x86 Mac?

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It is sort of all over the news right now. Apple has made it official that they'll be moving the Macintosh from PowerPC to intel-supplied chips. This is a mind-bending thing. First and foremost, this puts them into a competition with Microsoft that they haven't had for YEARS.

Hardware
This puts Mac stuff on the same hardware as the rest of the PC industry. This'll allow Mac-heads to tweak their systems in a way they haven't really enjoyed in the past. It is a small segment, but it'll give the uber-geek crowd something new to play with.

On the other hand, it'll introduce driver-hell into Mac-land to an extent it never really experienced. There is a reason Microsoft is getting very strict about the drivers they'll allow in Longhorn. I expect pain from this one.

The move means that PC-vendors can offer Apple-OS as an option next to their existing Windows and Linux offerings. This'll improve the availability of the Apple-OS and possibly bring more converts. Presuming, of course, that Apple will allow OEMs to sell their OS.

Software
Head-to-head tests of software packages between x86/Windows, x86/Linux, and x86/Apple will give good ideas as to the relative strengths of the OSes in question. Good for tweakers.

Wow. Amazing stuff.

2 Comments

I'm not sure how much freedom they'll really provide, hardware-wise. In theory it'll certainly be possible to drop in the hardware we all know and love from x86 land, but will it really be supported? I've heard a lot of scuttlebutt about Apple continuing to offer support for a much more limited set of hardware (compared to XP) in order to preserve as much of the "Mac Experience" as possible.

Yeah. I suspect they'll take the same route SuSE/Novell is with their Enterprise Server product in that they'll only certify it on certain specific hardware configs. One thing that control over the hardware gives you, and Apple has shown this over the last decade, is a tighter control over the user experience. Windows has been known as the crash-a-lot OS, and a lot of those crashes were due to driver conflicts. Apple never had that problem, much fewer drivers to play with, so therefore has the reputation of being a rock solid platform.It would surprise me not-at-all to learn that Apple isn't going to let the Dell/Compaq/Gateways of the world resell their OS. It'd be a bad move, in my opinion, but it wouldn't surprise me.