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Apple considering Marklar?

Originally posted by edvniow
What version are you running?
WineX is supposed to be the best for games and a few apps, but as far along as it may be, WINE still isn't an option for many users since it isn't even close to flawless yet.
Click to expand...
I always compile the latest CVS version. I've been using both WineX (CVS) [for games] and CrossOver [for Office-like applications].

True, it's now flawless. But with CrossOver successfully supporting Office 2000, IE, etc., users might pay more attention than before; especially with WineX's increased gaming support.
 
A half-assed version of x86 OSX with only generic drivers isn't a good idea at all!

People would buy it, install it on their PC, watch it not detect their scanner, sound card, digital camera, etc etc.
Result: Macs suck because I can't use all my periphials with it!!

Even if it was made clear that it was only a trial version, they still wouldn't have a good experience with it if it didn't detect any hardware.

If Apple is going to release Marklar, then it's either all or nothing.


Now for the driver question, I didn't have to install any drivers for any of my PCI cards or whatever with XP, the only drivers I did intall were updated versions which were the responsibility of the maker of that certain periphial, not Microsoft. Hell, I didn't have to install any drivers for Lindows which supports far less hardware so if it can be some by a much less smaller company, I'm sure Apple could take care of that problem, especially if it worked with the periphial makers.


Now would Marklar cut into hardware sales?

I say it would dent it, but not much since Apple hardware sells itself, ask anyone with a Tibook and you'll know what I'm talking about.
A lot of people buy a Mac not because of the OS, but because of the hardware design.
Like I said before, many of Apple's customers have gladly paid a slight premium just to have an actual Apple computer on their desk.


How much does Apple really make off of software?

Look for a thread I started in the 'General Mac' forums called 'Is Apple slowly becoming a software company?' for a link to a PDF of their third quarter earnings, split between hardware and software.
You will find that about 90% of their earnings come from hardware.

But does the rest of the software earnings include the copies of 10.2 installed on the computer?

Who knows.


Another thing to consider, if Marklar were to be released and plenty of people were to install it on their existing PC, wouldn't they be more likely to buy a full blown Mac next time they're in the market for a new computer?
 
forget about it

If Apple releases Marklar it basically means it failed in attracting customers to buy into it's well-designed, tightly-ingtegrated computer model.

People would not want to plop down money for an OS if they sensed the company was desperate.



I say Just offer a free iPod with any mac purchase if you trade in your old PC. Switchers galore.
 
I guess it wouldn't be a great Mac experience if PC users were shown a version of OS X which was unable to detect hardware properly, but something would either need to be done to an x86 version of OS X to make users want to buy a full blown Mac or something would need to be done to make PC owners understand the advantages of the Mac hardware (beyond just looks).

Perhaps the x86 version could detect and set-up all hardware, but then each time the user attempts to print, a dialog box would pop up that tells the user that printing is not available in the x86 version of OS X. Digital cameras and everything else would work fine, but only the actual act of printing would be disabled.

Or perhaps OS X could expire and cleanly remove itself from a PC after a set period of time.

I guess the more I think about it, though, the best bet to really attract PC users to the Mac platform with minimal risk to Apple's existence is to simply better educate them. Let them know what PowerPC MHz really means, let them know that Macs are able to multi-task with minimal slow-down, let them know that dual processors for Mac run much differently than dual processors on a PC, let them know that programs are available that will allow them to continue running their PC programs on a Mac (if they have to). These are probably the biggest barriers to switchers.
 
Originally posted by JeffHendr
Let them know what PowerPC MHz really means...

...let them know that dual processors for Mac run much differently than dual processors on a PC...

Click to expand...

Yeah, it means they're slower!

