I have a problem with Apple's attempts to limit the PC's that the new x86 port of OSX runns on.

In the oldern days, Apple produced a product you couldnt gt anywhere else,
a Desktop computer running the PPC architechture (a competing arch to x86).
both x86 and PPC have there advantages.

With there Unique product, Apple also gave a Free Operating system called FreeBSD, which it customised a little, and added a new interface ( Aqua )

This was all fine and good.

Then they Port OsX to the x86 architechture, meaning that MacOS can run on any computer following the intel instruction set (including AMD)

Then they add loads checks, to make sure that you bought your PC from Apple, and didnt build it yourself, or buy from del.com.

Surely this is anti-competative ?

they could charge what they like for PC's. And you would still HAVE to buy from them because MacOS has been crippled, to only run on that machine.

Apple is a hardware company more than a software company, MacOsX is just FreeBSD (Free) running Aqua.

Now they are switching to x86, they are just anouther PC company like Dell or PC World, that are selling there computers pre-installed with a Free UNIX Operating system, with Aqua as bundled software.

Once upon a time, Making a product portable was very important, now companys like Microsot and Apple seem to be doing the exact opposite.

True, I don't see what the big deal is all about. I mean, do you want to make it easier for the end users to use your OS or do you want to make it as difficult as possible? It's as if Apple doesn't want it's products to become popular.



I didn't know that. I was under the idea that you could run it on any x86 intel processor... celeron, p3, p4. You mean we have to still buy the 'special' intel PC's from Apple? Then what's the big difference between buying a Mac and an intel PC? Obviously, if they are going to fine tune the chip to give optimal performance with MacOS, it'll suck big time with other OS's like Windows or Linux. We'll have another whole new range of compatibility issues. Dam... are these people crazy? x-(



I didn't know that. You mean to say it looks just the same ... or it is the same?

IMO, something is really wrong in their (Apple's) philosophy. How about the IPod? They made a great product and gave everyone a pain in the behind by making it difficult to change the batteries yourself. Ok, many people can do it themselves, but what about people who are completely tech-ignorant? Does Apple want to make their products more useful and versatile or not?

Well officially there is logic behind it.. they cant to ensure compatibility with all apple hardware (peripherals and such) which they can do much more easily if they control the hardware. Also it's genius for them since they have proven they CAN sell expensive Apple hardware and get away with it, so people still will whether they think it's "right" or not. Especially since you can run windows on an Apple x86 machine, once people need to buy a new machine many will likely buy the mac ones so they have the choice to run either/both OS's.

This isn't to say I agree with it, I personally plan to wait for someone to crack the protection then I'm gonna try to tri-boot windows/linux/osx on my current machine... but we'll see haha.

Sorry about the double post but I joust found this on slashdot -


http://www.macbidouille.com/news/2005-08-17/#11401
english translation - http://forum.osx86project.org/index.php?showtopic=393

I didn't think they would actually start going after the people cracking OSX to run on other hardware... caught me by surprise...seems like something M$ would do haha

Apple = Style
Apple = Beatuty
Apple != stable
Apple != helpful
Apple != clever
Apple = Useless

Apple like to go for a specific nice looking style, usually quite low colours and usually not a lot of black, lots of white, they like beauty and dont want people going out and buying another PC, they want to sell you their beauty and show you how nice it is. They only want their hardware because thy know it works and cant be bothered supporting anything else.

Apple isnt stable, I hate people saying it is, everytime I use a mac, it never crashes granted but it never performs at any speed, its anti-crash system stops that I guess. It detects crashes apparently and prevents them, while a good idea if it reduces the speed of the mac by about 40% I dont think its worth it, macs always perform slow for me, even in the apple marketing table, the big machine still didnt compare to my middle range pc.

Mac isnt helpful, fair enough I havent spent nearly as much time as I should trying to learn to use it, but it confuses hell out of me, middle and second click are important, I learned to use the basics of KDE in about an hour. Was configuring gnome after only a few hours of it, and FWM95 was fully configured and running an XP skin and all withing about 20 minutes of using it. Aqua and Mac classic, both scare me and I find them pretty useless to anything that actually needs done, its built for beauty and widgets not for anything useful.

Apple doesnt seem to know what customers want, if they bought an apple PPC then they want to use an apple, next the bring out an Apple x86 and will only let you use the hardware they choose, tell me, how is this a step up in any book?

Apple in conclusion is absolutely useless, I can do anything a mac can with Windows and Linux, on hardware of my choice and get it working right and not have to crack hell out of it. I cand esign and update my PC as I choose and have as many OS's as I want in it, apart from one, and yep you guessed it, Apple.

so true

Just for people who don't know... != == does not equals QED

But yea, you've at least got to give them credit... they made an OS thats mostly just a modified version of free software, sell it for a good chunk of change, have been selling more and more overpriced mediocre hardware with it... and most people dont see a problem with it haha.

No one cares about quality anymore, it is the business tricking innocent tech-ignorants to fall into their trap and collect their money.

M$ is the cause of this.

xboxrulz

Guess I need to step in and clear somethings up here. First off I have one of the Mactel developer boxes and yes, I am bound by NDA on what I can say and can't say about it.

1) Yes you will have to purchase Apple branded hardware boxes.

