Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, OS
Jumping on the bandwagon: OS X on x86! OMG!
So, everyone is posting about OS X running on x86. Wired picked it up today. Our sibling blogs Engadget and DownloadSquad both beat Wired to the punch on it. It's even getting a lot of attention on digg. So, why hasn't TUAW posted about it yet?
Well, I think we TUAWers are all suffering from the boy who cried wolf syndrome. Ever since the Mactel switch was revealed, there have been numerous rumors popping up saying, OMG! Developer OS X leaked and running on Windoze box!!! Get the torrent here!!!, but many people have been surprised by goatse at the end of a long download (and no one ever wants to see that). This most recent rash of reports may very well be true, but the thrill is gone for us. We all have OS X running on nicely styled metal Apple machines. Why get excited about running it on a clunkily designed plastic Dell?
I don't know about everyone else on team TUAW, but the next time you see a post from me about running OS X on a PC, it'll be when I actually have done the hack myself and have it running with tons of pics and performance notes.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
DArren Cornwell said 11:17AM on 8-12-2005
Your damn right - we're all suffering. It's not like we have to wait years for the offical x86 version of MacOS to be released. Sure enough it will more than likley have numerous form of encryption to prevent it running on non mac boxes and surer than that, it will only be a matter of time before some group of hackers break that encryption and gets in running on all sorts of platforms.
The real question is would you want to run an OS that was designed and built to specifically run on an Apple box on an unsuported system?
The key to OS stability is the fact that Apple produce the hardware, and there are very limited different permutations of said hardware - why do you think MS Windows is so prone to crashes? (Oh no.... wait.... thats called sloppy programming :)
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Steve said 11:48AM on 8-12-2005
This whole debate about Mac OSX on Intel machines is like...so what. People have been doomsaying Apple since I bought my first Mac SE 30 in 1989 (before that I had an Apple IIe and IIgs). Until Apple goes under I will buy a Mac regardless of whether or not the operating system will run on another manufactorers machine. I would not start buying Toyotas when I am used to driving BMWs. And I think the majority of Mac owners would agree with me. It is the stability of the software/hardware combination as Darren said. Even if Apple does decide to sell their operating system to Dell or whomever that would mean more income and consequently more chance for R & D.
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rodion romanovich said 11:56AM on 8-12-2005
> The real question is would you want to run an OS that > was designed and built to specifically run on an Apple > box on an unsuported system?
a) Cost.
b) An apple bow won't be so different to an dell box both will be Intel inside ;)
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Matthew Johnston said 12:00PM on 8-12-2005
I feel the hackers (sorry if not correct term) have shot themselves in the foot here.
By breaking whatever measures are in place to stop os x being installed on non apple machines they are only feeding apple the knowledge on how they did this which of course tells them how to prevent it in the future release of the intel version of os x.
For this i am grateful to whoever did this as someones impatience is only making the final version of os x more tamper proof in terms of getting it to run on non mac systems.
The last thing i want to see is os x on a dell.
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Wheels said 12:20PM on 8-12-2005
DArren, I so agree. I absolutely HATE it when Windoze people say "Of course Windows crashes every now and then - Microsoft doesn't have control the hardware like Apple does." Then they'll turn right around and state, rather proudly, "Windows is far more superior because it works with all kinds of hardware." Huh?
Frankly, I can wait until the Mactels because at least they'll have style. But, I really do think that in the future Apple will be licensing OSX and will figure out some kind of hardware approval/fee process so that PC makers will be able to make "boring Mac boxes." Yes, I know this was tried, but Apple is a different company, MacOS is a different animal (no pun intended), and it's a different market where Windoze is vulnerable.
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metric152 said 2:14PM on 8-12-2005
I just jumped on the apple bandwagon about a year ago and I really enjoy the stability. I don't see apple opening up their OS to run on whiteboxes because then they will have the driver nightmare windows deals with.
If hackers want to play with it they're welcome to it. Each time apple releases an update they'll have to break it all over again. It's easier for me to just buy hardware I know will work software. That's half the reason I moved to apple.
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trip said 2:47PM on 8-12-2005
One word, Tablet ! :D Fianaly !
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Don Wilson said 4:02AM on 8-14-2005
It's not too hard to install it. After getting the necessary files, it took less then 20 minutes to get it installed on my laptop. Certain things, such as Graphics Core and other PowerPC specific apps don't work, but that's what you would expect.
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Guillermo said 1:24AM on 8-15-2005
I just finished installing it on my PC. It's a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with an Intel D865Perl mobo, 512 MB RAM, and a Geforce 5200 video card.
It runs a little slower than my 1.5GHz Powerbook and I'm having a little trouble getting the ethernet card on the mobo to work.
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Guillermo said 10:15AM on 8-15-2005
For the most part everything works: Mail, Safari, iPhoto, iCal, Address Book, Quicktime, iChat, Bonjour, ethernet, sound card, USB ports, printer (Epson C63), DVD drive, CD-RW drive, flash drives... Nice.
iTunes doesn't work. DVD player doesn't work. Safari crashes on some websites. System Preferences crashes in the screensaver and international prefpanes. Core Image and Quartz Extreme are not supported. I see some weird artifacts when some menus fade out, and the Expos?nd Dashboard animations are a little slow.
