XPostFacto x86 and OSX on select Non-Apple PCs?

there is no way apple will allow this. they've already said as much and will back it up with lawyers I assure you. It won't exactly be difficult for them to do either. They could put in specific propietary hardware or firmware to prevent it, they could make it so OS X only supports very specific configurations. Someone may hack a way into it, but it will definiltey be illegal and probably far from easy. And darwin running on beige box PC's doesn't really have an effect. Darwin is not OS X, its just the BSD layer. Apple has complete control over the rest of it.

 

Just to add to the twist. PearPC on the PC allows one to run OS X in a window (like, Virtual PC but the other way round). It is very very slow, but as soon as you get an intel version of OS X, PearPC is going to be a god send for PC users. Apple can't stop PearPC now... will it be able to in future?

The way I see it, PearPC = more copies of OS X sold = more money for Apple = demise of Mac hardware. (This may not just be PearPc.. as soon as someone cracks OS X to run on any hardware!)

 

I don't really know anything about PearPC other that it's a PPC emulator, but perhaps the only system of checks that OS X has right now is the PPC CPU. I'd imagine that Apple will put a different series of checks in place for the Intel dist of OSX. PearPC will have to emulate whatever OSX x86 will be looking for. Apple may be able to stop to that.

 

With DRM and a simple USB dongle taken out of it's case and soldered to the motherboard, Apple could basically make hacking the dongle and DRM a painfully expensive situation -- especially when their cadre of lawyers show up at your door.

You know MS will extort some pressure to make sure the Apple keeps Mac OS from being loaded on scads of run of the mill PCs.

With the PowerPC, emulation wasn't quite up to full speed.

With the move to x86, Pear PC becomes nothing more than a hack to get OS to boot on a non-Apple PC.