I suppose people will hack the system to install on commodity boxes. Why Apple doesn't want to do this is because Apple software is designed to work with Apple Hardware. Ever think its odd that when ATI ships a video card for Mac the drivers work. When they ship a card for Windows it takes 6 months before a decent set of drivers are out? That is part of the design philosophy that things should just work. I have worked in several IT (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, True64, NT4 for Alpha) eviroments and the one now is 100% Macintosh and it is the easiest to maintain. Apple doesn't want to spend the money to support every peice of hardware on the market and I don't blame them. The fact that everything works so well together on our network at work is a real blessing. The IT staff expense is 1 full-time employee that handle day-to-day issues and general tech support and me as a consultant for 20 employees. That single IT guy can actually spend time developing emergancy plans and manage backups because there are rarely any problems he has to deal with. We aren't worrying about the virus of the week. Hardware is more expensive up front, but they tend to use systems for upto 6 years. When they moved to the G5's, over half the desktops were G3's and the rest early G4's.

2) OS X is FreeBSD...kinda

Yes and not really. There is a lot based on FreeBSD, but the Kernal (the core of the OS) is MACH based. Almost like how Debian is FreeBSD with Linux kernal. Really the main part of OSX is the GUI interface Aqua. So to say it is a user friendly version of FreeBSD isn't exactly true, but most major *iux apps have been ported and it's not too hard to port from *iux to OSX.

3) Comment about Apple not being Stable.

OS 8 or 9, yeah I would have to agree with and I didn't even touch a Mac and made fun of people who did. OS X is a different ball game. My iBook once went 183.4 days of uptime. A latop here. FInally the battery died completely on a 16 hour Journey from Europe to the United States. All I had to do was close the lid and open it again and it didn't crash.

In fact I have only seen OSX crash once to the point where it became a paperweight. Even then we managed to SSH into the box and setup a new user account for the person and it is still working 2 years later. Then you also have to know the person that did it. Literally the guy that can touch a computer and brake it.

We use Apple for video production. Editing, title effects using Lightwave 3D, post production in After-Effects and Shake, etc. Frankly when it comes to high-end, high load stuff, you can't get much more heavy duty then what we do. Some of our G5 boxes have 8GB of Ram, and all but the iMacs in the front office and the Xserve Cluster nodes have at least 4GB. Under high load and high stress, the systems perform great. Now we have applications crash, but rarely will it ever take the entire OS with it. We can lock them up when we have FCP, 30 windows of Photoshop, Safari, iTunes, and Aftereffects running and you go to check your email. Compare that to 30 windows of PS, Avid Xpress, itunes, Firefox, then open Outlook on your PC and see what happens. Basically, you really have to try and crash our Macs.

4) Speed issues.

Depends on what you are doing. The G4 and G5 are behind in terms of rendering technologies. With Apple's move to OSX and the development of Final Cut Pro served to really PO Adobe to the point Adobe went to making PS for the PC platform first, Mac second. Most in the rendering community will say that PPC vs. X86 that x86 wins hands down. I think that assement is accurate. However, most Apple vs. PC speed tests really aren't helpful. Why? So the PC's are fast in 1v1 rendering tests in Photoshop of After Effects. Want to know why so many people switched to Mac in the Video production arena? Because Final Cut Pro 3 was far superior to Adobe Premiere 6. Premiere 6 was a POS. What's the point if it took 5 hours to render in Premiere on PC if it crashed 60% of the time 2 hours into the render vs taking 6 hours in FCP on a Mac?

5) The *iux workstation Market

It wasn't that long ago I can remember engineering and graphics workstations costing USD 20,000 per unit from DEC, Sun, or SGI. Apple began to offer an extremely affordable and more powerful Unix workstation than anyone else out there. BTW, you can also run Microsoft Office and a wide range of other common commerical software. Plus all that stuff written for Irix or Solaris isn't that difficult to port to OSX. OSX really was the death nail into SGI's coffin.

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Frankly what I can understand is the reaction from people in the computer user world. There is a cult of "AMD RULZ and LINUX is even better" that rivals that of the Cult of Mac. While Apple has been running on PPC people's been like, well you can spend the more money on the PPC, but because it won't run games I am not going to buy it. Now that Apple decided to use Intel chips, for good reasons I can't go into, suddenly everyone thinks that they have a right to run Apple OS X on what ever they want.

Most people that say this really don't understand Apple's market base. It is of low tech consumers that want things to be easy and work for a few tasks, and then powerusers willing to pay a premium for specific tasks.

People think that AMD64 is da bomb. I still have a Quad DEC Alpha 500 with 2GB of ram in the basement with NT 4 for Alpha and Lightwave 5.6. I also have a PC version of Lightwave 5.6 and let's see who's system would win.

MacOSX is based on a free Operating System Called FreeBSD.
Apple Boast about this since FreeBSD is famous amungst nerds for being stable, secure, fast, and probably the most dominent UNIX environment available.

Im not saying this is a bad thing, But FreeBSD already ported to x86.

As for controlling the hardware, i understand this point.
HOWEVER... Apple could just say that by Buying your PC from apple, you are guaranteed compatability, whereas if you buy somwhere else, you will have to check compatability yourself, make sure you dont have hardware that is not supported yourself.

If apple publishes the compatability list, places like Pc world could then Sell computers built with only MacOS compatable components.

Seems like the mac guy and the linux guy missed was. One reason most people dont want to use macs is they have not much choice as to what hardware to use. Its either buy from mac or cant use it at all have seen lots of good vidio cards that put mac's cards to shame. They maybe more relable at times. Yet I've had 53 operations running at the same time on this PC I builted from scrap parts try that with a mac. Opps sorry everything part of the board I forgot at least most of the parts are. With a PC I can upgrade as log as I want to use the same motherboard and then change it also. With macs you throw them out to upgrade its cheaper. Also mac is trying to look more like windows from what ive been seeing. The bottom line is mac is too protieitarey and that will be their down fall in the long run. I do like the os that mac use's but seeing that their is a hack out there to run it on a pc. I may just have to look into it. But 99% of my programs are for windows only.