(sorry, I couldnt resist! :D )
 
I have helped many people upgrade to Windows XP, and I have not run into any trouble with driver issues or incompatabilities EXCEPT for notebooks like Sony's where they have the stupid jog dial and you have to install special software for that. Otherwise, the base install on XP DOES indeed work on a majority of systems out there- HPs, Compaqs, Dells, etc. This proves that Apple too can do it. Here is the reasoning:

1. Taking out home baked boxes, if you step back and look at the PC market from, say, Best Buy, the major brands use Intel Processors on Intel Motherboards with integrated Intel Graphics and Intel Network Cards with standard integrated audio. The higher end ones use Intel Processors on Intel Motherboards with Nvidia or ATI Graphics and Intel Network Cards with either integrated audio, a CMedia based card, or a creative labs el cheapo or live/audigy.

2. Hard drives do not need drivers; dvd drives don't need drivers; and since CD Burners are generally pretty consistant between macs and pcs, the drivers are already there. Standard USB and PS/2 keyboard drivers are easy to write and USB drivers are basically done.

3. Apple does NOT need to provide enhanced drivers or anything like they're doing now on the PPC side. All they need to do is write a driver that has basic functionality- 2d and an open gl driver for video cards, standard front channel output on those 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1(!) sound cards. Not only will this relieve Apple of major driver duties, but it will also encourage users to contact the manufacturers and to get them to support OS X86.

4. I think that this stands to help PPC, not hinder it. Unless something radical happens, I don't think Marklar will succeed, and will probably suffer the same fate as BeOS (unless they get some huge support behind it). However, I think a number of people that normally would dismiss macs will be able to experience the OS and will switch because of it. And, if Marklar does sky rocket, since Macs and PCs will be at parity in regards to the OS, people will be comfortable with switching to a "mac" because, in their eyes, they're already using one. I can easily see laptop sales skyrocketing because of this, but maybe not as much in the desktop field. Apple definitely has the advantage with the TiBook and iBook in comparison to the Dells and HPs in terms of price and features, but desktops are a little more difficult (in my eyes).
 
Yeah, it means they're slower!

From the processor comparissons that I've seen, the Power PC is running at nearly the same speed as the Pentium 4. Apple seems to claim that they run faster on their website, but maybe that has to do with the fact that Macs don't require communication between the processor and cards to go through a PCI bus. It seems that at the moment, Apple is pretty much tied with Intel for speed, but the average PC consumer doesn't know it.

That's only if you're doing one thing at a time, though, on a freshly installed version of Windows. The minute you start doing more than one thing at one time on the PC and the Mac, the speed of the PC takes a dive, while the Mac runs at near full-speed.

Also, one of the biggest things that has made me convert over from the dark side is that Windows seems to randomly throw files around on its hard drive, making a disorganized mess. It randomly adds worthless garbage to its OS directories, and begins getting bigger and bigger. Soon, your new state of the art PC is running like a slug, while the Mac under the same usage, once again, seems to run at near full speed.

Another cool thing about the newer Macs is the whole dual processor thing. PC's do processing in serial where everything bottlenecks. A dual processor PC only uses the second processor if the first one is all filled up. Macs, however, are able to use both processors at once to get things done twice as fast.

I know you're just joking around about the speed thing, especially since Apple has gotten ripped off by Motorola lately, but I don't think the situation is quite as bad yet as people think.

If Apple WERE able to find a way to make Marklar successful, they'd have enough control over the market to accelerate their technology at a much higher rate, while at the same time dropping prices.
 
Originally posted by JeffHendr
Yeah, it means they're slower!

From the processor comparissons that I've seen, the Power PC is running at nearly the same speed as the Pentium 4. Apple seems to claim that they run faster on their website, but maybe that has to do with the fact that Macs don't require communication between the processor and cards to go through a PCI bus. It seems that at the moment, Apple is pretty much tied with Intel for speed, but the average PC consumer doesn't know it.

That's only if you're doing one thing at a time, though, on a freshly installed version of Windows. The minute you start doing more than one thing at one time on the PC and the Mac, the speed of the PC takes a dive, while the Mac runs at near full-speed.

