| Thursday, March 16, 2006 |
09:54 - Congrabulations. You graduated!
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/03/16/winxp-on-a-mac-contest-is-over-dual-booting-success/
|
(top)  |
Looks like the "Boot Windows XP on an Intel Mac" contest is over, and the $13,000 prize has been claimed. Propz to da winnarz!
What devastating impact will this have on Apple's fortunes? Not much, I have to imagine; this can only help the switching situation, as it eliminates the need for someone to tote around two laptops or use Virtual PC if he has some particular Windows app he can't live without or if he wants his library of games. (Virtual PC might still be useful if just to minimize rebooting.) It's not like this is going to result in millions of people rushing out and buying Macs just so they can stick Windows on them; and even if it did, that'd be just hunky-dory for Apple, as the hardware is where they make all their margins, and a Mac with Windows on it would be non-warranty and wouldn't suck up any support money. With all said and done, I don't think Apple really lost any sleep over whether the hardware could run something other than Mac OS X. (They certainly never minded people putting Linux on Macs, after all. Apple sales reps even had to endorse that it was possible, when they sold Macs on the Caltech campus back in the G3 days. Otherwise they'd never have sold any to the geek student body. Must have been galling as hell.)
The related question, as Steven Den Beste posed in e-mail, is whether the reverse operation will be widely possible: running Mac OS X on generic Intel hardware. This is where Apple will have tried its level best to lock OS X to Macs only; there are certainly a lot of people out there who would love to get their hands on an installable copy of OS X and not have to buy a Mac. Now, I thought I'd seen that this feat had already been achieved; I seem to remember someone building a PC from off-the-shelf parts that happened to match the motherboard and other hardware used in the Transition Kit machines that were available prior to the Intel Macs' release, and successfully booting OS X on it. I don't know if Apple has tried harder to lock down the released machines harder than the kit machines were, or if it's accepted that this barrier has already been breached, or if people think it's impossible for some reason, or if they just don't care; but there doesn't appear to be a contest for it with some big purse corresponding to the Windows-on-Mac one.
Whatever the story, I don't think Steve's pacing the floors over this issue either, because the people who would hack together a PC built from components supported by OS X's limited set of drivers and perform the necessary gyrations to get OS X running on it aren't the kinds of people who would have bought a Mac anyway. They certainly won't be corporate installations or non-technically-inclined publishing or graphics professionals. Apple's high-flying digital video business won't have to worry about production houses suddenly building new render farms from off-the-shelf Wintel parts carefully chosen to mimic a Mac and slipping a single $129 copy of OS X onto the whole rig. For that amount of hassle—and really, about that amount of money—they could just buy Macs and get real support for their trouble.
Besides, it's not like there's going to be any perceptible performance advantage to running OS X on something other than a Mac, now—something that might have been a concern if the Intel Macs ran at the same objective speed as the PPC-based hardware. Now, if it's for the same software (say, Photoshop), any incentive to ditch Mac hardware but keep Apple software is pretty much rendered moot.
In the end, this will probably end up being a curiosity and not much more. People attracted to the Mac's selling points aren't going to be deterred from their purchase by the dubious pleasure of hacking an OS X box together themselves—at least, not in the numbers that matter to Apple.
That said, this purports to be a very well-reasoned essay on why Apple shouldn't ever sell OS X for generic hardware. Not that anyone has argued that they should (aside from clueless market analysts and Michael Dell). But the site is currently down, so I'll have to check it out later.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
