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Why doesn't Mac OS X not work on a PC?

N

NASCAR

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 3, 2010
21
0
This probably has been asked, but I would like an updated answer.

If Macs and PCs are similar as far as hardware components, what exactly causes a OS X not to work on PCs? ( no hackintosh please ).

I'f you had two systems with the same or similar specs, why can't you just put in the snow leopard disk in the PC and have it install?

Thanks!
 
I think the major difference is that Mac has NO bios. Mac uses EFI. Hackintosh bootloaders emulate the EFI in order to boot Macintosh.

Not to mention that since Mac uses a very limited set of hardware, so it doesn't even have drivers for most PC hardware.
 
Macs use EFI while PCs use BIOS, I think that's one issue. Even though most of the hardware is the same in Macs and PCs, there are some differences. Ever wondered why are there like million different motherboards? Usually each model is a little different, thus some are better for OS X than others.
 
Hellhammer said:
Macs use EFI while PCs use BIOS, I think that's one issue. Even though most of the hardware is the same in Macs and PCs, there are some differences. Ever wondered why are there like million different motherboards? Usually each model is a little different, thus some are better for OS X than others.
Click to expand...

EFI is not the problem by no means, there are already Mobos with UI-EFI for windows based Pcs.

And OP, you can get OSX to run on a PC.
 
iirc, OSx does have some code to prevent this. It's not that strong though.
Apple doesn't want to make it too easy for people to just install OSx on any PC since Apple is a hardware company that uses OSx to sell comptuers.
 
old-wiz said:
iirc, OSx does have some code to prevent this. It's not that strong though.
Apple doesn't want to make it too easy for people to just install OSx on any PC since Apple is a hardware company that uses OSx to sell comptuers.
Click to expand...
There are conspiracy theories that say Apple embed chips in to Macs which perform an authentication 'handshake' with OS X to install/run. These are all untrue however.

Hellhammer said:
Even though most of the hardware is the same in Macs and PCs, there are some differences. Ever wondered why are there like million different motherboards? Usually each model is a little different, thus some are better for OS X than others.
Click to expand...

Apple can and, I'm sure does tweak parts of the OS to perform better on certain hardware, as I'm sure is evident in the new Air (OS X far outperforms Windows on the Air, even taking in to account Apple's shoddy Windows drivers). For example, modifying the way OS X manages and uses the hard drive (booting up, standby) based on the fact that all Airs ship with an SSD.

But comments I often hear such as "The OS is tailor made for the hardware" are by and large, normally untrue. Snow Leopard runs on every Intel Mac made since January 2006, every Mac is refreshed once or twice a year, and has anywhere up to 6 different models with endless BTO configurations. We've seen the Core Duo, Merom, Penryn, i7, Santa Rosa chipsets, Nvidia chipsets, Xeon based server architectures with ECC fully buffered memory, ATI cards, Nvidia cards, HDD's and SSD's. Apple would need 10x the amount of OS X engineers to "tailor" OS X to each individual Mac. I don't buy the statement "some motherboards are better for OS X than others", it's just a standard architecture.
 
nick9191 said:
I don't buy the statement "some motherboards are better for OS X than others", it's just a standard architecture.
Click to expand...

There are still differences. Some WiFi, audio, Bluetooth, network etc chips simply don't work in OS X because there is no drivers. Those are usually soldered into the motherboard, thus I said some mobos are better than others. Maybe there is something to do with firmware/BIOS and stuff as well.

There must be something why Gigabyte mobos are preferred for Hacks, or at least that is what I've heard, seen and read.
 
NASCAR said:
This probably has been asked, but I would like an updated answer.

If Macs and PCs are similar as far as hardware components, what exactly causes a OS X not to work on PCs? ( no hackintosh please ).

I'f you had two systems with the same or similar specs, why can't you just put in the snow leopard disk in the PC and have it install?
Click to expand...

MacOS X includes some code that checks for the presence of one particular chip with one particular 64 bit code inside. It is not particularly difficult to circumvent this, but it means that installing MacOS X on a PC and getting it to work is automatically not just copyright infringement but also a CDMA violation. It would be quite possible for say Dell to build a computer that is 100% MacOS X compatible, but putting that one chip with that 64 bit code into their computer would be illegal.


nick9191 said:
There are conspiracy theories that say Apple embed chips in to Macs which perform an authentication 'handshake' with OS X to install/run. These are all untrue however.
Click to expand...

Well, Psystar was convicted for about 700 CDMA infringements, one for each computer they sold together with MacOS X, with a fine of $2,500 for each infringement.

old-wiz said:
Apple doesn't want to make it too easy for people to just install OSx on any PC since Apple is a hardware company that uses OSx to sell comptuers.
Click to expand...

Apple's copy protection is just hard enough to circumvent to get protection by the DMCA laws. And there is no copy protection at all that would keep anyone from making illegal copies running on Macintosh computers, first for the reason that you say, and second because Apple wants to avoid any problems with copy protection for legitimate users.
 
Last edited:
With Sandy Bridge coming out and mother boards with true EFI rather an a hacked about version, the ability to simply drop in an OSX install disk could be closer, even more so when Apple move to Sandy Bridge, it will be interesting to see how they prevent it then.

I accept there will be driver issues, but these can be got around

Kimbie
 
Kimbie said:
With Sandy Bridge coming out and mother boards with true EFI rather an a hacked about version, the ability to simply drop in an OSX install disk could be closer, even more so when Apple move to Sandy Bridge, it will be interesting to see how they prevent it then.

I accept there will be driver issues, but these can be got around

Kimbie
Click to expand...

According to this thread, it doesn't really matter. There have been boards with EFI before too. Hacks will still be needed to run OS X on PC
 
nick9191 said:
There are conspiracy theories that say Apple embed chips in to Macs which perform an authentication 'handshake' with OS X to install/run. These are all untrue however.
Click to expand...

While this chip is non-existant for current Macs, I understand that it was used on the BIOS based Mac Developer platforms in 2005, and had TPM chips. That is why the original OSx86 hacks used a special kernel, so it would not check for the TPM chip. When the first Intel Macs shipped, they also included TPM chips, but were not used at all, and were not needed. All Macs after are missing the TPM chips.

AnonMac50
 
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