Also, one of the biggest things that has made me convert over from the dark side is that Windows seems to randomly throw files around on its hard drive, making a disorganized mess. It randomly adds worthless garbage to its OS directories, and begins getting bigger and bigger. Soon, your new state of the art PC is running like a slug, while the Mac under the same usage, once again, seems to run at near full speed.

Another cool thing about the newer Macs is the whole dual processor thing. PC's do processing in serial where everything bottlenecks. A dual processor PC only uses the second processor if the first one is all filled up. Macs, however, are able to use both processors at once to get things done twice as fast.

I know you're just joking around about the speed thing, especially since Apple has gotten ripped off by Motorola lately, but I don't think the situation is quite as bad yet as people think.

If Apple WERE able to find a way to make Marklar successful, they'd have enough control over the market to accelerate their technology at a much higher rate, while at the same time dropping prices.
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Dude, I don't know where you got all your info, but you are so disillusioned on how

1. SMP systems operate
2. How file systems work
3. How processors and chipsets work
4. PPC and Intel chips compare

but hey, I'll give you a benefit of the doubt. What comparisons have you seen? Maybe I have no idea how computers work! I'd like to read some of these articles!
 
Dude, I don't know where you got all your info, but you are so disillusioned on how

1. SMP systems operate

My information may be outdated, but when I was building PC's before coming to the Air Force Academy, dual processor PC systems were pretty useless. The second processor only kicked in if you started running a second program or if the first processor was running at 100%.

I currently have a dual processor Dell workstation, and it doesn't really seem any faster now that I've added the second processor. Perhaps it's not the way the processors work on PC's under Windows XP, but instead is simply because the software may not be optimized to take advantage of the second chip.

2. How file systems work

Got this information after becoming interested following a discussinon on this board about the lack of the need to defragment Mac hard drives. From what I read on various articles on the internet, PC's are much more random when it comes to organized writing of files in order to gain a slight speed boost when writing to the drive. Macs, however, are supposed to take the extra time to write files in a manner that makes more sense.

PC's are notorious for jumbling up garbage information on your hard drive. Every so often you need to run a disk clean-up utility just to get rid of all the multiple copies of files or file fragments.

3. How processors and chipsets work

All the information I got about Macs being speedier by not having to go through a PCI bridge came straight off Apple's web site.

All the information I got about serial versus parallel processing (regarding multi-tasking) came straight off of Apple's web site. It is also information that was explained to me by a friend of mine who's a hardcore Mac user. At the time I hated Macs, but after listening to him explain the advantages of parallel processing under OS X, I began to do my own research and liked what I saw.

4. PPC and Intel chips compare

This is simply from most of the review/comparisons I read online. It's true that the Spec2000 ratings are nowhere close to each other between G4's and Pentium 4's, but Intel is supposed to design their chips to always exceed on this test. when doing side by side comparisons of actual systems, Mac's and PC's seem to be fairly comparable. Here's one article I just found on the net that falls into these lines: http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html I'm sorry I don't have time right now to find more.


If you'd like more support for my perception of Mac vs PC hardware, let me know, and I'll try to find the articles that I read after I'm done with my Econ 333 final this afternoon.
 
apple could switch to a software company

Look at how much of a software company Apple has become. They have started making such great software that people are buying macs just to use the software like iDVD, Final Cut Pro, and DVDStudio Pro. Lets not forget all the graphics and animation programs they just gobbled up that are way more expensive than the actual hardware boxes they run on. But it's not enough. From Apple's point of view, they still have a tiny market that is slowly growing if at all.

So for apple to put OSX out there for x86 boxes, they'd be able to increase their software sales significantly. And since it's their software, they are of course going to create the drivers and compile it for x86 (which isn't supposed to be such an issue from what I understand.)

Programs like DVD Studio Pro could be sold to every owner of Avid on the windows platform. Same with Final Cut Pro. Their market for software sales would increase by 95%. The diehards would probably stick with the Mac hardware, but when your software market all of the sudden includes _everyone_ instead of 3.5% of the people out there, who the hell cares about hardware?

With the switch campaign out there, it's obvious Apple wants converts and they want to tap into that other 95%. This is just another option they are keeping on hand.
 
