| Thursday, May 20, 2004 |
13:21 - Welcome aboard, sort of...
http://wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,63456,00.html
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Steven reminds me that this is probably worth mentioning.
Released last week, PearPC is the first software emulator to allow Apple Computer's OS X to run on an Intel- or AMD-based machine.
The free, open-source software allows Intel- and AMD-based PCs to run several operating systems compatible with the PowerPC, including Mandrake Linux, BSD, Darwin and, most importantly, Apple's Mac OS X.
Users can download and install a copy of PearPC, and then install a boxed copy of OS X, which can be purchased from Apple for $130.
"Installation (of OS X) works beautifully but takes about four hours on a 1300 Athlon," said Weyergraf, referring to a PC with a 1.3GHz AMD Athlon chip. "I must admit 10.3 (OS X Panther) still has problems.... Some program crashes at startup and makes Panther restart it, over and over. We are working on this."
Biallas and Weyergraf warn PearPC is only a version 0.1 release and is still very experimental. By their admission, it is incomplete, unstable and painfully slow -- running about 500 times slower than the host system.
Since it's so slow as to be effectively unusable (and it's far from clear how much of the PC hardware the emulation layer is able to allow OS X to access), one can only conclude that the sole purpose of this is to allow adventuresome geeks to play with OS X's built-in UI tricks. Because I can't imagine that things like iTunes and iPhoto are what's driving this (FireWire and USB support are bound to be sketchy at best), and things like Final Cut Pro certainly require the speed of a native Mac. And it's not like people are doing this so as to access the massive library of games available on the Mac.
I love this:
It is "not meant for productive use," the pair caution on the site. "Don't use it on important data, it WILL destroy them sooner or later!"
Mostly, it seems, this is a "Because we can" sort of thing. And, hey! More power to 'em. The developers seem to be explicitly intending this to be a "First time's free" sort of thing, an introduction that gets people hooked on the OS and then drives them to buy a real Mac. If that's what ends up happening, well, huzzah!
OS X has allowed Apple to tap into the true geek bloodstream. If this is part of the dividend that's paid by that move, I doubt Steve is complaining.
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Brian Tiemann
