I'm 99% positive saying "IT WON'T HAPPEN". Apple is a hardware company in the end - In other words, they make money off the hardware, not the software. In that sense,
1) They can't compete with Dell et al. with their current strategy (where their money comes from selling pretty hardware equipped with pretty software). If they let OS X run on generic x86 hardware, everyone except the true f****** would go ahead and buy cheap machines/components and would just install OS X from a bootleg CD.
2) As much as I respect OS X's beuaty (technically & esthetically), it should be remembered it's within the boundary of extremely limited numbers of hardware. Umm.. Do you really think Apple can handle the near-unlimited numbers of hardware/software combination that exist outside?
Eh, maybe the reasons apple's computers are so overpriced is because they include a ton of software that you wouldn't get when buying a Dell.
And Apple isn't quite a hardware company in the ways other are..Apple sells visions of what things are, and tries to keep the prices stable. They don't go into pricing wars with other companies, look at the iPods.
Also, OSX could handle a nearly unlimited number of hardware if designed right, Linux does quite well, but it's also constantly updated, but when installing the lastest version of a Linux distro on a PC, I've generally never had hardware incompatibility problems.
Also, it is a well known fact that OS X is SLOW. (Beauty comes at price Wink ) And buggy (or inefficient). That's why every release of OS X gets "faster." IMO, Apple would not be able to overcome this hurdle. Similar/hypothetic analogy would be a case where Dell trying to equip their machines with a brand new Dell OS. It's just impossible.
Hmm, I thought OSX was slow because it was more stable than windows.
Plus, Athlons and Pentiums are a hell of a lot more capable than the G4 cpus that most computers running OSX have, and you'll probably find more PCs with DX9 capable graphics cards then mac, so they're ready for tiger.
It would mean dumping the entire software catalog for macos down the drain as no current x86 chip could emulate a PPC chip at anything approaching useable speed.
Recompile all the software...it's what's required when going from x86 to x86-64 anyhow, so Macs and PCs can make the software switch at the same time.
Also, maybe a dual core x86 chip could emulate a G3 or G4 well enough...remember, an emulator apple makes wouldn't be like independent people developing an emulator, it has the potential to be much faster than what anyone could make alone.
I don’t think its the 2-3% market share they want, its that they want freedom from Microsoft. Over the years MS has screwed MANY plans/ideas of Intel, just by saying "we wont support that" (I saw a lot of great ideas killed that way). Now MS is getting cozy with AMD (64bit windows is AMDs version) with IBM (XBOX 360), all the big hype talk is about PPE/SPE which Intel isn’t involved in. I know that Intel has courted Linux for some time (for this reason of getting away from MS), venture money etc, why not dump a ton of cash into OSX on x86?
MS said no Itanium, if intel had an x86-64 then they would have used it. At least microsoft related to release it until Intel had x86-64 capable chips. Anyhow, what company wouldn't want to expand their markets, especially as the new consoles(including xbox 360) could effectively kill a large part of the PC market if marketted right.