Re: apple could switch to a software company

Originally posted by bretm
Look at how much of a software company Apple has become. They have started making such great software that people are buying macs just to use the software like iDVD, Final Cut Pro, and DVDStudio Pro. Lets not forget all the graphics and animation programs they just gobbled up that are way more expensive than the actual hardware boxes they run on. But it's not enough. From Apple's point of view, they still have a tiny market that is slowly growing if at all.

So for apple to put OSX out there for x86 boxes, they'd be able to increase their software sales significantly. And since it's their software, they are of course going to create the drivers and compile it for x86 (which isn't supposed to be such an issue from what I understand.)

Programs like DVD Studio Pro could be sold to every owner of Avid on the windows platform. Same with Final Cut Pro. Their market for software sales would increase by 95%. The diehards would probably stick with the Mac hardware, but when your software market all of the sudden includes _everyone_ instead of 3.5% of the people out there, who the hell cares about hardware?

With the switch campaign out there, it's obvious Apple wants converts and they want to tap into that other 95%. This is just another option they are keeping on hand.
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That would make sense since software is generally sold as almost pure profit. Once you pay the developers, the only cost you really have is cd's and packaging.

Earlier in this thread, however, it was said that 90% of Apple's profit comes from hardware at the moment. The only reason Apple makes so much money off of its hardware, though, is because their prices are highly inflated in order to stay in business. If you have a small consumer base, prices have to be high in order to pay off all the employees and designer/researchers.

By expanding its software consumer base, Apple could drop its prices in on hardware, which at the same time, would attract more users to buy the more reasonably priced machines.

One thing I would not like to see, however, is for Apple to completely abandon the hardware business. Apple always comes up with new, innovative ideas that other companies never bother to invest in. Apple's played around with RISC technology, altivec, parallel processing (velocity engine), and is now probably going to take the lead with IBM's help in developing multi-processor utilization at lower frequencies for higher speeds. I like this kind of inovation, and I'd hate to see it go.

If Apple did decide to leave the hardware market, however, at least they'd save alot of money by no longer having to worry about paying for research to keep up with Intel.
 
Originally posted by JeffHendr
Dude, I don't know where you got all your info, but you are so disillusioned on how

1. SMP systems operate

My information may be outdated, but when I was building PC's before coming to the Air Force Academy, dual processor PC systems were pretty useless. The second processor only kicked in if you started running a second program or if the first processor was running at 100%.

I currently have a dual processor Dell workstation, and it doesn't really seem any faster now that I've added the second processor. Perhaps it's not the way the processors work on PC's under Windows XP, but instead is simply because the software may not be optimized to take advantage of the second chip.
Click to expand...


SMP works like this (on any platform): Programs run as threads. Some programs- usually ones optimized for SMP- run as multiple threads. A SMP system simply works on two threads at once, one on each processor. At any given time you can have hundreds of threads going at once. For refence, my XP system right now has 335 threads running. My linux server has 146 running. Just because a program such as Appleworks only has one thread running doesn't mean the second processor sits idle. The second cpu isn't an overflow processor.


2. How file systems work

Got this information after becoming interested following a discussinon on this board about the lack of the need to defragment Mac hard drives. From what I read on various articles on the internet, PC's are much more random when it comes to organized writing of files in order to gain a slight speed boost when writing to the drive. Macs, however, are supposed to take the extra time to write files in a manner that makes more sense.

PC's are notorious for jumbling up garbage information on your hard drive. Every so often you need to run a disk clean-up utility just to get rid of all the multiple copies of files or file fragments.
Click to expand...


The FAT file system, just like many file systems, uses a tree style storage format. It uses a reference table to quickly find the correct node, which is called the File Allocation Table, where FAT got its name. Trees are organized in a systematic manner, not random. Nodes are written to the disk as clusters of data. File fragmentation, which occurs with every file system, occurs when a sequence of clusters cannot be written as one seuqence because there is not a large enough "gap" of blocks on the physical device, so it has to skip around. These problems are not exclusive to pcs; they are associated with PCs because the chkdsk/scandisk utility has been included with PCs for a long time, and Apple never included one until later revisions of Mac OS.


