[Ti] Apple's True Market Share!

[Chris Olson]

Greg Chapel wrote:

> First, this statment is baseless. FreeBSD runs excellent on X86 as do many
> flavors of UNIX. OS X runs on top of FreeBSD and does make use of higher end
> hardware. Fortunately most PC systems out there have equal or better
> supporting hardware than most mac systems. I am talking about busses,
> graphics cards, highspeed ram, etc.

Well, there *are* some differences.  Firstly, OS X does not run on top 
of BSD.  OS X is a marriage between BSD and Mach.  You can start the 
Darwin kernel from a single user root shell, but you *can't* start the 
GUI from that shell without rebooting both the Darwin kernel and Mach 
microkernel.  And the GUI in OS X is not served to the desktop via TCP 
port (XFree86) as it is with pure BSD.

True stablity and performance will only be achieved when you run a unix 
system on native hardware that you have control over.  x86 is too 
generic, IMHO, to achieve the desired stability a developer would want 
in a unix platform.

> an X86 version of OSX, the same users quicky site how Apple is doomed and
> will never be able to sell hardware that competes with cheap X86 hardware.
> How hypocritical is that?

Very.  Apple's sales figures speak for themselves.  There's no need to 
port to x86 and open a can of worms, IMHO.  If performance of PPC vs 
Intel hardware is an issue, IBM will fix it.  Apple has been sort of 
"married" to Motorola over the years, and I see that changing.

> And just think how hard it would be for all of those developers out there, I
> mean Apple might make it as  difficult as re-running "make" and configuring
> the build for X86 ranther than PPC, similar to the way linux apps can be
> re-compiled. Of course that would be impossible and Apple could never pull
> it off.

But it's more complicated than that.  Once you port to x86 you have to 
come up with driver code for every little POS board that is built in a 
backyard shack in Tiawan.  And there are some considerable differences 
in how x86 processors run their instruction sets, as compared to PPC, or 
SPARC, or what have you.  That requires a new kernel for x86.  Since 
Aqua is integral with the kernel code, that means rebuilding Aqua.  Now 
we've lost all our native Aqua apps from third party vendors, so those 
have to be rebuilt.  It's a snowball effect when you move to a different 
platform.  Believe me, I know.  I've been developing linux applications 
almost since the beginning of Linus' first kernel.  Debian supports 11 
different cpu architectures, and it's a nightmare getting new software 
into Debian Woody (stable) because of the coding problems getting them 
to work on all architectures.
-- 
Chris Olson
Network Administrator
AST Communications,  Inc.
Linux Support                    http://linux.astcomm.net
Barron,  WI   USA