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chad walsh said 11:14AM on 8-15-2005
Can someone help me understand why Apple would NOT want its OS running on non-Apple machines. From a business perspective, Microsoft has a monopoly on this market. Capture even a small percentage of the world wide OS market for Intel based machines and Apple stock goes through the roof. I'm not a techie, so I don't understand why Apple would NOT want to give consumers the option between Windows (a notoriously unstable system) and Apple's OS (a system famous for ease of use and innovation)? Add to that the fact the Windows in a knock off of Apple, which Mr. Jobs has surely not forgotten, and I cannot understand why Apple would not go after the Intel based OS market? Or are they....
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chad walsh said 11:15AM on 8-15-2005
Can someone help me understand why Apple would NOT want its OS running on non-Apple machines. From a business perspective, Microsoft has a monopoly on this market. Capture even a small percentage of the world wide OS market for Intel based machines and Apple stock goes through the roof. I'm not a techie, so I don't understand why Apple would NOT want to give consumers the option between Windows (a notoriously unstable system) and Apple's OS (a system famous for ease of use and innovation)? Add to that the fact the Windows in a knock off of Apple, which Mr. Jobs has surely not forgotten, and I cannot understand why Apple would not go after the Intel based OS market? Or are they....
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Boo Wisdom said 11:14PM on 8-16-2005
Well, I have it running on an Intel 2.67Ghz with 488MB ram, and it runs GREAT! The download has the hacked CoreGraphics to run on SSE2 machines... but if you have a 2.5Ghz or higher, you support SSE3 for the most part, so I just overwrote the hacked CoreGraphics with the original one form the Developer DVD, and now Rosetta works... iTunes, DVD player and ever PPC compiled program I have installed runs out of the box on intel without any problems. There is an extension in the Extensions folder that checks for the dongle chip on the Apple Intel cpu to see if you can legitimately run it, but once you remove it from the Extensions folder and reboot, it runs FAST... in fact, my 2.67Ghz processor runs Mac OS X x86 faster than it runs Windows XP!
They already have firefox browser for x86, so I have no need for Safari. Soon they will have Apple Airport patched to allow it to detect broadcom chipsets natively like it does on the PPC version of Mac OS X!
I love this... I have it dual booting with Windows XP, which I will be dumping once they get Wine ported over to OS X for Intel so that I can run Windows software on Mac without the need for Windows!
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Boo Wisdom said 11:31PM on 8-16-2005
Guillermo, if you have SSE3, you need to overwrite the CoreGraphics and iTunes and DVD will work as well as PPC compiled programs. The patched CoreGraphics is also what is causing the artifacts... the speed of the animations is due to the Extension you have to delete from the Extensions folder. It keeps checking for the dongle chip every few seconds, which takes up like 90% of the CPU every few seconds... once I removed the Extension and rebooted, EVERYTHING runs fast... the animation is smooth... no jumping or slugishness. Go to /System/Library/Extensions and delete or move AppleTPMACPI.kext from the Extensions folder and then reboot. You WILL notice the difference immediately!
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hohoho said 2:33AM on 8-19-2005
Intel Macintosh or do they stay with apple Macintosh to keep the disciples happy thinking there still using a true mac, which disapeared years ago in the form of the G3. slowly but surley the mac has become an IBM PC. Intel OS is Just the icing on the cake, the compatability of OSX to run on pc cpus Is in the core of the OS apple in the past has tried to hide this compatability. For the record apples OS is a rehashed version PC OS called Unix & the OSX GUI is a rip off of PC Linux Gnome GUI. Apples innovative developments are innovative in truth but only on the apple platform.So it appears to me that apple is just another of the many brand name pcs to avoid that flood the market with incompatabilities and limitations.
Steve jobs well known as the reality distorter with his constant false grand claims Again just clever marketing to appear to be ahead of the pc market to the ill informed minority. Prime example PowerPC's supposed performance advantage over Intel. fabricated by devious apple engineers. Now I can run OSX on the latest Pc harware Instead of my new G5 watered down harware limitations
I say goodbye to Proprietory Systems why would you want one
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Mike said 11:41AM on 8-19-2005
hohoho, you have strong opinions, but that facts you use to back them are mostly false.
Firstly, it's not just that apple is developing os X for intel (x86) platforms, but they are planning to move their hardware over to intel as well, knocking IBM out of the picture entirely.
Second, OSX is based on BSD (a variant of Unix, but not unix), or in fact the mach kernel, but it is greatly modified. It is not simply a rehashing.
Lastly, OSX simply is not based on Gnome in any way! I have no idea where you got this from. Gnome and OSX do not share anything in common, except maybe a few libraries (gtk...), and they look nothing alike.
All this said, I do not use os x, and I in-fact use linux. Thus, I am not defending apple, just correcting your grossly misguided "facts".
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