3. How processors and chipsets work

All the information I got about Macs being speedier by not having to go through a PCI bridge came straight off Apple's web site.

All the information I got about serial versus parallel processing (regarding multi-tasking) came straight off of Apple's web site. It is also information that was explained to me by a friend of mine who's a hardcore Mac user. At the time I hated Macs, but after listening to him explain the advantages of parallel processing under OS X, I began to do my own research and liked what I saw.
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According to Microsoft's website, Windows is secure :rolleyes: PCI TRANSFERS GO THROUGH THE PCI BUS. Do you even know what a PCI bridge is? Do you understand that 98% of pcs do not have an extra one compared to macs, and the ones that do are high end servers that have 20 pci slots? All chipsets in consumer computers, pc and macs, have a root bridge off of the chipset, and support usually 3-6 devices. Any more than that require an extra bridge, which is a pci device that expands to more pci devices- like take a usb hub and pluging it into another usb hub.


Parallel processing, once again, is related to optimizing programs for multiple threads by forking off different calculations to be done at the same time. It is a characteristic of programming, not architectures. OS X does not handle threads any different than Windows. OS X does not magically make a program multi threaded. Windows does not magically make a program multi threaded.



4. PPC and Intel chips compare

This is simply from most of the review/comparisons I read online. It's true that the Spec2000 ratings are nowhere close to each other between G4's and Pentium 4's, but Intel is supposed to design their chips to always exceed on this test. when doing side by side comparisons of actual systems, Mac's and PC's seem to be fairly comparable. Here's one article I just found on the net that falls into these lines: http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html I'm sorry I don't have time right now to find more.


If you'd like more support for my perception of Mac vs PC hardware, let me know, and I'll try to find the articles that I read after I'm done with my Econ 333 final this afternoon.
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I know that the DVE articles have been done a million times, but I stand by them because DVE is an independent website. I don't listen to benchmarks from PC websites anymore than I do from Mac websites.

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/07_jul/features/cw_macvspc2.htm

http://www.digitalvideoediting.com/2002/11_nov/reviews/cw_macvspciii.htm

If you want to learn more about processors and why what Apple says isn't always the truth (and what Intel says isn't always the truth), I'd recommend this: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...104-6174602-6399949?v=glance&s=books&n=507846. I'd loan it to you, but I have to use it to study for my final in my CprE 305 class where we build a processor http://class.ee.iastate.edu/cpre305/cpre305.html
 
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Parallel processing, once again, is related to optimizing programs for multiple threads by forking off different calculations to be done at the same time. It is a characteristic of programming, not architectures. OS X does not handle threads any different than Windows. OS X does not magically make a program multi threaded. Windows does not magically make a program multi threaded.

So is all this stuff on Apple's website about the velocity engine a bunch of garbage?

Do Macs make as much of a mess of the hard drive as PC's do concerning multiple copies of files and file fragments? Does OS X grow infinitely bigger the way that Windows does? Does OS X significantly slow down the way Windows does after a couple of months of usage?

In any case, thanks for the info. I'm still learning alot about Macs. I just got my first Mac-Powerbook 1 GHz with Superdrive. I thought all the info on the Apple website about the G4 processor was pretty cool, but maybe it's all smoke and lights to keep Apple users happy while their company is in trouble.
 
Originally posted by JeffHendr
Parallel processing, once again, is related to optimizing programs for multiple threads by forking off different calculations to be done at the same time. It is a characteristic of programming, not architectures. OS X does not handle threads any different than Windows. OS X does not magically make a program multi threaded. Windows does not magically make a program multi threaded.

So is all this stuff on Apple's website about the velocity engine a bunch of garbage?

