It does (or let's say, it did): Atari Computers used their TOS, than AMIGA had their Amiga Workbench, Nokia has Symbian. Do you remember Silicon Graphics - SGI? They had IRIX (of course there were some products from them using Windows NT 4). Or let's not forget about BeOS. Firstly, strictly developed for the BeBox, than, later it was "opened up" for x86 and PPC.
But anyway, i fully agree with your post.
That's true, but then the Amiga and AtariST and I'm guessing SGI also had fairly unique hardware. It wasn't just a matter of bypassing a security check and presto, it would run on their competitor's hardware. That was also somewhat true of the Mac of the day, but that didn't stop programmers from making Mac emulator interfaces to make it run (e.g. Shapeshifter) or even ones for the AtariST. As long as there's software unique to a given platform OR in the Mac's current case, a vastly more stable environment from which you can then launch other virtual operating systems, there's going to be a desire to run those operating systems on your current hardware. Who wants to buy a whole new machine if you can boot another OS on your current one? I run an Amiga emulator on both my Mac and my PC. It lets me run my old Amiga games, access my old word processor documents, etc. and is a whole lot of nostalgia as well.
To run Shapeshifter, all you needed was real Mac roms dumped (many retailers sold them for you) and a copy of MacOS 8 I believe. It was fairly common at the time. Several Amiga models also had "bridgeboards" to run MS-Dos and even Windows 3.1 on them. True, those were more like a computer on a card, but you could share resources quite easily and use one machine and monitor between the two.
Today we have the concept of the Virtual OS. Products from VMWare let you run virtually any Intel based OS out there on your machine. The GLARING exception is the Mac, which isn't allowed to be virtualized. It's the ONLY one that isn't allowed. Apparently, VMWare is scared of Apple suing them also. Several vocal people on here clearly support those decisions. Some of us do not.
CWallace said:
And beyond the software, what of the hardware? Windows supports thousands, if not tens of thousands of peripherals going back, in some cases, a decade or more. OS X does not begin to have that level of hardware support. And many companies, while they would be happy to support their current hardware with OS X drivers, are likely not going to be interested in supporting "legacy" hardware still in use in people's homes and in corporations.
I don't believe anyone was suggesting they should have to try and support those devices. In fact, I'd be perfectly happy if I could simply buy a machine that only supported the drivers Apple has already made with the possible exception of Video drivers where it's clear that Windows and Linux have a distinct advantage in that they get direct updates of video drivers from ATI and NVidia whereas Apple's drivers for such devices seem to just sit there.
For example, I just installed an update to NeverWinter Nights on my XP machine. I started the game up and it was suddenly choppy feeling with the 3D. I rebooted and tried again and no dice. I looked for any mention of such a bug and found a lot of people had the same problem. Apparently, updating to newer NVidia drivers fixed it for many people. I updated my video drivers which were less than 6 months old for my 7900GS and it went from 1.69 to 1.75 and sure enough, it's smooth as silk again. I've got an ATI 9800 Pro for my PowerMac 1.8GHz. It's clear the video drivers haven't been updated since shortly after the card first came out. They are around 4 years old. When I go from Tiger to Leopard, I lose about 40% of my video card's speed rating. Apple has since updated the drivers for a few newer cards it still actually sells and they appear to be doing better in Leopard now. But this card, which is supposedly fully supported under Leopard runs much slower than in Leopard, making certain games run much slower and watching certain videos that are nearly smooth in Tiger (e.g. 720P) are unwatchable in Leopard. Now they've announced Snow Leopard which is supposed to be mostly bug fixes and speed optimizations and most people seem to think PowerPC support will be dropped entirely. I doubt Leopard will ever run as fast as Tiger here (well the CPU scores are HIGHER under Leopard, but that's about the only thing that is; my Sata hard drives run 40% faster in Tiger, video is almost 90% faster, etc. and my system is well within Leopard Specs with a 1.8GHz 7448, 1.5GB of ram, all Sata hard drives, USB 2.0, etc.). If NVidia and ATI were providing drivers directly, I believe Leopard would already be running as fast as Tiger in video scores.
The problem I've read about is that Apple won't give enough information to let a 3rd party company do anything on a core level. One company I read about wants to make a USB 2.0 adapter to act like a 2nd graphics output for things like the Macbook which only have one head. They had to reverse engineer EVERYTHING to just get it to work period and it runs at less than half the speed of their Windows drivers because Apple will not cooperate. They're probably afraid more people will buy the Macbook instead of the MBP or something so once again there's a conflict of interests between the OS and the hardware ONLY because Apple does BOTH and wants to corner all the sales; they have a history of releasing competing products that work better than a 3rd party software or device can because they have information that they do not. When Microsoft is taken to court on similar charges, they have been FORCED to provide more OS information to 3rd parties so they can compete on a more even level. I simply do not see why the same would not be true of Apple if similarly challenged. Why would the courts EVER rule that way? I say it's because those are DIFFERENT MARKETS. OS X competes as an operating system, not as a video card. People seem to think Apple should be allowed to do anything they want but they ignore the fact that Apple exists in a community and communities have RULES like FAIR COMPETITION.
