Simon C

Yes an intresting topic, now AMD have released the 64 bit athlon, could it theoretically be possible with changes get Tiger to run on it? Speaking to people I know, we would willingly change OS's if this was poss and available. I hate windows, I hate windows.

Would Mac do it to gain a bigger market share??

Have a ponder.

angrynorth

Firstly, Pear PC is already capable of emulating the OSX environment, but it runs it 40x slower than it would do on a Power PC chip.

The actual difference is the type of chip, Power PC versus X86. The fact that AMD has gone 64 bit is really a moot point as it is still based upon the X86 platform and would therefore not run Panther/Tiger.

I also think that if Apple were to release an X86 version of OSX it would most likely spell the end of them. They rely heavily on hardware sales and obviously if the port went to X86 where file sharing is very popular, there is no guarantee of revenue. They probably would get a much larger market share, but would still end up second to Windows because the enterprise market (where the money is) would be reluctant to change because of retraining costs and software updates etc...

Not only that it would only end up like windows anyway, it would have to deal with all the crap that ruins windows, such as supporting 5000 versions of a graphics card etc which would inevitably bloat OSX and ruin its reliability and usability.

Simon C

Cheers, thats a damn pity. Would really love something like OSX on a pc, but with some speed. Looks like I'm going to have to wait for that stripping programme for XP and live with windows.

Markus

There is some emulator thing for a PC which will run Mac OS X on it. Can't for the life of me recall what it's called though (saw it on TechTV). Now, that could be used to run Tiger (of course you have to bear in mind that Tiger is not actually shipping until late Q1 next year).

Rather than try and emulate the OS, which would be slow, why not just switch from PC's to macs? I *think* there is some switchover system in place to allow you to trade in your PC's for macs, I might be wrong though.

As for Apple releasing OS X for PC, can't see it myself. There was talk of Darwin (the core part of the OS if memory serves correct) for Intel, and *cough* *splutter* there might have even been a version of it around a while ago However, the thing you have to bear in mind is that Apple's main profit comes from hardware not software, because, unlike PC's there, aren't any clones (well, not today, a fair few years back, yes) so they have totaly control over the hardware, no one else makes it.

If they released a PC version of OS X, how many people would bother to buy mac hardware? Most would simply upgrade their machines to run OS X. It's the same as with linux, people dump Windows and install linux, they don't change the hardware.

angrynorth

Pear PC

Simon C

Markus, I already am, but my pc cost me 200 to build so the only thing for it is to bin it and start from scratch.

Roll on the 17th, I'm off to play with Mac's since uni *cough* years ago!!!

Markus

Much as I like the idea, I'd rather not see a PC version of OS X, as I have this feeling that supporting it would be a nightmare. Part of the reason I'm in mac support is that I *hate* PC support. I *can* support pc's, everything from building to problem dianosis, but I tend not to mention this facet of my abilities as it's kinda hard to tell your friends to **** off when they have a PC problem and call you at 10pm.

I don't think, in 10 years, I've had a Mac hardware problem that's taken me more than an hour to resolve, software problems, yeah, can take a little longer, but probably only a day or so at max.
PC problems, grrrrrrrrr, well, I've had hardware issues that have taken 3 weeks to resolve, and software problems that take around the same time. Most of the software problems do seem to be hardware related though, for example, so gfx card did not like the motherboard the PC had, then changing the motherboard caused the audio card to fail, etc, etc. It just winds me totally up.

Now, in theory putting OS X on there might make it all nice and happy, but, well, I'm not so sure. One thing they MUST change would be to make the defaul account a 'standard' account, and NOT an Admin account. You'd have far to many newbies going in and messing around. God forbid they get into the terminal and start messing around. Don't get me wrong, this kinda thing happens in a pure mac environment, but when you consider that the majority of computer users are PC based and not that computer literate, swap them to Mac interface, eek!