Too much misinformation here.
Freescale are pretty big. They don't make mockups just for fun.
In a sense they do. It is all part of marketing to the engineering and product development crowd.
I'm starting to save from now.
That should be a life time policy!
Oh, and if it ran on ARM, there's no reason it couldn't run applications designed for the iPhone.
True!
The iPhone basically runs a stripped down version of OSX with a different UI layer (i.e. UIKit and it's own UI layer instead of AppKit and Aqua). If Apple ported AppKit, Aqua and the rest of the missing frameworks to OSX on ARM, they should be binary compatible and run a full version of OSX,
The question is why would they want to do that. Right now they have a quickly developing alternative platform. It is a platform seeing a lot of developer interest and frankly has dumped a lot of legacy crap. It makes no sense to add on to it, just to support old apps.
In any event ARM is not at all compatible with i86. It is an entirely different instruction set and processor architecture.
although it likely wouldn't be compatible with current applications (without Rosetta, but ARM processors are typically not powerful enough to run applications like this very well).
There is nothing better than arm based on the watts required to accomplish a specific task. Yes that is a different performance metric than many like to deal with but is very valid in the portable market. In any event there is a whole new generation of ARM processors coming that will be surprisingly fast. This do to much higher clock rates and architecture improvements.
Add to that dual or more processors and a new handheld device can be very competitive performance wise.
iPhone OSX is a subset of OSX with a few extra frameworks. Port the outstanding frameworks to ARM so that it becomes a superset of OSX, and you get an OS that looks and feels just like OSX, can run the same applications (with a recompile or Rosetta) and can run iPhone applications.
This is certainly possible but do you really want to go in that direction because what you will end up with is a confused application environment with competing user interface components. I'm not saying this is impossible rather I'm not convinced the results will be acceptable.
I'd rather see Apple extend the current Mobile OS to encompass the noted desires of the bulk of the users. That is the better move would be to implement copy and paste, a full BluTooth stack, a USB stack, printer support and whatever other components the developer world needs to deliver new unique products.
Similarly, if you ported the iPhone-specific portions of OSX to standard OSX, you'd get an OS that supports what OSX does today, and iPhone applications with a recompile for x86.
Again this is very possible but is it a good thing? The thing is there is a vast difference in how the user uses a machine on the desktop and how a handheld is used. The gesture system on a desktop should make sense on the desktop, Apple already seems to be going in the right direction here.
I think the latter is the smarter choice. That would force the tablet to be x86-based, but it'd pave the way for a future iPhone running some sort of Intel Atom processor, so that Apple would only have to maintain one version of OSX.
That would not be very smart in my mind. The problem is ARM still beats the best that Intel can offer for low power devices even when those ARM systems are built on much older processes. Also no matter how small the ATOM is an ARM processors is smaller thus leading to low cost SoC implementations.
Of course that is one way to look at it. ATOM biggest advantage, or I should say its successors, is that eventually they will be 64 bit devices. At the rate of technology growth, 64 bit processors might be needed in handhelds a lot sooner than many may want to admit to. Some will dismiss this out of hand but lets face it on the desktop a 32 bit only environment will soon be a thing of the past. In the handheld environment the constraints are of course power draw, but RAM density is increasing quickly and there are alternatives on the horizon that might displace DRAM and SRAM. I see Atom as a long term solution if Apple is really looking that far out into the future. Even then Intel still has to deal with ATOMs significant power draw.
Dave