When you write a book and publish it, you have given up certain rights that you had when you had NOT published it. If you write something and keep it to yourself, it's yours to do anything you wish with. When you publish it, you are agreeing to follow certain rules within a country and even the world. Copyright law states your book will become public domain x amount of years after your death and there isn't a thing in the world you can do about it except NOT publish it to avoid that happening (short of what corporations like Disney are trying to do to get the laws changed to extend copyrights to infinity which is wrong, IMO). If you do not want it to EVER be public domain, then you CANNOT publish it. Do any of you on here understand that basic concept? When a company becomes a corporation it agrees to follow new rules that did not apply when it was not a corporation. You no longer OWN the company. It's put up on a stock exchange and people are publicly allowed to buy shares in your company. You have to follow certain rules to be incorporated in the USA. You are NOT given verbatim RIGHTS to do anything and everything you want. You don't even have unlimited rights when you're not a publicly traded company. You are responsible to a country's laws. If that country says you have to compete fairly and openly to do business here then that's what you have to do. If you don't like it, go move to a different country! (How's that for a stick in the old "Go buy Windows" argument you like to throw in my face, eh?)
The question here is whether Apple is violating Anti-Trust laws which forbid a company to do certain things that allow it to corner a given market and allows no fair competition between it and others wishing to compete in that same market. It all comes down to whether OS X is a separate market from the hardware it runs on. Will it run on anyone else's non-propriety hardware without artificial tying? The answer is obviously NO these days. Whatever it might have had in the PPC days, it publicly gave up when it decided to buy off-the-shelf hardware from the generic clone market. Its hardware is not generic in nature and nothing special what-so-ever save pretty cases put around it. By moving to Intel and creating Boot Camp, it's gained MASSIVE and I mean MASSIVE new sales opportunities because suddenly people that would have NEVER considered a Mac can now take a hard look because they don't have give up anything to use a Mac. They can still run Windows software and with Apple's advocated Parallels and Fusion, you can even run them at the same time using virtualization. But does this huge new market potential not come at a cost??? Apple is now using the same hardware as everyone else. They gained a new market but they ALSO became a PART of that same market. Thus they are now competing with the SAME HARDWARE as other Intel vendors. But here's where things get sticky because Apple wants to have their cake and eat it too. They don't WANT to compete with those vendors! They want to pretend they're still using somewhat unique hardware, but they are not. What they gain in market share, they also lose in uniqueness. So what some of us are saying is that if you're going to compete with the same hardware, then you have to follow the rules of that market and actually COMPETE not monopolize artificially by giving your hardware something you won't give to other hardware because that is not an even playing field. You or Apple may not LIKE that, but those are the rules laid out by anti-trust laws and fair competition. Like it or not, Apple is competing against the hardware of Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. And if they're competing against their hardware, then that hardware needs to do the same things. And it DOES the same things except Apple is using a DIFFERENT market (its Operating System market) to artificially leverage sales of its hardware compared to competitors. That is illegal TYING. It was tying before in the PPC days too, but it was never challenged because no one else was making that same hardware before and wanting to run their OS.
Now if this results in Apple being FORCED to license their OS for sale to that market, that's one thing. That's a software ruling to break the tying effect that is illegal. But given Apple is already selling the complete non-upgrade version of the OS by itself in places like Best Buy, the court could very well rule that they are already competing in that market and they simply lose their case against Pystar, basically rendering their license forbidding installation on non-Apple hardware null and void, in which case Apple would lose their ability to make licensing monies on top of having to let other hardware vendors ship with OS X. Thus, Apple is being very foolish to sue one tiny company for shipping clones with OS X because it is entirely possible they could open the floodgates for Dell, HP and others if they lose this case and they very COULD lose it for the above reasons. If the judge sees hardware and software as two distinct markets, then it IS illegal tying and Apple WILL lose. Well, it's two separate markets for EVERYONE ELSE out there using the same hardware and a variety of operating systems, ALL of which now run on Apple's hardware too and Psystar has demonstrated that OS X will INDEED run on generic hardware by other people once the artificial security checks are bypassed. Now I don't know about you guys; you seem to living in some fantasy world where Apple is always right and always wins court cases, but if I were a part of the board of Apple, I'd be wetting my pants right now because they just dug their own grave. What I stated is all a competent judge needs to decide the case. We already know tying is illegal. It's already been set by precedent. The only question is whether the OS and hardware are separate entities and not unique as they once might have been since moving to the generic Intel market. That is EASILY PROVEN. Thus, any competent judge will rule against Apple. Apple might win the battle in a charge that Psystar modified the OS, but they will LOSE the WAR for said reasons. I'd expect Dell Clones with OS X by Christmas 1999.
