Ian Ragsdale wrote: > On Jun 7, 2005, at 11:51 AM, Joseph Alotta wrote: > >> I used to be a NeXt developer. This announcement is very reminiscent >> of the NeXt announcement to stop making those little black boxes and >> bring NeXt OS on Intel chips. We had just bought a ton of hardware >> and they demo this clunky 386 PC. First of all, it looked nasty. We >> were used to that elegant design. Secondly, it kept crashing. It >> destroyed the culture. It was like putting Haydn into the juke box >> at a disco. Everyone went home. The vice president of our division, >> who bet his career on NeXt, resigned and NeXt languished for years. >> >> It is the same scenario playing out again. Will Steve Jobs never learn? > > > Did NeXT produce their own boxes, or did they allow installs on any PC > with supported hardware. I believe that is a key difference. Apple > boxes will be exactly the same as they would have been, except they > will have a different CPU. You still won't be able to install OS X on > a commodity PC without jumping through a lot of hoops. >
Why wouldn't you? Memory, drives, video, etc. are all the same right now. Motherboard has pretty standard features, other than it is setup for a Power processor. Apple has been going cheap for a while, SCSI -> IDE ring any bells? It would be a real shame if they didn't allow you to install OS X on any commodity PC, once again back to that whole volume issue. Without a different chip, Macs really are just a pretty looking box with a nice software package preinstalled. Darwin runs on Intel already (mostly) which is the real key, if Apple goes through with this and won't let you install on a commidity PC then they really missed the boat, in fact I would say they couldn't even find the dock. > I think the only way that you look at it is that if IBM couldn't or > wouldn't deliver the processors Apple needed at a reasonable price, > what else could Apple do? > Will definitely agree with you there. Though you have to love the media spin making it seem like this is Apple's choice to drop IBM, uh huh. > Ian > I like Macs as much as the next person, but if they are going to go the Intel route, they might as well go the whole way. In fact being able to install on a normal Dell, would be one way for them to win back some huge user spaces, lots of companies would love to get out from the M$ licensing structure, but just aren't willing to fork out that much cash for all new hardware when they shouldn't need to, aka just to run another Intel based OS, and admittedly Linux is much harder to learn (or at least seems it). Not to mention theoretically (ask your lawyer, anyone know for sure?) they should be able to transfer over their Adobe/Office licenses which run natively. http://danconia.org
