowledge of Rhapsody comes from looking back.

From my understanding, Rhapsody developer preview 2 (essentially NeXTSTEP 5.1) was the last version to ship on Intel, released in May 1998. 1.0 (5.2) never saw the light of day, and the project morphed into OS X Server (5.3 to 5.6) that they shipped years prior to OS X 10.0.

Rhapsody was much more NeXTSTEP then it was OS X. The base kernel and Unix side is pretty much the same (what became Darwin), but the frameworks and UI were very different. Rhapsody was still using display postscript, had an odd mix of NeXTSTEP and classic Mac OS GUI elements, and there was no Cocoa yet.

When OS X 10.0 went into formal development I believe around May 1998, this is where Aqua, Cocoa, and Carbon started. They still took a large chunk of Yellow Box to turn into Cocoa, along with the Java hooks. At this point in time, Jobs had been the interim CEO for about 9 months (since September 97), and March of 98 was when a number of Apple projects were killed. May 1998 is also when the first iMac shipped, but it was too early to see if it was going to succeed. I bring this up because this is also likely when any serious Intel work stopped (right after finishing Rhapsody DP2), due to the dire situation Apple was in with no proven savior product quite yet. All hands on deck to focus on exactly what needs to be done with no room for anything frivolous.

The e-mail in the story shows a date in June of 2000. By then, Apple was back to being pretty stable, rising on the success of the iMac, and the other retuned products. OS X was still on it's way, with the public beta appearing in September 2000. Looking back at keynotes, January 2000 was the first time OS X was shown off with Aqua. At WWDC in May 1999 OS X was shown, along with the first DP release of OS X 10.0. Most of that demo was showing Quartz, and then describing the newly renamed Classic and Cocoa. Aqua was missing from the block diagram, and the second demo focused on showing Finder (then built on Carbon), and the Cocoa built Mail app.

My guess at reconciling the two sides is that this engineer was one of the main people who went through and picked up where Rhapsody left off, porting Quartz, Aqua, Carbon and Cocoa from PowerPC to Intel. December 2001 is shortly after 10.1 shipped, and is still early enough for Jobs to claim all OS X versions existed for Intel too. As the team ramped up in 2002, they had the manpower to fix up any non cross compatible code not only in the core of OS X, but also the newly growing Apple OS X app side with parts of iLife and other programs.

A lot of this probably remained pretty quiet inside Apple, since fixing higher level apps is pretty easy to do without raising too much suspicion. And since Darwin continued to exist on Intel back then, the low level kernel work where platform specific code is easier to spot was in full view of not just Apple employees, but anyone watching opensource.apple.com. These engineers could have easily been submitting code from fake non @apple.com addresses to cover their tracks.
...

It's not that I don't believe the story, I'm sure it's true that her husband worked on the Intel port and the basic elements are true. I'm also keeping in mind that she is a third party and if she is not an engineer herself may not understand the technical issues involved.

The aspect of these Intel port retrospectives that I don't buy is the super-secrecy and the claim that nobody, even at Apple, really knew about it. I'm willing to believe that Bertrand told the guy it had to be super-secret. I'm willing to believe that living in the RDF, these guys even believed nobody could figure it out. I'm even willing to believe that Steve convinced himself that he was the only guy in the world who knew. But don't expect me to believe that nobody even at Apple knew or at least logically deduced that they had continued to maintain the Intel port that had already existed for seven years and been sent to developers in pre-release versions of OS X. I also get annoyed that the story is presented as if they started from nowhere and accomplished the impossible (or at least improbable) because again the Intel port was already there.

Basically what I'm getting at is even if these guys had their secret handshakes and swore everyone else to secrecy, they were fooling themselves. Aside from the fact that everyone already knew there was an Intel port, there were business reasons to infer they would maintain it. They were coming out of really rough times and needed to keep their options open, and with the AIM alliance crumbling and PowerPC becoming irrelevant on the desktop, keeping that port running was at least a threat to hang over the heads of their CPU suppliers. It simply would not make sense to let something so potentially valuable wither on the vine; look at how Microsoft's old PowerPC port of Windows NT came in handy when they decided to make a PPC-based video game console.

As I said, I understand why they were publicly silent. They were probably also super-careful about who had access to the codebase and machines running the port, because one installable image of the Intel port in the wild and everyone would be trying to install it on their home PC.

 

[D-Dave]

Given that Win8 has come in for some harsh criticism and Apple is now not wholly dependent on sales revenue from Macs since it has iPhones/iPad revenue, now might be a good time to license OSX to a select few Tier 1 vendors.......

Say, Sony, HP, Lenovo..... The real benefit would be to increase the market for the other things that Apple now does.

Hm...not sure if I like that idea. Recent builds of OS X do not feel as stable as those in the past have...opening up the OS to a wider hardware base may even increase that.