Do Macs make as much of a mess of the hard drive as PC's do concerning multiple copies of files and file fragments? Does OS X grow infinitely bigger the way that Windows does? Does OS X significantly slow down the way Windows does after a couple of months of usage?

In any case, thanks for the info. I'm still learning alot about Macs. I just got my first Mac-Powerbook 1 GHz with Superdrive. I thought all the info on the Apple website about the G4 processor was pretty cool, but maybe it's all smoke and lights to keep Apple users happy while their company is in trouble.
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I hate to break it to you, but there's this think called marketing. They tell lies by twisting the truth in a complicated way to make people believe things that aren't necessarily true.

When apple claims to have 266MBs of bandwidth for PCI devices, they dont' tell you that is only for 64 bit pci devices. Most PCI devices, save high end scsi cards, are 32 bits, meaning they go at the same 133MBs speed that they claim pcs can only do. Secondly, the integration of a north bridge and south bridge chips into the system controller does not give an advantage- it still does the same work of the two, it still has the same elements. Not only that, but the two bridges in PCs are connected by a very fast bus, 266 or 533 MBs, and it isn't a bottleneck like Apple claims. In the old days (97-98) this wasn't so, but it has been since around 2000. If you want proof, Intel calls it part of their hub archietcutre, Via calls it the V-Link, and AMD calls is hypertransport, and it's also called a backside bus.

The velocity engine uses the same concept as the entire CISC instruction set does- work on mutiple data sets in the same instruction. THat is why people hated the CSIC instructino set- they were too complicated! But, what Apple has said was a disadvantage in the past is now a benefit. That's marketing.

"Jaguar includes enhanced preemptive multitasking, symmetric multiprocessing and multithreading capabilities..."

Hello? These have been in the NT kernel since it's inception with NT 3.1. These are basic computing concepts that Apple has marketed because they are fancy names. There are not unique to Apple; Apple is the only one that advertises them because they sound good. That's marketing. Look at Microsoft's marketing- see those same buzz words? http://www.microsoft.com/ntworkstat...ctOverview/FeatureList/Windows95/techdiff.asp Of course you do, they're there to sell products, NOT be a technical comparison of two technologies.

I know this may be hard to believe, but a standard means that it's the same (supposedly) across different things. PCI bus is standard. Memory controllers operate on standards. The processing of 1's and 0's are standard. Just because they use a different instruction format does not mean that PowerPC and X86 are completely two different beasts. At the heart they still have the same ALU's, the same shift units, the same floating point units(even if different sizes). What is different is how they are implemented (using a carry & look ahead adder, putting in multiple decoders to have 3 different pipelines) and the physical electronics underneath. Apple can go and put on their website how their floating point conforms to IEEE standards, that does not make it unique.
 
Intels 3Ghz P4 Hyper-Threading & OSX

Hyper-Threading Technology, which was pioneered on Intel's advanced server processors, helps your PC work more efficiently by maximizing processor resources and enabling a single processor to run two separate threads of software simultaneously. The result is greater performance and system responsiveness when running multiple applications at once. So you can multitask like never before.
Click to expand...

This sounds like a much more affordable and less power consuming technology than actual dual processing... imagine this technology in laptops.

Why doesn't Apple just build the best... most stunning x86 boxes. They would certainly have better margins than going with the IBM 970 ...which I imagine is a very expensive processor comparitively. Apple has some very clever engineers... they could devise a way to keep just anyone from installing Marklar on a Dell or some home-brew box. Maybe even buy slightly modified processors from Intel or AMD that have a unique identifier. Then embed code in ROM that makes Marklar only respond to the traits of those systems made by Apple. This way they won't cannibalise the hardware business... but move to a cutting edge platform that actually has an interest in being... well, cutting edge.
 
With all the information that locovaca is giving me, it seems that everything I thought was cool about Apple hardware is either a lie or has already been implemented by PC's in the past few years. It also seems, that PC's are faster on a lot of the graphics functions that Macs are supposedly the best at handling.

If all this is true, and there really is no longer any hardware advantage from Apple other than the appearance, Apple might as well design their OS around x86 technology.

