On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 04:48:03PM +0800, Orlando Andico wrote: > Jobs would be crazy to have good driver support for OS X x86. He'd > kill his own cash cow.
If by "OS X x86" you mean run-of-the-mill non-Apple x86, then you're absolutely right. Although I do remember briefly scanning through a bit on Slashdot about some article that speculates that a possible strategy Apple may be taking is increasing market share by "leaking" Mac OS X for x86 to piracy channels. This got me thinking: I wonder what potential market Apple has in the retail OS business (eg: head-to-head with Microsoft) for non-Apple manufactured/engineered x86 desktops (eg: what most of us are running now). Might be interesting, although at the end of the day I hope F/OSS benefits from whatever happens. (And for the record: I work with three New World Mac boxes running Mac OS X Tiger on a fairly regular basis, but continue to hold Debian GNU/Linux as my operating system of choice, albeit on an inferior but better-supported non-Apple manufactured/engineered x86 laptop.) > The sad thing is, if Apple had done this in 1994 before Windows 95 > came out (because back then, Apple engineers had already gotten System > 7 running on the 486 processor) Micro$oft probably wouldn't be in the > near-monopoly position it is in now. > > Granted Apple is closed-source as well, and evil as well. But they > have a better record of creating innovation. Similar sentiments here, for which reason I hope F/OSS will benefit from the impending changes that the Apple-Intel teamup will bring, however way that goes. --> Jijo -- Federico Sevilla III : jijo.free.net.ph : When we speak of free software GNU/Linux Specialist : GnuPG 0x93B746BE : we refer to freedom, not price. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
