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MacOS size is 1MB ?

O

orgazmo

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 6, 2007
16
1
I am having a debate with my CEO and he is claiming that MacOS is 1MB vs Windows which is 1GB. He says it was in Apples financials.

I pointed out that windows xp pro is 1.5GB installed and Leopard is 6.5GB installed and he said the financial papers were talking about "pure code" without all the "stuff"

Can anyone shed some light on what he is talking about? Is he talking about the size of the kernel or what? I would ask him but he is not a technical guy.
 
If he's not a technical guy, then he's probably full of it and has no clue what he's talking about. I highly doubt that Mac OS, let alone Mac OS X, is just 1 MB. By his logic, Windows could also be 1 MB due to "pure code."
 
he has no idea what he's talking about. ignore him if possible, or explain to hi that "stuff" is actually part of the OS and still code.

talk about idiotic... your CEO, I mean
 
he's probably talking about the back end coding, and it is possible osx is smaller than windows. remember, osx does come with A LOT of items such as drivers, programs, etc. that aren't in the actual OS code. those programs and drivers are add-ons to the OS.

Windows, doesn't have that much drivers and programs that come with the system, or if it does come with the system, it is very small.
 
smartalic34 said:
he has no idea what he's talking about. ignore him if possible, or explain to hi that "stuff" is actually part of the OS and still code.

talk about idiotic... your CEO, I mean
Click to expand...

Its actually in the Apple Financial report, so would you say Apple as a company is idiotic? He's far from an idiot.
 
it's also pure common sense. how can all of Leopard's code fit in 1 MB? thats the size (about) of a floppy disk.

even if the financial report does say 1 MB, he obviously doesnt have the technical acumen to even make an argument. unless he can explain his "stuff" argument, he's wrong, plain and simple.

as a caveat to this, there may be a kernel or something, like you say, that is 1 MB. but to say the whole OS is 1 MB is a misspeak, at least...
 
Just to be clear, the kernel is NOT 1Mb. Not Windows, not OS X. A while ago Microsoft announced they were able to shrink the windows kernel to 20Mb, and they called it minwin. This is because they aggressively optimized it. OS X is built off BSD (which in turn is built off old UNIX code), and other components which it retains most or all compatibility with.

Hopefully Snow Leopard will be much smaller and more streamlined. :apple:
 
Muncher said:
OS X is built off BSD (which in turn is built off old UNIX code), and other components which it retains most or all compatibility with.
Click to expand...

The OSX kernel has nothing to do with BSD. The OSX kernel is a message passing mach micro-kernel. The BSD layer is all in user-land above the kernel.
 
Not a chance that it's 1MB. I can't imagine where heard that. I haven't read the annual report but I doubt they compared a 1MB Mac OS X to a 1GB Windows. There's no way that they could justify that.
 
Once upon a long, long time ago MacOS did fit on a floppy disk - it had to since Macs didn't have any hard drives!

But even then, much of the OS was stored in ROM.

Now, the only way you can say OSX is 1MB is if you exclude pretty much everything which makes it OSX!
 
Let's just end this thread now. The mach_kernel on it's own is bigger than 1Mb. And the kernel on it's own isn't enough to boot a system: you need at least boot loader and some user-land to make it work. Also note the mach_kernel relies on there being quite a lot of other non-kernel processes up and running to provide the same level of functionality as a more monolithic kernel would.

As proof:

Code: 
MacBook-Pro:/ robbie$ du -hs /mach_kernel
9.8M	/mach_kernel

The kernel file on my Macbook Pro is 9.8Mb
 
XP is 40 million lines of code.
Vista is over 50 million lines of code.

Tiger was 86 million lines of code.
 
I think you should just start making Dilbert references around your boss and see what happens...

21701.strip.print.gif
 
orgazmo said:
Its actually in the Apple Financial report, so would you say Apple as a company is idiotic? He's far from an idiot.
Click to expand...

care to link that report?

or at least tell me the page -- I don't feel like flipping through the 180 page myself

was it the 10-k? the 10-q?, the annual report?, the Auditors statement?
 
cw2k7 said:
XP is 40 million lines of code.
Vista is over 50 million lines of code.

Tiger was 86 million lines of code.
Click to expand...


although, number of lines of code do not translate to efficiency and may not have any correlation with the size of the end product. It all depends on how it was coded and how it was compiled.

one algorithm may have as many lines as another, yet be many times more efficient.

haha though in this case, that might be wishful thinking. I just don't like giving Windows the benefit of any doubt :)
 
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