Perhaps they would simply use x86 technology inside Mac systems with ROM chips added to prevent standard PC's from being able to install the OS, or perhaps they would release it for use on all PC's in an attempt to take on Microsoft. Either way, at least they wouldn't have to worry about companies like Motorola anymore, they would no longer have to worry about catching up with Intel or AMD, and they would be able to concentrate on making great, stable software.

Afterall, it is OS X's stability that causes most PC users to think about switching. Windows is becoming junk, and is so unstable, that I sometimes spend more time handling errors than getting my work done. If you could have OS X stability on an affordable system, I think more people would switch.
 
What makes a Mac such is really the software, not the hardware. Despite that, I would really wait on hoping for a switch to X86 until the 970 comes out. The 970 will really help bring parity initially between macs and pcs- what will be the back breaker is if they can keep the speed increases, through clock speed or architecure wise, and come close to pc speeds in things like rendering speed with PCs. The mac users will stay mac users regardless of speed, it's the rendering farms and low end servers that apple wants to get.

And I wasn't out to break your spirits or anything. I just wanted to point out that Apple does not have very many "exclusive" technologies. Just don't take Apple's marketing to be technical fact. Don't take anyone's marketing to be technical fact. According to Intel, hyperthreading can provide up to 968% increases (go here http://www.intel.com/home/desktop/pentium4/hyperthreading.htm?iid=Homepage+htland_ihcp4ht& and watch the demo), whereas, on the contrary, hyperthreading can hurt performance in some cases. That's why researching these technologies is important.

(PS: Here's a little stint about SMP and how it works: http://2cpu.com/FAQ/2cpusmpfaq.htm- it may help clear your confusion on what 2(+) cpus do for a system)
 
How I see the "Marklar" issue

Although I would certainly like to run it on my PC, I don't believe this would be Apple's first choice in putting "Marklar" out into the market.

IF Apple moves to an x86 processor ( due to inability to get updated PPC chips ), then Apple would most likely continue to have a "closed" system, but would use a more widely available chip ( Intel, AMD, etc. ).

If Apple decided they wanted to take a HUGE gamble and have an x86 release of OSX, that was NOT on a closed system, they would probably work out deals with vendors to provide a "Certified for OSX" certification for systems that would have a "pre-installed" copy of OSX with all of the included applications that come with OSX for PPC.

If the preceeding was a success and demand was there for a "software only" release for OSX for x86, then they would sell it with a disclaimer ( like Lindows.com does for LindowsOS ), that says not all hardware is guaranteed to work with it, etc.

If they ARE actually considerting an "Open" release of OSX for x86, I would really like to see the business plan on that. The possibility for destroying their hardware sales is HUGE. This is one reason that Microsoft does not compete with it's Systems vendors. At this point, if Microsoft tried to go to a "closed" system, it would be as devastating as Apple going to an "open" system.
 
If the 970 fails to meet a wider audience than just Apple... IBM will put it to sleep

Although I agree with imaginereno, I think Apple owes their customers and their investors the "other benefits" of the x86 architecture. The problem with Moto and the PPC is that their market is stagnant... and has been for a long time. Moto will never commit enough resources to properly develop the PPC architecture... they are doing a half-ass job!

The x86 market has a history of competitive and marketable growth. Intel has a lot of competition, and a lot of reasons to produce innovative products... a lot like Apple in their respective market. I think if Apple and Intel collaborated... it would be very interesting. It's only a matter of time before Apple makes the transition. IBM is not the golden goose that everyone wants it to be... if the 970 fails to meet a wider audience than just Apple... IBM will put it to sleep. This is assuming that there hasn't already been a mass migration to the Opteron or Itanium by Q3 2003.
 
Originally posted by bbyrdhouse
Hey Mudbug,

I just noticed that you live in Shreveport, LA. I grew up in Bossier.
Small world huh.
Click to expand...


Hey guys, from Shreveport also, now living in Ruston.

Small world indeed.
 
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