Text 1033, 86 rader
Skriven 2004-12-12 12:17:37 av Alan Zisman (1:106/2000.0)
    Kommentar till text 991 av Charles Scaglione (1:106/2000.0)
Ärende: Re: New System
======================
-=> Charles Scaglione wrote to Jay Emrie <=-


 CS> BTW, there is a crazy rumor going around the MS Newsgroups that Steve
 CS> Jobs has a "secret" version of his OSX that will run on an Intel or AMD
 CS> platform.  As you probably know, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates are not exactly
 CS> friends. <g>

The OSX for Intel issue periodically crops up in Mac-circles as well... in
those circles, there are two levels to it:

1) Is it feasible (or already done)?

2) Is it worthwhile for Apple commercially?

re. #1:

-- at its core, Mac OSX is based on BSD-Unix, the MACH kernel, and the old
NeXTStep OS... All three of these have Intel-processor versions; the text-based
Unix that underlies OSX (known as Darwin) has been released in a sort-of open
source license by Apple, and has an Intel-processor version.

So the Unix underpinnings for OSX already exist in publicly-available
Intel-processor versions.

The trick, however, is in what comes next. These include technologies such as
OSX's Aqua graphical-interface; that could be ported to Intel (with some work),
however, most likely for applications to work with it, they would need to be
recompiled.

More of a barrier would be hardware support; Windows includes a huge number of
drivers for hardware, both built-into the PC box (network cards, video
adapters, sound cards, etc, etc etc) and outside the box (printers, scanners,
etc etc etc)... these would have to rewritten for a new OS-- the Mac versions
wouldn't 'just work'. That would require a huge amount of work both for Apple
and for the 3rd-party hardware manufacturers. And since hardware driver
glitches are one of the major reasons for problems with Windows, it would be a
major cause of frustration with any new operating system.

re. #2:

-- Apple is a hardware company. Software, whether OSX or iTunes, is developed
because it sells hardware. That was a lesson that Steve Jobs realized early in
his return to Apple (1997/98) when as one of his first major decisions, he
cancelled the Mac-clone licenses that UMax, Motorola, and several other
companies were holding. While Apple was getting a license fee for every
Mac-clone produced, these systems were eating into sales of Apple hardware,
rather than dramatically expanding the market for Macs.

While a decision to license the Mac OS might have made sense in 1985/86 (when
Bill Gates suggested it to Apple), Apple's thinking now (and I think they're
correct in this) appears to be that making OSX available for Intel-processors
would end up costing Apple profitable hardware sales.

This of course, could change... especially if IBM/Motorola PowerPC processors
hit a major glitch. I would imagine that Apple keeps an OSX-on-Intel project on
the back burner as insurance against this possibility... but even then, I would
suspect that any product that eventually saw the light of day would require
proprietary Apple ROM and wouldn't be usable on run-of-the-mill PC clones.

Similar conjectures arise over whether Apple has a competitor for Microsoft
Office-- either just for Macs or for both Macs and Windows systems. A few years
ago, when Apple released both a browser of its own (Safari) and a presentation
package (Keynote), competing with the Mac versions of Internet Explorer and
Powerpoint respectively.

Apple already has Appleworks, sort of equivalent to (though better than)
Microsoft Works... with versions for both Mac and Windows (though virtually no
one, outside of a few schools that use both Macs and Windows) is aware of the
Windows version; it bundles Appleworks onto education and home-market Macs:
iBooks, eMacs, and iMacs... some work on AppleWorks, including Keynote
integration, and it could have a cross-platform, MS Office-compatible office
suite... again, the question isn't whether they could do it, but whether it
would make commercial sense to do so; presumably MS would retaliate by stopping
development of future versions of the (very good) Mac version of MS Office.
(They've already stopped development of the Mac version of IE). And since the
existence of a Mac version of MS Office is important for Apple's efforts to
have the Mac platform taken seriously in some markets, that's an important
consideration.

Similarly, Apple's bundling of consumer iMovie and iPhoto, and sales of
mid-market and high-end Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro have resulted in
Adobe's dropping development of several of its products for the Mac-market.
... Inet mail to: alan at zisman dot ca
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