slughead said:
-->Apple<-- has ported Mac OS X to x86. Jobs made reference to it in an interview, even said that they were keeping it up, other rumors substantiated it.
Actually, Jobs said that it
could be ported to other platforms with relative ease, but all he was talking about was the actual operating system. Most modern operating systems are at least somewhat portable - XP has the Hardware Abstraction Layer, OSX and other *NIXes their shared code - and so that's not surprising.
What you don't seem to understand is that the application APIs, hardware drivers, and other important parts would
not be nearly as easy to move. Without them, having an OS is pointless for anyone that doesn't want to spend ridiculous amounts of time writing their own drivers. The problem with OS X on x86 hardware is that Apple would have
another case of pissing off developers with a major shift (68k to Power, Power to OS X on Power, OS X on x86) in their programming.
Simply put, why would developers even bother writing for OS X once it's on x86? They could stop selling anything but Windows versions, since the hardware exists to run their other product.
oh, so basically a power user shouldn't build their own system because grandma can't build it?
No, you're branching off into a completely separate issue now.
Apple doesn't license their hardware, and with good reason. Unlike any other computer manufacturer in the world, they have a thriving business operating systems, hardware, and software, pushing an integrated solution that's intended to be easy to use. When they opened things up and let others make hardware, they were hemorrhaging money as the secondary companies used every corner-cutting trick they could to try to eat Apple's margin rather than growing the market.
The end result was that the Mac platform didn't gain marketshare, Apple lost money, and the user end experience on the clones was more annoying. I know, because I remember needing third party drivers to make some of the hardware in mine work.
Because if grandmother can't build it, how in the world can you build a "comparable" system to Dell?
Yes, you can't, because the home builder isn't subject to manufacturing, packaging, advertisment, distribution, and other fees and concerns that a major OEM has to deal with. It isn't at all comparable to take a mishmash of parts and then a complete box, because the responsibilities are spread out thinly on the former and not on the latter.
What I tell you three times is true:
It's not a fair comparison.
It's not a fair comparison.
It's not a fair comparison.
I can see not comparing them in the context of grandma's computer.. but can we not compare 2 computers because of the low probability one will be bought by a grandmother more than another?
There's no low probability about it. The average consumer buys a whole box from a retailer of some sort, whether the original company or someone like CompUSA, and
that won't change unless the technology does. Computers are too complex for most people to understand the internal workings without a lot of experience, which is why many of the geekier people on boards like this one forget what the experience was like.
So I guess, since kids shouldn't be using ovens, d'giorno pizzas can't be compared to dominoes.
The rare child is capable of using an oven at a young age, just as the rare computer user can build their own. That doesn't mean you can compare the two directly, since the situations are different. To extend your metaphor, one could say that food that is available to the child who can cook is not an option for the one who can't, which means that the two are not able to be directly compared.
