On Saturday 11 June 2005 07:37, Rick Thomas wrote: > On Jun 7, 2005, at 3:20 PM, Eric Dunbar wrote: > > Plus, what this means is that Apple's future doesn't have to be > > exclusively tied to its hardware. With Apple running on X86 Dell now > > has a much stronger stick with which to beat Microsoft into > > submission, and, if necessary, Apple can become the OS supplier of > > choice for one of the big manufacturers. > > Don't get your hopes up. Remember what happened to the PowerPC Mac > clone makers. Apple believes -- rightly or wrongly -- that selling the > hardware their OS runs on is vital to their bottom line. > > Also, consider this: If Apple allows MacOS-X to run on commodity > hardware, lots of people will decide to try it out on their own > (commodity) PCs - just "borrow" an install DVD from a friend and give > it a go. Some part of those people will be convinced that OS-X is > better than Windows for their needs. Microsoft will see this as > competition. Their monopolist reflexes will take take over. They will > immediately proceed to squash the competition (Apple) like an annoying > bug. All MS has to do is withdraw support for MS-Office for Mac, and > Apple disappears in a cloud of slightly bad-smelling smoke. > Actually, I think Apple WILL definitely consider having their OS run on commodity PC's. Wether they will eventually make it happen, is another question.
I imagine a scenario as follows: - Officially, Mac OS X will not run on anything but Apple Hardware. - Mac OS X will almost certainly be hacked (or better, Darwin) by someone to make it run on non Apple hardware. Apple will likely make this a hard one. - Since the hack is not too easy, it will never get to average PC users, but a certain number of enthousiasts will definitely try this. - By evaluating this behaviour, Apple can make an estimate of the popularity of Mac OS X on PC. Important parameter 1. - Next, in their own labs, they can now do real performance comparisons with windows, since the hardware differences now are minor, certainly those that influence performance. If Mac OS X performs favourably on commodity hardware, they would have a selling point there also. Parameter 2. Again I don't know if Apple would eventually feel strong enough to go into competition with the Windows department of Microsoft. But I'm still curious to see this evolve. Geert Jan _______________________________________________ yellowdog-general mailing list [email protected] http://lists.terrasoftsolutions.com/mailman/listinfo/yellowdog-general HINT: to Google archives, try '<keywords> site:terrasoftsolutions.com'
