[Ti] Apple's True Market Share!

[Ric Perrott]

On Wednesday, December 11, 2002, at 02:21  PM, Chris Olson wrote:

> 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

1) The x86 kernel is already written and running. Darwin and mach are 
both running in full on x86 hardware. Aqua is not as you said " 
integral with the kernel" anymore than any other GUI is. Of course it 
will require a recompile, everything will, but because of the pure OO 
nature of Cocoa, that's all it will require. Recompile for x86 and 
you're ready to go. This of course only applies to Cocoa apps. Carbon 
apps will require a little more work as they compile to PPC natively. 
But then again this isn't going to happen in 6 months so developers 
will have time.

2) Why would you need to provide a driver for every little POS board? 
MacOS is not Windows, and even in Windows it is the card makers 
responsibility to provide a driver, not Microsoft's

What EVERYONE seems to be missing here is that porting OS X to x86 does 
not in any way mean that you'll be able to assemble a Mac like you can 
a bare bones PC right now. What Apple will do is retain the sole rights 
to the hardware, but they will be building Apple Computers with an 
Intel/AMD processor inside instead of IBM/Motorola. That's it. Same 
Apple bios, same graphical bootup.. in fact you'd probably be 
completely unable to tell if OS X was running on a PPC or a Pentium 5 
or whatever they'll call it.

Mac OS X on x86 != Clone Machines or "do it yourself" computer 
construction.

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Ric Perrott
Writer, Poet, Pot-Stirrer
Visit http://www.ricperrott.com